Can this historic sentence help unite a polarised America?

POLITICS
The Greatest Sentence Ever Written
Walter Isaacson
Simon & Schuster, 34.99

Walter Isaacson has given the American people a birthday present for their nation’s 250th anniversary, this July 4, of the Declaration of Independence, written and sealed in Philadelphia. That document, conceived by leaders enraptured with the ideal of creating a country of united states, spurred the American Revolution.

Isaacson – distinguished author of biographies on Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, Alfred Einstein, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk – assumes the mantle of a learned rabbi parsing a holy text, examining in less than 100 pages the meaning of what he posits is the greatest sentence “ever crafted by human hand”.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

Through the lens of the 20th and 21st centuries, we can ask: what did they mean by “We”, modified eight words later by “men”? Women were not so recognised. Indeed, they would not get the right to vote until the 19th amendment to the Constitution was ratified in 1920. African slaves were not counted as people, but as fractions of humans for the purposes of conducting a census. But at is heart, the authors of the Declaration understood, going back to Rousseau, that “we” meant the expression of the collective will. Establishment of the United States was for all the people.

The authors drew on their lived experience with democracy. “Self-evident truths” meant that all people are, as outlined in the Virginia Declaration of Rights, “created equally free and independent”.

“All men” is trouble. The creators meant men. Full stop. They deliberately excluded women, slaves and Native Americans. Thomas Jefferson and George Washington were large slaveholders. Inherent in the Declaration is a massive tumour of cognitive dissonance: the projection of the highest aspirations of human idealism against the depravity of human subjugation. Isaacson cites a letter from John Adams, an abolitionist who became the second president. “The subject was too dangerous to be touched in public.” Even as president, Adams did not move towards the abolition of slavery. “Of the fifty-six signers, forty-one owned slaves,” Isaacson tells us. All 13 colonies, at the time of the Declaration, permitted slavery.

There was no way of getting around it until the Civil War was decided.

So even unto this day, Isaacson notes that bending “the arc of the moral universe … towards justice”, as Martin Luther King gave his life for, in order to fulfil the words that “all men are created equal”, will probably forever be “a constant American struggle”. It still is. The Supreme Court is expected to diminish the electoral power of black Americans. Civil rights are a never-ending effort.

In 1776, “Created equal” meant not that all people were the same but that their political and social rights arose from the social contract – the laws – in the Republic. Class was out. Equality was in. That was revolutionary. As is “certain inalienable rights”. They cannot be renounced, or expunged by tyrants – they still exist, even if people are oppressed.

The first sentence of the Declaration ends in joy. The United States is perhaps the only country created not on the basis of tribe or race or religion, but on the basis of the “inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. The whole purpose of the United States – although it fails miserably now on most days – is the “pursuit of happiness”. Where else is this proclaimed across the planet? As legendary columnist George Will has observed, “For Americans, the pursuit of happiness is happiness.”

Isaacson reports that when the Declaration reached General George Washington, commander of the Continental Army in New York, on July 9, he had it read to the public. Then “some of the crowd rushed to the 4000-pound equestrian statue of King George III a few blocks away, pulled it down, and cut off its head.”

Thank you, Rabbi Isaacson. One of your very best sermons. Exactly what we need as we contemplate the 47th president presiding over the 250th birthday of the United States.

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