An understanding of the principles upon which our nation was founded, as well as how they came into being is crucially important to the American people today, if for no other reasons than that they apply as much as ever to our current situation and that they are today under aggressive attack from similar kinds of forces as those against which the American Revolution was fought.
The story of the founding of our nation involves a stark mix of greatness combined with tragedy and failure. On the one hand, the sentiments expressed in our founding document still serve today, more than two and a quarter centuries after they were written, as a blueprint for the most moral system of government among humans that was ever written. But on the other hand, subsequent events deviated so much from the ideals expressed in the American Declaration of Independence that the whole endeavor has always been surrounded by dark shadows. Though improvements were subsequently made that ameliorated those dark shadows, they still exist to this day.
The greatest patriots our nation has ever known and will ever know are those who seek to bring the reality of our nation closer to its promise – or highest ideals. These people stand in stark contrast to those who constantly proclaim the “greatness of America”, without the slightest recognition of any need to improve their country by seeking to close the gap between its ideals and its reality. Those people are not patriots. They are simply arrogant fools.
Joseph Ellis notes two founding moments in our history, in his new book, “
American Creation”. The first, in 1776, which featured our
Declaration of Independence, proclaimed the promise of our nation. The second, which followed seven years of Revolutionary War (1775-83), occurred in 1787-8 and was the creation of a
written document that attempted to put the promise into practice. That attempt represented a compromise with certain very conservative forces, and as such it fell far short of the ideal. Ellis notes the unsatisfactory ways in which historians have dealt with this issue:
We have been asked to choose between two simplistic narratives of the founding, one featuring the founders as demigods who were permitted to glimpse the eternal truths… the other crowded with a cast of villains who collectively compose the deadest, whitest males in American history.
Dark shadows upon our foundingEllis expounds upon the resulting shadows that have plagued our nation from the very beginning:
The darkest shadow is unquestionably slavery, the failure to end it or at least adopt a gradual emancipation scheme that put it on the road to extinction. Virtually all the most prominent founders recognized that slavery was an embarrassing contradiction that violated all the principles the American Revolution claimed to stand for… Slavery remains a permanent stain on the legacy of the founders, as most of them knew it would.
The other shadow, almost as dark, was the failure to implement a just and generous settlement with the Native Americans… All the principal founders acknowledged the indigenous people of North America had a legitimate claim to the soil and a moral claim on the conscience of the infant republic.
And there were other important deficiencies as well – the disenfranchisement of women, for example. It wasn’t as if these issues never entered the minds of the founders. John Adams’ own wife lectured him about the importance of equal rights for women. Abigail Adams
wrote to her husband:
In the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you will remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors… If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not be held by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.
The compromiseThe end result was a compromise among three factions, representing three different lines of thinking among the founders. One faction, the most conservative, wanted to do everything it could to reach a diplomatic solution with their mother country. By early 1776, aggressive military actions ordered by King George III had pretty much closed off that line of thinking. The most liberal line of thinking, of which Tom Paine was the most outstanding representative, was exemplified by the most radical political phrase the world had ever known, that “All men are created equal”. That ideology was not considered a viable framework on which to construct a national constitution, if for no other reason than that the American South would never abide the abolishment of slavery, let alone providing the former slaves with equal civil and political rights. A fight for independence against the most formidable military machine the world had ever known was considered a great long shot even for a unified nation. Without a unified front it was considered an impossibility. Even following military victory, it was not believed that the fledgling nation could survive long without the participation of the South.
Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence in late June of 1776. Congress revised or deleted about 20% of Jefferson’s draft. The revisions primarily involved deletion of anything that was critical of slavery – at the insistence of the South. Yet 55 words at the beginning of the document survived Congressional edits:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. That to pursue these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
Ellis explains the importance of the survival of these words:
These 55 words would grow in importance to become the seminal statement of the American creed. With these words, Jefferson had smuggled the revolutionary agenda into the founding document… planting the seeds that would grow into the expanding mandate for individual rights that eventually ended slavery, made women’s suffrage inevitable, and sanctioned the civil rights of all minorities…
Abraham Lincoln put it most poignantly in 1858: “All honor to Jefferson – to the man who… had the coolness, forecast and capacity to introduce… an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, so that today, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling block to the very harbingers of the re-appearing tyranny and oppression.”…
Lincoln was right. There they were, the magical words of American history… lying dormant until subsequent generations awakened to their implications, an awakening process that, truth be told, continues into the 21st century… We can say with considerable confidence that these were destined to become the most potent and consequential words in American history… They became the political fountainhead for all the liberal reforms that would seep out and over the nation, and eventually much of the world.
Thomas Jefferson has been severely criticized as a hypocrite because, despite his high minded views on human rights, he owned slaves, did not free them during his lifetime, and went along with a compromise on the founding of a nation that condoned slavery. I won’t comment here on his owning of slaves.
