For years, when our children were young — before they grew up and moved away, as children do — my neighborhood held a Fourth of July parade. The kids decorated their bikes, and we went around the block waving flags and blasting patriotic music from a boombox.
And every year I was tempted to buy myself a periwig, breeches and waistcoat — the whole 18th-century ensemble — and read the Declaration of Independence before the parade started. Who knows? I still might do it someday to wear to one of the barbecues we continue to hold.
I think it would work as long as I kept to the Declaration’s first couple of paragraphs and its rousing conclusion about pledging lives, fortunes and sacred honor. But the litany of grievances against King George III might test my audience’s patience, even as they recognized uncomfortable parallels between England’s mad king and our own current leadership madness, which unfortunately coincides with this year’s 250th birthday bash.
If asked about the Declaration of Independence, I suspect most Americans would mention the phrases “all men are created equal” and “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” then pretty much be stumped to go much further. Some might add “We the people” to the mix, confusing the Declaration with the Constitution; a few might even throw out “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” jumping ahead 87 years to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.
This conflation of phrases is understandable. The Declaration, the Constitution and the Gettysburg Address are each founding documents in their own way. The Declaration announces our basic ideals, the Constitution establishes our government’s legal framework, and the Gettysburg Address anticipates “a new birth of freedom” after the Civil War, a nation redefined around the principle the Declaration proclaimed but the country had never fully embraced.
That rebirth remains unfinished. It stalled when we abandoned Reconstruction, found new life during the Civil Rights Movement, and now seems in danger of being abandoned again. Let’s hope another renewal lies ahead.
The Declaration’s power, though, isn’t limited to its “self-evident” truths and “unalienable Rights.” (Note that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are among our rights. We have many more*.) I admire the Declaration because it is a monument to reasoned argument. The Founders believed that “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind” required them to explain to the world why they wanted to break with Britain. They insisted they were not acting for “light and transient causes”; they weren’t motivated by a mere fit of anti-government pique, as someone of the era might describe it. Independence was declared only after “patient sufferance” and repeated appeals to a king and Parliament “deaf to the voice of justice.”
Oh, sure, some of the Declaration’s grievances might be a little self-serving and “too much like scolding,” as John Adams noted. (Adams also regretted the removal of a section condemning slavery.) Even so, among all the things the Fourth of July stands for, it stands for a group of men gathered to debate, revise and refine 1,300 words. It stands for informed persuasion.
A hot take it is not.
Independence was not a given in July 1776. Many Americans were initially skeptical of declaring it. But those words sealed the deal. The least we can do is read them.
No wig or breeches necessary. You don’t even need a parade.
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*The Bill of Rights would later lock us into thinking that the rights it lists are the only rights we possess, as Alexander Hamilton feared it would. The Ninth Amendment tries to remind us otherwise: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”