POLITICS JULY 4, 2011
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At least one of the Founders thought that Independence Day would become important. When the Continental Congress voted for independence on July 2, 1776, John Adams, who more than any other single Founder was responsible for that vote, was ecstatic. America’s declaring of independence from Great Britain, he told his wife Abigail, marked “the most memorable Epocha in the History of America.” He hoped that the day would be “celebrated by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated,” he said, “as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one end of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.”
Although Adams was wrong about the day (two days later on July 4 the Congress formally adopted the Declaration of Independence), he was right about the celebrations, at least through much of our history. For us today July Fourth is still an important holiday, and we can be thankful that no one is suggesting that we move it the closest Monday. Yet the day no longer seems to have the solemnity and significance that Adams hoped it would have. To be sure, we have lots of parades, games, and fireworks, but much of the meaning of these festivities seems to have slipped away from us.
This is too bad, for July Fourth, 1776, is not only the most important day in American history, but because the United States has emerged as the most powerful nation the world has ever known, it is surely one of the most important days in world history as well. The Declaration legally created the United States of America. It announced to a “candid world” that Americans were assuming “among the Powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God entitle them.” But it did much more than that. It stated all governments everywhere were supposed to derive “their just powers from the consent of the people,” and that when any one of these governments became destructive of the people’s rights and liberties, the people could alter or abolish that government and institute a new one.
These words have served as inspiration for peoples everywhere. Colonial rebellions against imperial regimes throughout the world have looked to the Declaration to justify their cause. In declaring Vietnam independent from France in 1945, Ho Chi Minh cited the American Declaration of Independence. Members of Solidarity in Poland and dissidents in Czechoslovakia invoked its words to oppose Soviet domination in the 1980s. And the Chinese students who occupied Tiananmen Square in 1989 used its language. And maybe there are some participants in the Arab Spring who are aware of our Declaration of Independence. It certainly has become one of the most influential documents in world history.
But for Americans the Declaration has a special significance. It infused into our culture most of what we have come to believe and value. Our noblest ideals and highest aspirations—our beliefs in liberty, equality, and individual rights, including the right of every person to pursue happiness—came out of the Declaration of Independence. Consequently, it is not surprising that every reform movement in American history—from the abolitionists of the 1830s, to the feminists at Seneca Falls in 1848, to the civil rights advocates of the 1960s—invoked the words and ideals of the Declaration. It was Abraham Lincoln who made the most of the Declaration, particularly its assertions of human equality and inalienable rights. Thomas Jefferson, the principal drafter of the Declaration, said Lincoln, “had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that today, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and stumbling block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.” A century later, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Martin Luther King, Jr. took inspiration from this abstract truth embodied in the Declaration.
For us Americans, the words of the Declaration have become central to our sense of nationhood. Because the United States is composed of so many immigrants and so many different races and ethnicities, we can never assume our identity as a matter of course. The nation has had to be invented. At the end of the Declaration, the members of the Continental Congress could only “mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.” There was nothing else but themselves that they could dedicate themselves to—no patria, no fatherland, no nation as yet. In comparison with the 235 year-old United States, many states in the world today are new, some of them created within fairly recent past. Yet many of these states, new as they may be, are under-girded by peoples who had a pre-existing sense of their ethnicity, their nationality. In the case of the United States, the process was reversed: We Americans were a state before we were a nation, and much of our history has been an effort to define that nationality.
In fact, even today America is not a nation in any traditional meaning of the term. We Americans have had to rely on ideas and ideals in order to hold ourselves together and think of ourselves as a single people. And more than any other single document in American history, the Declaration has embodied these ideas and ideals. Since it is our most sacred text, the day, July 4, 1776, that gave birth to it ought to be understood with all the significance and solemnity that John Adams gave to it.
Gordon S. Wood is Alva O. Way University Professor Emeritus at Brown University and the author, most recently, of Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815.
12 comments
Thanks to the great Gordon S. Wood for this lovely meditation on the meaning of the Fourth, the date of declaration not just of American independence but of a great human cause.
