Who are we-as a nation, as a people? There's a simple answer to that question: We are Americans. However, the simple answer raises the harder question: What does it mean to be an American? What does America mean? And there are even more fundamental questions that sit behind those: Where do our answers come from? What form do they take? What tells us who we are?The first point I want to make, one that explains the organization of this book, is that stories do all this. Stories organize the world for us; they put the stamp of meaning on the stuff of chaos. This is true, obviously, of individuals. When people think about their lives, they think about them in narrative form. They find themes, heroes, villains, and above all meaning. James Joyce said that this is the artist's task: "transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life." In this sense, we are all artists-we are all the authors of our own stories, not because we decide what happens but because we decide what it means: how it's interpreted. And usually we are the heroes of our own stories. This is not just true for individuals. As Jill Lepore writes in This America, nations too need a story: "some kind of agreed-upon past." Stories about a nation's history give individuals a sense of national identity-of what it means to be a citizen of that nation, what the nation itself stands for. They tell us what our values and collective identity are. They are stories not just about the past but about the future: they give us a purpose, a mission, even a sense of destiny. Are these stories true? Not always. Some distortion of the past is probably inevitable. History always involves interpretation, and strict factual accuracy is not the sole or even primary criterion of a national story's success. A national story works if it unites. Stories knit the nation together. Or they should. When a national story no longer works, it creates a kind of identity crisis-just as when some personal revelation or change in circumstances forces us to reassess our individual stories. When our stories stop making sense, who are we?That is the plight of America now. There is a story we have told ourselves for generations-the standard story. Like most national stories, it was never completely true, but it was true enough. It brought Americans together-or at least, it brought together enough Americans to form a governing coalition. It told us reassuring things about ourselves-that we were good, that we always succeeded, that our history was a steady progress toward the realization of deep and noble founding ideals. It looked like it was working-at least, it looked that way to the people in power. But no longer. We are going through a national identity crisis. Like a person questioning the story of their life, America is struggling to make sense of who it is. The standard story is no longer viable.A new version is emerging-a more honest, less triumphalist one. But this version is equally problematic. It still clings to the central feature of the standard story: the idea that modern American ideals have their source in the Declaration of Independence, and that the story of America is the story of a nation struggling to realize those ideals. This new version of the standard story is less false. Yet it is still, fundamentally, backward. In both versions, the story is actually harmful to the values it purports to champion. It misidentifies both the heroes and the villains; it holds at its heart a terrible contradiction that divides us, creating irreconcilable visions of America. We'll get to what that contradiction is shortly. For now, the point is that we need to abandon the standard story in all its versions. But we cannot abandon stories entirely. We have to replace the standard story with one that can do the same nation-building, identity-forming work. That better story can be more accurate, and it can also be more powerful because-as I will spell out-it affirms the same values that the standard story claims to, and more effectively. Like our standard story, this new story can exhort us to love our country, to appreciate its virtues, and to believe in our Constitution. It can be at once more truthful, more optimistic, more inclusive, and more just. It can be more American.But first let's hear the standard story.The history of America as a nation starts with the Declaration of Independence. Back in 1776, our great Founders wrote down some wonderful principles. They called them self-evident truths. All men are created equal. They are endowed by their creator with inalienable rights, including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Our Founders fought a war for those principles, and they built a society around them. They codified those principles in the Constitution. The Constitution sets out our fundamental values: liberty and equalitythe keys to what it means to be an American. It tells us who we are. For more than two hundred years, our Constitution has served us well, because of the wisdom of the Founders. Our task as Americans is to be true to those