Tag Archives: Declaration of Independence

Semiquincentennial

Are We the Bad Guys?

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              I was at a bar not far from my house when I watched the ball drop above Times Square, ringing in the New Year.  On its flashing surface were the words, “America 250.” A couple of days later, I was leaving a hotel in Westchester County very early in the morning. I was going to drive my daughter to JFK so she could catch a morning flight to South America. In the hotel lobby the TV sets were replaying football highlights from the previous day. On the sidelines appeared, once again, the words “America 250.”  We got in the car, started driving towards the airport.  After the kid made it through ticketing and security, I waited at the airport for a bit for her text telling me she had boarded successfully.  I watched my phone while I waited and learned that American special forces had swooped into Caracas and seized Venezuela’s head of state.  And, of course, not long after that, I watched the videos of an ICE agent murdering Renee Goode in Minnesota.  I am sure that many of you did, too. And yesterday, I listened to our President denounce Somalians in terms only the most savage racist would use, and threaten to blow up the NATO alliance by invading, of all places, Greenland, because Norway did not award him a Nobel Peace Prize.

Yay America.

None of this is funny.

This new year will be one of commemoration, the Semiquincentennial, the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Events will take place across the country. In museums and libraries large and small exhibits and events will explore the meaning of American Independence. Much of this work will be provocative, clever, inspiring and interesting.

But in Trump’s America, what does it mean to commemorate the Declaration? The Bicentennial in 1976 occurred when I was in grade school.  Looking back on that year, I agree with one of my professors who described it as an orgy of self-congratulatory nonsense.  Fifty years later, I wonder what we have to celebrate. I’m not in the mood.

Several years ago I attended a planning meeting for New York’s 250th celebration.  I cannot remember who invited me, but the event was held at the Ganondagan State Historic Site not too far from where I live.  It was part of a larger national movement to make sure that Americans, across the United States, appropriately commemorated this important event. Several speakers addressed the audience, each of them saying basically the same thing: The Declaration of Independence is the source of our nation’s highest ideals, a shining example of liberty at home and abroad, worthy of celebration. “We’re not quite there, yet,” each of the speakers said.  They acknowledged, almost sheepishly, that after 250 years a considerable gap remained between American ideals and American reality.  But they were in no mood to focus on that.  This was going to be a celebration of all that the American Revolution accomplished. It’s going to be huge!

I found this frustrating.  I raised my hand.  “Was the Revolution a good thing?”  A gentleman who sat a couple of rows in front of me turned and answered my question. He said that it was not job of a historian to say whether something was good or bad. 

“Bullshit,” I thought.

“Penicillin,” I said.   “Pol Pot.  See? It’s easy.”

 I did not receive any invitations to subsequent planning meetings. The Semiquincentennial is going to be a celebration of how great we are as a nation, but maybe we are not that great. And I certainly do not feel like celebrating.

Let me give you an example. Let’s say that Donald Trump decides that he wants to run for reelection in 2028.  Of course, the Constitution prohibits this, but we have seen that our national charter has provided little comfort for those who believe in rights and freedom and liberty and restraints on the exercise of executive power.  And whatever the Constitution says, have you seen any evidence at all that Republicans in Congress would stand up to him? What about the Supreme Court? Fat chance, right? It is entirely possible that if Trump decides he wants to run again he may be permitted to do so.

              And I believe firmly that if he did run again, he would run on those issues that worked for him last time: fear and loathing towards immigrants and people of color; fear and hatred of transgendered people. These issues appeal to the sort of “low information” voters who have flocked to Trump.  There are indeed a lot of low information voters out there, enough to swing an election to him.  But nearly sixty percent of white Americans voted for Trump in 2016, 2020 and 2024.  And although I do not doubt that they would deny strenuously that they are racist homophobes, they would vote for him anyways.

              That’s a pretty sorry state of affairs. The existence of Trump, and Trumpism, makes me feel like there is a rot at the heart of our institutions and, as a historian, it seems to me that it has been there for a very long time.

              It is difficult to deny the power of the language of the preamble to the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson wrote beautifully. But I am not convinced that most Americans believe that all people are created equal. The Declaration, written by a rapist enslaver who never lifted a finger to abolish that horrible institution, also denounced the “merciless Indian savages” and dangerous slaves that he believed the king had unleashed upon innocent Americans. Hatred and fear of the other is baked into our national DNA. It may have been easier to pull white Americans together around their hatred of the other than their love of liberty and freedom. Alongside those who believe fervently in the ideals of the Declaration there always has been another group that does not believe in an egalitarian and democratic republic premised on a respect for the rights of all. And those people are in charge, right now, of all three branches of the federal government and they will be in charge when the celebrations of the Semiquincentennial ramp up in a couple of months. They control much of the nation’s media, and many of the hugely popular websites where you and I waste a lot of our time.

