He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained…
He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only…
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States, for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners, refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither…”
— The Declaration of Independence
In the last few years, I have taken to reading the Declaration of Independence each year on the Fourth of July, because although I’m not one for barbecue and we never went to the fireworks when I was little, like any good Jew, I am programmed to associate the word “holiday” with “tradition.” I recall distinctly one year where I threw a bit of a tantrum because I felt like I hadn’t done anything to celebrate the holiday properly (we had, I think, gone to the town parade, but my parents didn’t want to see the fireworks, and I wanted to go). I spent an hour in my room making a homemade American flag and felt better; now, having largely given up on my nonexistent artistic talent, I mark the holiday in the best way I know how: by reading.
Different things stick out to me every year, but I had given no more than passing attention to the list of grievances until a little over a year ago, when for the first time I felt moved to read the Declaration on a day other than July 4th. It was May, and I was in Bethlehem, visiting the West Bank. Unbidden, one of the complaints rose to my mind: for cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world… I thought of Gaza, and the blockade surrounding it, and I wondered how it would feel to read the Declaration as a model rather than a historical document. For me, it had always been a part of my past, a thing that happened and a list of principles that were, if not followed, at least solidly established and aspired to by now. But there are still tyrants in the world, and there are still those who long for self-governance and the right to be seen as equal. The next week, the American consulate in Jerusalem became the American embassy, and I thought that perhaps I did not need to be so far from home to find signs of tyranny.
The above excerpts speak across time, and I am not going to dedicate space to dissecting how the actions of our current would-be tyrant do or don’t line up with the exact actions the Declaration alludes to. We don’t need an exact match for the Declaration to be telling us something. Instead, here are some facts of American history:
- In 1978, the Indian Child Welfare Act was passed to give tribal governments executive jurisdiction over Native American children, including the authority over foster placement. This law was passed in response to a long history, stretching back centuries, of Americans removing native children from their families and raising them as white Christians, with little to no knowledge of their heritage. Prior to ICWA’s passage, as many as 25-35% of all native children were being taken from their parents. 85% of them were placed outside of their families and their communities.
- In 2018, an attempt was made to strike down parts of the law on the grounds of racially preferential treatment. This appeal succeeded at the level of the Federal District Court. It was struck down by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, and remains in effect.
- Until emancipation, African American children born in bondage could be—and were—stripped from their enslaved parents at any time. In Virginia, women were permitted two weeks to care for their child and recover before being sent back out to work. The child was handed over to elderly slaves for its care.
- During the Second World War, Americans placed their fellow Americans in camps—their children, too. This was done for fear that they might prove more loyal to the country they had left behind than the one they had made their home. They tried their best to close their borders where they could, too, and turned back both adult and child refugees, fleeing some of the worst persecution the world has ever known.
The Declaration, for all its lofty language, foreshadows this ugly history if you look for it. The document does not refer to the slavery still being actively practiced in the States—a passionate appeal of Jefferson’s on the matter (cruelly ironic, of course, in its own right) was cut. Nor does it have the clinical workarounds of the Constitution: the “those bound to Service for a Term of Years,” or “three fifths of all other Persons.” It does, however, contain in its list of grievances:
He has excited domestic insurrections among us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of welfare, is undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions.
This tells us in plain language what we might wish to avoid seeing when we skim through the accusations: that all men may be created equal, but that the Founders—and white society of the 1770s in general—were not yet ready to face the actual implications of that statement. We know this, too, from America’s slaves: the ships in Chesapeake Bay, site of America’s naval victory over the British in the Revolutionary War, and a joy to free men, “were to me so many shrouded ghosts,” wrote Frederick Douglass, in prose as eloquent as it is devastating. “The glad ship is gone; she hides in the dim distance. I am left in the hottest hell of unending slavery. O God, save me! God, deliver me! Let me run free! Is there any God? Why am I a slave? I will run away. I will not stand it.” And, of course, our most famous reminder: the words carved into the walls of the closest thing this nation has to a temple—the proposition that all men are created equal, the testing of whether any nation so conceived and so dedicated might long endure.
