The 250th anniversary of the United States of America is almost upon us. On July 4, 1776, the Second Continental Congress approved the Declaration of Independence. Its most famous sentence is what can be called the American Proposition: “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.”
In countless and crucial times in the history of the United States, American leaders have affirmed the American Proposition. In 1863, on a bloody field in Gettysburg, President Abraham Lincoln affirmed, “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” In 1963, on the white marble steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. echoed it again, “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’” The American Proposition is the patriotic creed of the United States.
The American Proposition is not exclusively American. It may have been born in the United States, but it is now a global citizen. As President John F. Kennedy pointed out on July 4, 1962, “Today, 186 years later, that Declaration whose yellowing parchment and fading, almost illegible lines I saw in the past week in the National Archives in Washington is still a revolutionary document. To read it today is to hear a trumpet call. For that Declaration unleashed not merely a revolution against the British, but a revolution in human affairs.” Since 1776, the United States and many countries have internationalized and constitutionalized the claims of human equality and inalienable rights found in the Declaration. In his book The Declaration of Independence: A Global History, David Armitage lists more than 114 different declarations of independence, including from Estonia, Singapore, Angola, Rwanda, Libya, Israel, Vietnam, Austria, Mexico, Iceland, Korea, Hungary, the Philippines, Bolivia, Brazil, and New Zealand. Despite its current global reach, the Proposition’s first national home was the United States of America, so it seems fitting to name it from its origin.
This 250th birthday raises critical questions for our country.
The importance of the American Proposition in the history of the United States and in the history of the world is undeniable. Historian Joseph Ellis called this phrase “the most potent and consequential words in American history.”
Yet from the very beginning, the people of the United States, individually and collectively, have not always lived up to the American Proposition. The first draft of the Declaration was written by our third president, Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson’s prose has a historic significance, an emotive power, and an evocative poetry that is missing from other propositions, such as in the Universal Declaration on Human Rights issued by the United Nations in 1948 and similar documents. Yet in his own person, the slave owner Jefferson embodied a spectacular failure to achieve the high ideal he articulated. These failures are also found later in Supreme Court cases such as Dred Scott (1857), which excluded Blacks from constitutional protection, and Korematsu (1944), which excluded people of Japanese descent from the West Coast Military Area. The truth of the American Proposition is almost never denied, almost always celebrated, but never perfectly embodied in practice.
This 250th birthday raises critical questions for our country. Do we still believe in the American Proposition? Do we believe in truth, even self-evident truth? Do we act on the principle that all human beings are created equal? Do we view our rights as endowed by our Creator? Do we respect the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness of all people? Our answers and actions will determine whether, as Lincoln put it, “this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
This article is the first in a series in which Dr. Kaczor will provide more insights leading up to the celebration of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.