principles.We haven't always done that. We had slavery, of course, which is in direct conflict with the Declaration's principles of liberty and equality. But we fought a second war for those principles-the Civil War was fought in the name of the principles of the Declaration. Abraham Lincoln said so in the Gettysburg Address in 1863, when he looked back fourscore and seven years to 1776 and said the nation was conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. So the Civil War was a test of a nation so conceived and dedicated-but it was also an opportunity for Americans to move forward, to realize the promise of the Declaration more fully.Even after the Civil War, that promise wasn't fully realized. Racism and discrimination persisted. Eventually, the civil rights movement rose up to challenge them, marching on Washington in the name of the Declaration. In 1963, from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Martin Luther King talked about the Founders, the "architects of our Republic," the people "who wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence." They promised, he said, that all men, Black as well as white, "would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." He pointed to segregation, to race-based denial of the right to vote, as breaches of the promise made by the Declaration, and he dreamed of a day when we would "rise up and live out the true meaning" of "all men are created equal."Maybe that day still hasn't come, but it's getting closer. The story of America is a story of living up to the ideals of our Founders, the ideals that started us on this journey. We move forward, but we're guided by the past, by the spirit of 1776. We remember, as President John F. Kennedy said, that we are the heirs of that first Revolution, and we still carry that banner-the flag of freedom, of equality. We march in the name of the Declaration of Independence.That is our standard story. It is what many of us tell ourselves to explain who we are: the heirs of the first Revolution, the descendants of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, of the drafters of the Constitution. American history starts with the high note of the Declaration, and we're trying to sustain it. We're following the Founders' wisdom, which for nearly 250 years has pointed the way to a better America and a more perfect union.The standard story means to be relatively nonpartisan. One of the reasons for its durability and popularity is that it has both progressive and conservative versions. Conservatives tend to focus on individual liberty, while progressives focus more on equality. All presidents in the twentieth century appealed to the Declaration of Independence, though for different purposes. 1 Calvin Coolidge quoted the Declaration to argue that "the fundamental conception of American institutions is regard for the individual," while Franklin Delano Roosevelt invoked the pursuit of happiness to defend the New Deal. Conservatives look to the past mostly as a source of authority, and they often conclude that the Constitution should be understood in the same way the drafters and ratifiers understood it. Progressives look to the past for justice, identifying ways we have fallen short. Conservatives are more likely to celebrate Americans for living up to the ideals of the Founders, while progressives are more likely to suggest that there is still work to be done. Yet both versions hold that the ideals of the Declaration lead us forward. Gerald Ford said, "To be an American is to subscribe to those principles which the Declaration of Independence proclaims and the Constitution protects." Barack Obama, in his first inaugural address, said that "America has carried on . . . because we, the people, have remained faithful to the ideals of our forebears and true to our founding documents."So the idea that our values were set out in the Declaration of Independence, fought for in the Revolution, made law by the Constitution, and gradually realized through our history is deeply embedded in our modern identity. There are many things to say about this story. Before evaluating it, let's start by describing. What should stand out to us about this idea of American identity?The first thing to note is that it is a backward-looking story. Our ideals have their origin in the past-at our very beginning. The Declaration is the central document in this story, maybe more important, maybe more truly American, than even the Constitution. But the Constitution is important too. The Constitution has the answers to our current problems. If America seems adrift, we should go back to the wisdom of the Founders. Focus on the Constitution, the original understanding of it. Live up to the ideals of the Founders, be more like them. The way forward is by recovering past greatness.The second thing about this story is that it's a success story. Yes, we've had our difficulties, but America always succeeds. We always triumphbecause of the wisdom of the Founders and the ideals of the Declaration. The Civil War is probably the