It has endured, and it has grown, though we are perhaps no closer to living up to that conception and dedication. Walt Whitman could hear America singing, the mechanics and the carpenters, the masons and the boatmen, but seventy-five years later it fell upon Langston Hughes to remind him that, “I, too, sing America”—he, the darker brother. Congress granted the vote to the men it had emancipated, but it waited half a century to grant that same right to women, and longer still to ensure that that right could be exercised safely by all people regardless of their color. Recently, many have been hard at work ensuring that what assurances Congress was able to offer have been slowly stripped away. And here, today, now, this instant, America tears children from their parents, holds them in cages, petitions to keep their parents in detention indefinitely, rages and wails when told it cannot. And somewhere not so far from those centers, one of the many faceless men standing for this nation’s highest office on the debate stage tells Americans that he cannot believe this is happening, that America would do this. He would do well to study his history.
It would seem from all this, perhaps, that there is little to celebrate this July 4th, that our fury and our sadness and our hopelessness should supplant celebration at every turn. America was never great—have a beer, and let’s drink until the burden of her crimes eases for a night. I am not convinced that this is a useful course of action; more importantly, I do not think it is the right one.
I, too, sing America. Hughes, Whitman, Douglass, those millions of people who have risen to hold America accountable for what it promised us—are they not worth celebrating? This country has produced many, many horrors. But it has also produced a proud, fierce, and decent people, from its leaders, more than a dozen of whom went to see conditions in detention centers for themselves this week, to those it has offered the least, who, after facing time in its prisons or being threatened with deportation by its officials, return to the streets and the boardrooms and the courts to make sure that others don’t have to face what they went through.
Martha Gelhorn, an American war correspondent whose writing spans the Spanish Civil War to the American wars in Nicaragua in the 1980s, spent her time on the ground covering the experience of the everyday men and women who risked and gave their lives for this country at one time or another. Faced with American warmongering in Central America she too saw in the Declaration a demand for accountability that stretched across the centuries:
The President, the Cabinet, the elected members of both Houses of Congress should read the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America, all of it, every day. It is a glorious statement of human rights, and it does not date. ‘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 those are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.’ Does that apply only to North American white men? And how about: ‘But when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinced a Design to reduce them under absolute Depotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security.’ El Salvador and Somoza’s Nicaragua in eighteenth-century prose.”
The principles espoused by the Declaration offer us a vision of the America that could be, someday. The grievances of the Declaration are part justification, and part list of warning signs. They ask us to remain continually accountable, so that we do not become what we fought so hard to escape. That we are still fighting—that these ideals, along with this nation, have continued to endure, and not yet been given up for naught—is indeed a cause for celebration.
Today the President will make an address from under the watchful gaze of one of his noblest forbears, one to whom Americans of all parties make a claim. He will be flanked at this memorial by two great speeches, both of which ask Americans to help make good on the Declaration’s ideals. But perhaps this is a day to reflect on the more down-to-earth, simple ask that man once made of this country, which he saw as the last, best hope of earth.
We can succeed only by concert. It is not “can any of us imagine better?” but, “can we all do better?” …The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise–with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”
The plan Lincoln was asking for was emancipation—a plan he called plain, peaceful, and generous. It was a plan he would argue in the coming months was inevitable, a road America had been treading since the Declaration. We are still on that road. The shrouded ghosts of our history are here to keep us accountable—but so too are millions of plain, peaceful, generous Americans, and so too is the Declaration.
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The crisis on the border is urgent and terrible. Many, many organizations are working on the ground, around the clock to bring aid to migrants, and are in need of money, volunteers, and supplies. You can find an organization near you here.
Additionally, if anyone wants a spectacular close-reading of the Declaration of Independence, check out Professor Danielle Allen’s Our Declaration. Important reading for troubled times.
Bare the Iron Hand 