But I nevertheless think that credit should be given where credit is due. Jefferson did not have it within his power to abolish slavery. Slavery would have continued with or without the creation of the United States of America and its Constitution that passively condoned slavery – possibly for much longer than had the compromise not been effected.
What Jefferson did have the power to do was to draft a founding document that included the most radical, human rights oriented political statement that the world had ever known. He did that, and it survived the editing of Congress against all odds. And with that, seeds were planted for the ending of slavery – which
came to fruition less than a century later – and much else.
On the road to fulfilling the promiseFollowing the creation of our imperfect nation, with its imperfect Constitution that condoned slavery in 1788, much progress was made. Ratification of our
Bill of Rights – the first ten amendments to our Constitution – represented an initial attempt to provide a permanent legal basis for the ensuring of human rights in our new nation. Then: From 1812 to 1856,
property qualifications for voting were abandoned; passage of the
13th,
14th, and
15th Amendments to our Constitution in 1865-70 ended slavery and provided voting and civil rights to our former slaves; passage of our
19th Amendment in 1920 prohibited the restriction of the right to vote on the basis of sex; our
24th amendment in 1964 prohibited the use of poll taxes to restrict a person’s right to vote; and passage of the
Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the
Voting Rights Act of 1965 went a long way towards facilitating enforcement of our 14th and 15th Amendments.
The unfinished agenda Nevertheless, much remains to be accomplished, and in some respects we have actually
regressed: Our “War against Drugs” has helped to stick us with the ignominy of the
highest percentage of imprisoned citizens of any nation in the world – much of that
racially determined; we have repeatedly
traumatized sovereign nations by altering their governments, stealing their resources and killing their citizens to suit the selfish needs of small groups of elite and wealthy Americans; private and public discrimination against individuals
based on sexual orientation remains prevalent in our country today;
income inequality today stands at an all time high; and, the principle of one-person-one-vote has been severely violated by the excessive role of
money in politics.
The role of corporate tyrannyAt the root of all these problems is the excessive and growing power and wealth of American corporations. Through their use of campaign contributions and monopolization of mass communications they have come to dominate the political landscape in our country, in the process making a mockery of the promises of our founding principles. While professing loyalty to our founding principles they do everything in their power to subvert them. Our courts have sanctioned this travesty primarily by two means:
The perversion of “free speech”First, they have used our First Amendment’s protection of speech to
subvert the spirit of that amendment by equating speech with money. When speech is equated with money, those with the most money are given disproportionate right to speech, and thereby the capability of drowning out the speech of the vast majority of Americans in an age of mass communications. This is especially true given the
practice of granting monopoly access to the so-called
public airways to powerful corporations. What meaning is there to “free speech” when the wealthy and powerful are given access to the megaphones needed to make themselves heard over the voices that lack access to those megaphones?
The tyranny of corporate personhoodThe related travesty is the practice of granting to corporations the rights and privileges of “persons”, while refusing to saddle them with the
responsibility of persons. The original conferring of corporate “personhood” actually took place in an informal manner that should have had no legal bearing on future decisions: In 1886, in an unofficial opinion by U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite, before any oral arguments took place in
the case of
Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, and without any explanation whatsoever,
Waite simply announced:
The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does. This offhand statement – which cannot possibly constitute an official opinion of the court, which is always preceded by extensive research and debate – has since been considered the law of the land.
And as such it greatly increased the power of corporations against individuals by allowing them the protections given to persons under our Constitution, even though corporations are simultaneously showered with various powers that
actual persons don’t have and exempted from many of the responsibilities and obligations that
actual persons have.
Our First Amendment also gives American citizens the right to petition their government. That right is perverted when the transferring of money gives wealthy individuals or corporations many
orders of magnitude more right to petition their government than that accorded to our nation’s less wealthy citizens.
SolutionIf corporations warrant the right to free speech granted by our First Amendment, then surely they also warrant the necessity of being held accountable for criminal actions committed by their human components. That would mean, for example, that federal investigations should be launched to determine the
criminal and financial responsibility of British Petroleum for its actions that led to the widespread contamination and destruction of large portions of the Gulf of Mexico. Neither British Petroleum nor any other corporation should have an inalienable right to drill for and profit from oil found under the sea or anywhere else. That oil does not belong to them. In
theory they are granted that right on the assumption that their oil drilling will benefit the American public. But
in practice they are granted that right because they use their wealth to buy out… I mean “influence” our government’s officials.
Thus has the most important principle of the founding of our country – that all humans are created equal – been subverted through the use of trickery and corruption, thus halting or reversing decades of progress in closing the gap between the ideals and the reality of our nation. That gap will be closed only when Americans understand our nation’s founding principles and how they are being subverted, and when they care enough to demand a government that adheres to those principles.
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