              Trump’s executive orders about the teaching of history are intended to proscribe those educators who point out this nation’s shortcomings. Show the well-researched documentary, “The 13th,” in your class and you will be in trouble.  In some states discussing the 1619 Project can get a teacher fired. These orders are intended to undermine the very principle that equality matters. They are intended to defend a racist status quo. To prohibit teachers from talking about past injustices that continue into the present is to deny that those injustices exist, and to effectively dismiss and delegitimize the concerns of those who say we are not all right as a nation.  I have seen the protests in the streets of the Twin Cities.  I know that there are many, many people who oppose Donald Trump. Some of those taking part in the resistance are heroes. Their humor, their love of their neighbors, truly is inspiring. Some, like Renee Good, have become martyrs. But that does not alter my belief that the opening lines of the Declaration are a rhetorically bombastic lie. As a nation, I think the evidence is pretty clear that most of us do not believe that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, and that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

After 250 years we have yet to live up to those ideals, which seems to me compelling evidence that most of us never really believed in them at all.

Teaching Native American History

An “Unfinished Revolution” May Not Be Much of a Revolution At All

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            According to a recent story by Kathleen Moore that appeared in the Albany Times-Union last week, the State Board of Regents had a chance to look at the new way the New York State Parks department will depict the American Revolution.  The parks department’s new displays at several sites will “include powerful new videos detailing the lives of unheard people from that time.” One of the videos, which focuses on the struggles of an Oneida woman who fought the colonists in hopes of keeping her Nation’s land, ends with a black screen with the following words: “Since its founding, the United States has never upheld a treaty made with an Indigenous Nation.”

            That’s a provocative claim. (And a complicated one, but that’s another story.) In all, there are forty videos, which have not yet been released to the public.  The Board of Regents “immediately praised the new pieces, but worried that they would get another deluge of criticism similar to what happened when they approved diversity, equity, and inclusion policies.” They will need to be brave, and the Regents are readying themselves for combat. According to Chancellor Lester Young, Jr., “we are the body that is responsible for the education of all students and it’s important that we maintain the courage to do what’s right.”

            “The new way of viewing the Revolution, as designed by the State Education Department’s Office of Cultural Education and the State Parks Department is called ‘The Unfinished Revolution.’” The Revolution was “incomplete” in that it “did not include women as voters, obviously enslavement was allowed for decades, so how do we grapple with that history?” That is what Devin Lander, the New York State Historian, said when he spoke with Moore.  “The idea,” writes Moore, “is to see the revolution as the impetus for 250 years of striving to meet the ideals of the Declaration of Independence.”

Think about that. 

250 years.

Two and a half centuries.

A quarter of a millennium.

It’s a long time.  We have yet to fulfill the ideals of the Declaration after 250 years.

Maybe we are just not that into the so-called “ideals” of the Declaration. After all, Jefferson’s Declaration also expressed that nasty old hypocrite’s anger that the King was stirring up slave rebellion and bringing down upon the frontiers the “merciless Indian Savages.” Jefferson and the other “Founding Fathers” baked hatred of the other into the American Nation’s founding documents.

Framing the Revolution as “unfinished” will leave students ill-equipped to explain how it was that our supposedly ruthless imperial overlords in Britain managed to abolish slavery and recognize the right of women to vote well before the United States.  It may seem to these students that the enemies of the principles laid out in the Declaration were quicker to realize them than our new “Empire for Liberty.” That might seem strange to them, a real head-scratcher.

The Board of Regents requires that students in New York learn about Cherokee Removal.  The notion that New York could not have become the Empire State without a systematic program of Indigenous dispossession that, at times and places, violated federal law will never be mentioned.  That New York continues to attempt to skim the cream from the barest hint of prosperity that comes to Indigenous nations in the state will never be mentioned. Continued treaty violations, today, are never addressed.  Hochul and Cuomo, both Democrats, were as bad as the Republican George Pataki.

That white New Yorkers, today, are the beneficiaries of this process of dispossession is as heretical a doctrine to racist dingbats as it is to the Board of Regents, who hardly are as courageous as they would like to believe.

In the last election, nearly 75 million people voted for a dim-witted tyrant whose followers, at a convention broadcast on national TV, held pre-printed poster with the slogan, “Mass Deportation Now!” The Republican Presidential candidate and his running mate repeatedly state the known falsehood that immigrants are eating dogs and cats. It’s a vile, racist, lie. And they do not stop. Police violence against people of color is an American reality. I read the history of the past 250 years and it is overwhelming.  The few occasions where this country’s leaders stood up for justice and equality came because people of color compelled them to do so. Maybe, just maybe, we do not value freedom and equality for all Americans. Many of us—too many—are comfortable with deeply entrenched inequality in American life.  Too many people turn away from too much injustice.  That, I am sorry to say, is a beat that runs through much of American history like a throbbing wail.  So instead of saying outright, that we have failed to create a just and decent society, we claim that despite the passage of 250 years, we continue to strive to live up to the ideals of an enslaver who could turn a nice phrase.  We have not failed because we have not had a chance to fail even though 250 years have passed and we have not succeeded. An unfinished revolution, you see, may not be much of a revolution at all.