best example of that: it was a terrible war, but the ideals of the Declaration triumphed and we took a big step toward realizing them.And the third thing is that it's a story of continuity. There's a line that goes from the signers of the Declaration of Independence, through the drafters of the Constitution, to us today. The continuity of the standard story is related to the fact that it's a success story: we're the same people we've always been, the same nation. The signers of the Declaration, the drafters of the Constitution, they got it right. We're living in the world they designed; we're fighting for the ideals they championed.So this is a nice story in a lot of ways. You can see why it appeals to people. It tells us that we're good, we Americans. We started out with good ideals, which we haven't always lived up to, but we're getting better. We're succeeding. When things look dark, answers exist if we look back. There's authority in the past, in this moment of unity that everyone can rally around, everyone can share in. Everyone can feel a connection to the Declaration and the Founding.I'm going to question these claims, but more important, I'm going to show that there is a better story-and it rejects all three of these features. This story looks forward, not back. It is a story of failure, not success. And it is a story of ruptures and breaks with the past, not a story of continuity. Given those differences, what is perhaps most amazing about the better story is how closely it tracks the standard one. It starts with a bang. A shot heard round the world. A war to throw off an unjust system and replace it with a better one. A determination to take into our own hands the decision who the American people are, to forge a new national identity. There's a short document expressing these ideals and a longer one giving them the force of law. There are soldiers who died for our rights and lawmakers who wrote them into our Constitution. All of this is true . . . but none of it in the way we have so often been taught. It's a different shot, a different war, different documents, different people. And we, like a child stolen from its parents and raised by impostors, we, too, are not the people we thought we were.Again, that better story must wait. The standard story has persisted for a long time, and we need to look more closely at how and why it consolidated its hold on our national identity. Almost no one now actually argues against the standard story. Instead, we see arguments within its framework. But there have been other understandings of America's founding documents and ideals, expressed by dissenters from the triumphal narrative. There is a lot to learn from those perspectives. Not because we necessarily want the same things these dissenters did, but because their interpretations might be right. And, most important, embracing their views now might lead us down very different paths than it would have hundreds of years ago.
Questioning the Standard Story Dissenters
The standard story as I have set it out is relatively straightforward. It focuses on a few foundational documents, and only parts of them. It tells us that our ideals were stated in the preamble to the Declaration of Independence, fought for in the Revolution, and codified in the Constitution. Less explicitly, it venerates the Founders as great men, worthy of our admiration and emulation. How has the story held up over time? Each of these elements has faced notable challenges. Overall, there have been two main developments. First, the triumphalist aspect of the standard story has diminished. Academics and activists have complicated our understanding of the Revolution, the Founders' Constitution, and the Founders themselves. These revisionist views have, to greater and lesser degrees, made their way into our politics and our culture. Some are still controversial; others are becoming conventional wisdom. That has shifted the standard story in a slightly more progressive direction but has not altered its fundamental character.The second development, which is more important, is that the standard story has become dominant. I do not mean the triumphalist version, which in fact has eroded. What has become dominant is the idea that the Declaration of Independence states our values, and that American history has progressed-in fits and starts, with steps forward and back-toward a greater realization of those ideals. While there were meaningful challenges to that view in the past, today it is now largely unquestioned, even by those regarded as radicals. Indeed, as the luster of other parts of the standard story dims, one response has been to place more weight on the Declaration of Independence. This is a time-honored strategy-we will see it employed by the opponents of slavery and the champions of civil rights. But however well it may have worked in the past, it is a fundamental mistake in the world we live in now. The Declaration cannot do the work that we ask of it. Explaining why starts with an analysis of the key historical figures and arguments.