- JakeH
July 4, 2011 at 1:41am
Looks even more impressive from here in the Former Evil Empire. Happy Independence Day!
- Robert Powell
July 4, 2011 at 4:44am
Perhaps it is a nice meditation, but Wood unaccountably fails to address the main issue. That is: Why? Why is the meaning of July 4th "slipping away"? We get stock paeans to the greatness and meaning of Independence Day every year. If Wood wanted, instead, to issue a warning of its diminishing significance in the public mind (a warning which might equally be applied to most of our other traditional national and religious holidays), with all that that might imply, then why didn't he dig into the reasons, as he understands them? Wood's last paragraph is the most interesting. We get the by now cliched reference to the US as a nation based on an idea rather than blood and soil, a nation like no other, etc. But this begs the question: Is an idea--no matter how attractive--enough to hold a diverse country together over the long run during the hard times that inevitably come?
- ccarrick@vzavenue.net-old
July 4, 2011 at 7:34am
My late father in law, a quiet man who grew up in an orphanage, was a gunner on a bomber in WWII, flying dozens of missions over Europe. He didn't talk about his experience. No matter how hot, he wouldn't wear shorts. Until he and I went fishing one day and there it was, a large hole in his leg, left from the wound he suffered on one of the missions. It wasn't that he was embarassed by the hole; rather, he didn't want to bring attention to himself. My late maternal grandmother was an extraordinary woman, a graduate in one of the early classes at Smith, Women's Medical College in Philadelphia (women weren't admitted to the "male only" medical schools), and the University of Berlin (women weren't admitted to the advanced training programs in America), she practiced medicine until she was into her 80s. Her greatest source of pride, though, was her membership in DAR, signified by the pin she always wore on her dress or medical coat; my great, great, great, great grandfather was a member of the Leicester Company of Minute Men who marched April 19, 1775, at the Lexington alarm to Cambridge and fought at the Battle of Bunker Hill and in the seige of Boston, Bennington, and Saratoga, rising to the rank of Captain in 1778. He survived the War and enjoyed a long life. Unlike my maternal grandfather, also a physician and the love of my grandmother's life, who died (when my mother was a small child) of a staph infection he contracted years earlier while serving in the Philippines during the Spanish American War. I think about my father in law and my grandmother whenever I see a politician wearing one of those small American flags on his lapel. And I will also think about them today when I see all those people celebrating July 4th waving small American flags and dressed in patriotic colors.
- rayward
July 4, 2011 at 8:49am
Happy Birthday to America, and to the only President born on the Fourth of July, who contributed his insight into our national identity in a speech to the American Legion Convention on October 6, 1925, when the anti-immigrant KKK was resurgent in the North, and the American Legion was nativist: “The bringing together of all these different national, racial, religious, and cultural elements has made our country a kind of composite of the rest of the world, and we can render no greater service than by demonstrating the possibility of harmonious cooperation among so many various groups. Every one of them has something characteristic and significant of great value to cast into the common fund of our material, intellectual, and spiritual resources…. By tolerance I do not mean indifference to evil. I mean respect for different kinds of good. Whether one traces his Americanisms back three centuries to the Mayflower, or three years to the steerage, is not half so important as whether his Americanism of today is real and genuine. No matter by what various crafts we came here, we are all now in the same boat.” citation: President Calvin Coolidge, Speech before the American Legion Convention, Omaha, Nebraska, October 6, 1925
- K2K
July 4, 2011 at 9:18am
As I get ready to enjoy fireworks by the sea side, am wondering what Professor Wood has in mind when he writes about "complete meaning?" I have no idea what this means. Is there such a thing as complete meaning? Must we dress in colonial clothes and re-read the Declaration in its original drafting to attain to such complete meaning? Besides, the meaning of the 4th is holding up pretty well when compared to other holidays. People complain about the loss of meaning of Christmas and I know from experience how difficult is it to concentrate on the meaning of Passover another holiday celebrating freedom. At least the 4th is an outdoors holiday and when the weather is propitious as it is today there is much that one can do to celebrate it: from listening to outdoor music bands performing the music of the day or watching some re-enactment or other some of the revolutionary war's battles to going on picnics and watching fireworks. Most people know what is being commemorated. Complete meaning? Probably not, but what is missed today can be experienced the next fourth of July. Happy fourth everyone.
