In
his final speech, given to striking garbage workers in Memphis on the
night before he died, Martin Luther King Jr. proclaimed, “All we
say to America is, ‘Be true to what you said on paper.’”
In
her new book Our Declaration, Danielle Allen examines exactly
what America did say on paper, and in her close textual reading of
the Declaration of Independence she argues the document is “an
exemplary piece of democratic writing.” Over the last several
decades, views of the Declaration often have focused on the Founding
Fathers’ glaring blind spots regarding slavery, women and Native
Americans. Or, with the growing influence of libertarian thought,
the Declaration’s emphases on freedom and equality have been seen
to be in conflict.
But for Allen, a Princeton University political science professor,
“The Declaration of Independence matters because it helps us see
that we cannot have freedom without equality.”
As
Allen shows, the document emerged out of an ongoing, broad-based
dialogue throughout the colonies. While Thomas Jefferson composed
the initial draft, countless other people offered input either
directly or indirectly. Allen captures the multitude of voices engaged in writing the Declaration, from Jefferson to John (and
Abigail) Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Richard Henry Lee, James Madison
and others all the way down to the anonymous wife of an American
sailor impressed by the British navy. “The story
of the writing of the Declaration,” Allen says, “presents a case
of the human mind at work on a scale larger than that of a single
individual. In this story, we can see human intelligence as a
collective force, a powerful instrument for grasping the world,
effective because it pools the capacities of multitudes of people.”
Democratic
writing involves a wide range of influences, Allen argues, and
requires that participants achieve consensus at multiple points in
the process. It further demands a respect for the intelligence of
the audience and an underlying “affection for humanity.” None of
this is easy, she admits, pointing to several drafts of the document
with sections crossed out and rewritten. In other words, “consensus
is, in short, a mess.”
The
manner in which the Declaration was created and the ideals it states
are inseparable, Allen says. Coming out of an age when the power and
wealth of monarchy had gone virtually unchallenged, “how radical it
was to think of the happiness even of farmers and laborers as the
ground and limit of politics.”
The
authors framed this concept of equality—that everyone has an equal
right to the pursuit of happiness—within a delicate balancing act
regarding governmental power. The government must not be too strong
or it risks becoming as tyrannical as that of George III’s, which
the Americans were seeking to escape. On the other hand, it needs to
be strong enough to secure everyone’s right to pursue his or her
own happiness.
The
libertarian ideology that has risen to ascendancy in modern American
political culture typically pits the goals of freedom and equality
against each other in a zero-sum game, with
increasing equality necessarily meaning decreasing freedom. Allen,
however, convincingly demonstrates that the Declaration is founded on
the idea that “equality is the sole foundation on which we can
build lasting and meaningful freedom,” an argument that is
“fundamentally antilibertarian.”
The
Declaration is, of course, filled with paradoxes and no small amount
of hypocrisy. The slave-owning Jefferson, for instance, penned a
searing critique of the slave trade, which Congress edited out of the
final draft. And the same document which proclaims the equality of
all men includes a condemnation of “merciless Indian savages” as
well as an element of anti-Catholicism.
Despite
such shortcomings, the Declaration’s idealism shines through and
has provided inspiration ever since to those groups excluded from the
original social contract—groups which have fought for their own
right to the pursuit of happiness. In the nineteenth century,
abolitionists and women’s rights activists drew inspiration from
the Declaration, as did twentieth-century civil rights activists from
King to the Black Panther Party, which reprinted the document’s
preamble as part of its party platform. Similarly, around the world
colonized people have modeled their own struggles for independence
from European imperialism on the American original, from the 1930
declaration of the Indian National Congress to Ho Chi Minh’s 1945
Vietnamese Declaration of Independence.
The
struggle for all of us as citizens is, in Allen’s words, to
“contribute to the collective mind to produce the
shared vocabulary that we citizens will use to live together.”
King and the Memphis garbage workers understood that.
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