Lincoln and His Foils
Abraham Lincoln is probably the most important single figure in the promotion of the standard story. He gives a strong statement of every element: the Declaration, the Revolution, the Constitution, and the great men. Lincoln's reading of the Declaration was relatively simple and consistent. In pronouncing that all men (by which he understood all people) were created equal, Lincoln argued, the Declaration set out a principle about their proper status in society and how they should be treated by government. In his 1858 debates with Stephen Douglas, he claimed that the "central idea" of America "at the beginning was, and until recently had continued to be, 'the equality of men'"-not equality in "size, intellect, moral development or social capacity" but equality of their inalienable rights. The authors of the Declaration meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere.For Lincoln, equality is an aspiration, something that society works toward. The drafters of the Declaration "did not mean to assert the obvious untruth that all were then actually enjoying that equality, nor yet that they were about to confer it immediately upon them. . . . They meant simply to declare the right, so that enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit." Lincoln's equality is conferred by the government, in the form of legal rights. Making people equal, not in their circumstances but in their rights, was for Lincoln a main purpose of government. The maxim of equality was placed in the Declaration, he said, not as part of its argument for independence but for future use. The Founders expected that Americans would pursue its perfection.Lincoln's view finds its greatest expression in his 1863 Gettysburg Address, where he proclaimed that America was a nation "conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." The Gettysburg Address was transformative in important ways, but its understanding of the Declaration was by then relatively conventional. The interpretive victory had largely been won before the Civil War. (Briefly, people seeking to promote equality-notably Black and white abolitionists and enslaved people-fastened on the language about liberty and equality because the Declaration was the only federal document to offer those words.) To see how complete the victory of Lincoln's interpretation was, we can look at two of his best-known antagonists, Stephen Douglas and Roger Taney.Douglas and Taney both contested Lincoln's reading of "all men are created equal," but each of them accepted Lincoln's understanding that equality referred to legal rights in society. Because they opposed equalitybecause they were trying to support slavery-they argued that "all men" did not really mean all people. "No man," Douglas proclaimed in 1858, "can vindicate the character, motives, and conduct of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, except upon the hypothesis that they referred to the white race alone, and not to the African, when they declared all men to have been created equal. . . ." Indeed, they did not even mean all whites. They simply meant that "British subjects on this continent [were] equal to British subjects born and residing in Great Britain; that they were entitled to the same inalienable rights, and among them were enumerated life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."Taney-joined by six other justices-said the same thing, and for the same reason. The "general words" of the Declaration did not include Black people. If they had, "the conduct of the distinguished men who framed the Declaration of Independence would have been utterly and flagrantly inconsistent with the principles they asserted; and instead of the sympathy of mankind, to which they so confidently appealed, they would have deserved and received universal rebuke and reprobation." Such hypocrisy was inconceivable, Taney argued because "the men who framed this declaration were great men-high in literary acquirements-high in their sense of honor, and incapable of asserting principles inconsistent with those on which they were acting." From a modern perspective, this argument is ludicrous. "All men" is a strange way to say "all British subjects," and one hardly vindicates the character of the signers by arguing that they were racists instead of hypocrites. The important point here, though, is that Douglas and Taney were forced into their absurd positions because they accepted Lincoln's understanding of equality. To find someone who did not, we have to go back further-and we will, in the next chapter. For the moment, though, let's turn to the other elements of the standard story.The Revolution itself played less of a role in Lincoln's political thought and rhetoric, but he treated it as sacred, charging his listeners at the Young Men's Lyceum in 1838 to "swear by the blood of the Revolution" like "the patriots of seventy-six did to the support of the Declaration of Independence." (Oddly, the principle he sought to consecrate in the blood of the Revolution was "never to violate in the least particular, the laws of the country; and never to tolerate their violation by others"-about the least revolutionary principle you can imagine.) He not only praised the Founders; according to Gordon Wood, it was Lincoln who made Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and the rest into our Founders. Before Lincoln, "when most Americans referred to the 'founders' they meant John Smith, William Penn, William Bradford, John Winthrop and so on, the founders of the seventeenth century." 