- arnon
July 4, 2011 at 4:16pm
Happy fourth from my laptop, K2K even if you did quote Calvin Coolidge. Reminds me of the line in "Singing in the Rain." 'I am as famous as Calvin Coolidge, both of them. '
- arnon
July 4, 2011 at 4:18pm
Brilliant K2K. Thanks...B
- Robert Powell
July 4, 2011 at 7:01pm
BP! Hello and thanks.historians, and thus most Americans, have been most unfair to Calvin Coolidge. I had a graduate course in 2004 on the American Presidency and decided to tackle Coolidge for my paper because I was very focussed on 1920's American history. What a revelation! People forget that, in the 1920's, the Republican Party was still the party of Lincoln, the Democratic Party was still the party of the segregated south, and the Progressives were still a force under LaFollette. [Indulging myself because today IS Calvin Coolidge's birthday and I again failed to make the trip for the celebration in Plymouth Notch, Vermont, here Quoting K2K on the presidency of Calvin Coolidge]: Coolidge's appointment of Harlan Fiske Stone as Attorney General restored confidence to the Justice Department. Coolidge’s only appointment to the Supreme Court was Stone in 1925, one of the most important appointments in Supreme Court history. Stone joined Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis D. Brandeis in a minority liberal bloc. His powerful dissents in upholding Congressional efforts to meliorate the economic crises of the depression eventually led the still overwhelmingly conservative Court to abandon economic policy review. A grateful Franklin D. Roosevelt elevated Stone to Chief Justice in 1941. Coolidge made access to the press a presidential must for all of his successors “by speaking to the American people twice weekly from his White House press conference forum through the medium of ‘the White House Spokesman’.” “In building up the news generating potential of the office Coolidge was anything but passive”. Silent Cal was actually quite talkative: “In his sixty-seven months in office, he held 520 press conferences, an average of 7.8 per month. [compared to the F..D.R.] average of only 6.9 per month.” His development of the media, both print and radio, largely shaped the power of the modern presidency as the focal point during a crisis, and opened the office to the scrutiny envisioned by the Founding Fathers. The political time of the 1920s was one of fracture. Both the Republican and Democratic parties were in the process of reshaping coalitions of liberal progressives and conservatives in varying combinations of fiscal, social, and international beliefs. Shifting ethnic and racial allegiances in a time of great social change heightened the realignment. The complexity of this political reconstruction seriously hampers understanding of the Coolidge presidency..., and impacts fairness of historian rankings. The Roaring Twenties was a leap into modernism that threatened to tear the country apart. The crisis of the Coolidge presidency was nativist reaction, sometimes violent, against Socialism, Communism, female emergence into the public sphere, science and technology, and a new religious and ethnic diversity added to the historic racism that could not be erased. Coolidge peace and prosperity is as remarkable as that of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s cold war, McCarthy era. The Coolidges actively stabilized the domestic turmoil with a thoughtful, semi-Lincolnesque president, and a stylish, educated, yet traditional, First Lady, whose official White Portrait includes their equally stylish collie, Rob Roy, named after a cocktail in a subtle knock against Prohibition. [K2K excerpts more Coolidge in his own words]: “The Federal Government ought to be, and is, solicitous for the welfare of every one of its inhabitants. There should be no favorites and no outcasts: no race or religious prejudices in Government.” [The New York Times, “Coolidge will Act on Klan Challenge”, 24 August 1924, page 1] “In this contest there is but one place for a real American to stand. That is on the side of ordered liberty under constitutional government. …America is a large country. It is a tolerant country. It has room within its borders for many races and many creeds…. If we want to get the hyphen out of our country, we can best begin by taking it out of our own minds.” [Coolidge, address delivered at the dedication of a monument to Lafayette, 6 September 1924, reported in full by The New York Times, 7 September 1924, 1,30.] Coolidge, Address At Gettysburg Battle Field, May 30, 1928: “Good credit, which is derived from sound financial conditions, is the principal foundation of national defense.” on the most famous Coolidge quote: “the chief business of the American people is business.” Rarely has a quote been taken so out of context. In this speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Coolidge was addressing the potential