1 Noted abolitionist speaker Frederick Douglass agreed with Lincoln on these points. In his famous 1852 speech, "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?," he gave a standard account of the Declaration and the Revolution. The Declaration, he said, "is the ring-bolt to the chain of your nation's destiny. . . . The principles contained in that instrument are saving principles." The signers of the Declaration, he went on, "were brave men. They were great men, too." So did the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. In the 1833 Declaration of Sentiments of the American Anti-Slavery Society, Garrison quoted the preamble as "[t]he corner stone" upon which a "band of patriots . . . founded the Temple of Freedom." Garrison and Douglass, we will see, did not agree with Lincoln about all elements of the standard story, and they may have been behaving strategically here, since criticizing the Declaration or the Revolution was unlikely to be effective. Condemning those aspects of the Founding would leave them no place to stand. But by venerating the Founding, they could use the exalted past as a fulcrum for criticism of the degraded present. Lincoln took this tack in his debates with Stephen Douglas, arguing that we had fallen away from the Declaration's principle of equality and must return to it. Frederick Douglass made the same point with a sharper tone. The America of 1852 was betraying its founding ideals, he charged. "Whether we turn to the declarations of the past or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future." He also declared, "For revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival."The Founders' Constitution, the last piece of the story, presented a different issue. Reject the Declaration and the Revolution in the 1830s and you have very little left of America, no real way to argue that American values are on your side. However, with the Founders' Constitution, there was a choice. Foes of slavery could read it in its best light, trying to work with what they had, or they could reject it and try to build something newthe two options that face anyone born into an imperfect world. Lincoln and the Republican Party took the first one. The 1856 Republican platform committed itself to "the principles promulgated in the Declaration of Independence, and embodied in the Federal Constitution" and argued that the Constitution prohibited Congress from allowing slavery (a "relic[] of barbarism") in the territories. Douglass similarly ended "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" by calling the Constitution "a glorious liberty document." As the election of 1860 approached, he told a Glasgow audience that "the way to abolish slavery in America is to vote such men into power as will use their powers for the abolition of slavery" and concluded that the Constitution "will afford slavery no protection when it shall cease to be administered by slaveholders." 2 Some radicals went even further and argued (implausibly) that the Constitution prohibited slavery.Trying to claim the Constitution for your side makes some obvious sense. The Constitution is binding law and very difficult to change. (Amending the Constitution requires approval by two-thirds supermajorities in both houses of Congress and then three-quarters of states.) Still, not everyone chose this path. On July 4, 1854-two years after Douglass's excoriation of American hypocrisy and praise for the anti-slavery Constitution-William Lloyd Garrison took the stage at an anti-slavery rally and struck a match. He lauded the Declaration of Independence as announcing "equality of rights" but asked what there was to celebrate on its seventy-eighth anniversary. He produced a copy of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act and set it on fire. And did the same to a copy of a judge's decision ordering the return of fugitive slave Anthony Burns. Then a judge's instructions to a jury considering charges against those who had tried to free Burns. Finally, he raised a copy of the US Constitution, "the source and parent of all the other atrocities-a covenant with death and an agreement with hell." As the flames consumed it, his voice rang out again. "So perish all compromises with tyranny!"Garrison's interpretation of the Founders' Constitution as pro-slavery was consistent with his abolitionism. It was shared by the early Frederick Douglass, who in 1849 pronounced that the Constitution "was made in view of the existence of slavery, and in a manner well calculated to aid and strengthen that heaven-daring crime." It was also, of course, shared by supporters of slavery like Roger Taney. In Dred Scott v. Sandford, Taney announced his limited view of the Declaration's promised equality, and extrapolated from that a strongly pro-slavery reading of the Constitution. Congress lacked the power to ban slavery, Taney said-not just within states but in territories. And Black people could never be US citizens.We'll return to the disagreement between Lincoln and his foils, both the pro-slavery Taney/Douglas and the abolitionist Garrison/Douglass camps, and see how those past disputes translate into the present day. (That turns out to be complicated-what was a pro-slavery position centuries ago is not necessarily one today.) For now, we can rest with this observation: In the period before the Civil War, there were interpretations of the Declaration that took it to condemn slavery and those that took it to be consistent with or even to protect slavery. Similarly, there were interpretations of the Founders' Constitution as both anti-slavery and pro-slavery. But here the interpretations did not line up so neatly with political positions: among those who read the Constitution as pro-slavery were the abolitionists Garrison and Douglass. The reason for this difference between the Declaration and the Founders' Constitution is simple. Rejecting the Founders' Constitution in favor of the Declaration was a possible antislavery political strategy; rejecting the Declaration led nowhere. The question to keep in mind is whether this is still true, or whether our current circumstances might support a different choice.
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