conflict between editorial freedom in a business concerned with being a business. The following excerpts provide the context of this infamous quote. One wonders why Coolidge is not instead remembered for his closing quote, “The chief ideal of the American people is idealism.” “…truth and freedom are inseparable. … The public press under an autocracy is necessarily a true agency of propaganda. Under a free government it must be the very reverse. Propaganda seeks to present a part of the facts, to distort their relations, and to force conclusions which could not be drawn from a complete and candid survey of all the facts. It has been observed that propaganda seeks to close the mind, while education seeks to open it. This has become one of the dangers of the present day. ... our times in all their social and economic aspects are more complex than any past period. We need to keep our minds free from prejudice and bias. Of education, and of real information we cannot get too much. But of propaganda, which is tainted or perverted information, we cannot have too little. ... Editorial policy and news policy must not be influenced by business consideration; business policies must not be affected by editorial programs. … it is probable that a press which maintains an intimate touch with the business currents of the nation, is likely to be more reliable than it would be if it were a stranger to these influences. After all, the chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world. I am strongly of opinion that the great majority of people will always find these are moving impulses of our life. …the accumulation of wealth can not be justified as the chief end of existence. But we are compelled to recognize it as a means to well nigh every desirable achievement. So long as wealth is made the means and not the end, we need not greatly fear it. … It is only those who do not understand our people, who believe that our national life is entirely absorbed by material motives. We make no concealment of the fact that we want wealth, but there are many other things that we want very much more. We want peace and honor, and that charity which is so strong an element of all civilization. The chief ideal of the American people is idealism. I cannot repeat too often that America is a nation of idealists. That is the only motive to which they ever give any strong and lasting reaction. No newspaper can be a success which fails to appeal to that element of our national life…. I could not truly criticize the vast importance of the counting room, but my ultimate faith I would place in the high idealism of the editorial room of the American newspaper.”
- K2K
July 4, 2011 at 9:24pm
arnon: "Singing in the Rain" is my favorite film - just saw it again last week, and duly noted the Coolidge reference. He was more popular than Will Rogers - apparently had a terrific voice for radio - and took the print journalists everywhere. Google Grace Coolidge's official portrait, last seen hidden in the WH China Room. Some First Ladies do not want the competition... Today I watched "1776", the film musical. My birthday is Thursday, so I am going to Williamstown, to The Clark, to immerse myself in art, and landscape, and hopefully meet some strangers who are also wondering who bought Asher Durand's "Progress", the most iconic painting of America, 1854, on the eve of industrialization, sold because of a tax break for corporations selling art in 2011. Heartbreaking.
- K2K
July 4, 2011 at 9:33pm
Just to clarify, Asher Durand's "Progress" was sold by a privately owned corporation in Tuscaloosa, Alabama for $40 million to an unknown buyer just before the tornadoes descended on Tuscaloosa. It was the keystone painting of the finest collection of American art in existence, a collection created by that company's third-generation owner, Jack Warner, who, at 94, is more heartbroken than I am by the sale - too bad most of his collection was an asset of the company, and his son is more into temporary tax breaks than art. I am equally distressed that they also sold Edward Hopper's "Dawn Before Gettysburg", the defining battle of our Civil War, July 1-3, 1863.
- K2K
July 4, 2011 at 9:51pm
I may be a couple days late, but I just want to reaffirm my position that the 4th of July is not about recognizing soldiers, or confusing patriotism with militarism. On the 4th of July I affirm not to recognize or congratulate a soldier, or a member of the armed forces. There are other days on the calendar for that. On the 4th of July I will read the declaration of independence and be proud to be an american not because soldiers fight around the world in wars that I may or may not support, but because of the principles and ideas upon which we were founded and upon which we stand. And that those principles and ideas are stronger than any military might could produce.
- jsklaw
July 8, 2011 at 2:09pm