July
2, 2003, 10:10 a.m. The
Idea of America
What
some wise men had in mind.
or all too many Americans, the Fourth of July is just another summer holiday,
albeit one that usually features fireworks. Of course, most Americans
dimly recollect that it was on this day sometime in the distant past that
Americans declared their independence from Great Britain, but they seldom
stop to reflect on the true revolution that the Fourth of July signifies:
the Declaration of Independence and the creation of a nation based on
a universal idea.
The word "nation"
comes from the Latin natio, a noun derived from a form of the verb
meaning "to be born." It has traditionally meant a grouping
based on such tangibles as race or blood. National movements since the
19th century have usually had as their goal the creation of a territorial
state encompassing those possessing that common identity. It is this understanding
of nationhood that Hitler reflected when he reputedly claimed that the
United States was "not a nation (Volk), but a hodgepodge (mischung)."
But it is the Declaration, not race and blood, that establishes American
nationhood, constituting "the mystic chords of memory, stretching
from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and
hearthstone, all over this broad land.…"
As Abraham Lincoln remarked in 1859:
All honor to Jefferson
— to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national
independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity
to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth,
applicable to all men and all times, and so embalm it there, that to-day,
and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to
the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.
In a speech delivered
just after Independence Day 1858, Lincoln clarified the link between the
Declaration and American nationhood. His argument is one we should ponder
at a time when "multiculturalists" are advancing the view that
the U.S. is not a land of free individuals but instead a conglomeration
of discrete racial and ethnic groups.
When we celebrate the Fourth of July, Lincoln told his listeners in Chicago,
we celebrate the founders, "our fathers and grandfathers," those
iron men...But
after we have done this we have not yet reached the whole. There is
something else connected with it. We have besides these men — descended
by blood from our ancestors — among us perhaps half our people
who are not descendants at all of these men, they are men who have come
from Europe — German, Irish, French and Scandinavian...finding
themselves our equals in all things. If they look back through this
history to trace their connection with those days by blood, they find
they have none, they cannot carry themselves back into that glorious
epoch and make themselves feel they are part of us, but when they look
through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old
men say that "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all
men are created equal," and then they feel that the moral sentiment
taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is
the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right
to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the
flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration, and so they are.
In Lincoln's view,
America is a nation by virtue of its commitment to the principle of equality,
by which he meant simply the idea that no person has the right to rule
over another without the latter's consent. For Lincoln, what made the
United States unique, and constituted the foundation of American nationhood,
was the incorporation of this moral principle into the Union. This belief
lay at the heart of his opposition to slavery, an affront to the very
idea of republican government.
Of course, defenders
of slavery such as South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun, Georgia senator
Alexander Stephens, and Chief Justice Roger Taney and "don't-care"
politicians such as Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas disagreed. Taney
and Douglas argued that Jefferson did not mean to include blacks when
he wrote that all men are created equal. Calhoun and Stephens contended
that he did mean to include them but that his view was false.
The irony is that while Lincoln's view prevailed with the Union triumph
in the Civil War and was subsequently incorporated in the Constitution
via the 13th and 14th Amendments, it is the Taney view that often predominates
today. The rejection of Lincoln's view of American nationhood is visible
on both today's political left and political right.
The main threat to American nationhood is multiculturalism, a notion that
would appeal to Hitler: the discredited idea that race defines destiny,
that blood determines who we are and what we can become. Multiculturalists
reject the principles of the Declaration because they see them as, at
best, "cultural imperialism" and at worst, racism.
To argue against multiculturalism is not to reject ethnic pride. I like
to joke with my students that since "Mackubin" is a sept of
the Clan Buchanan, whenever I hear a bagpipe, the hair on the back of
my neck bristles and I want to kill an Englishman. But then I realize
that other of my forebears were English and Welsh, so I would have to
kill myself.
In America, ethnicity is an indicator of whence we have come, not where
we are going. It is precisely the rejection of ethnic politics and the
embrace of politics based on individuality and equality that have created
the conditions of civility and domestic tranquility upon which American
strength and prosperity rest. The increasing hyphenation of America bodes
ill for these conditions.
But multiculturalism couldn't exist if even those Americans who praise
the Declarations didn't misunderstand its principles. How widely they
are misunderstood is driven home by a piece by a
piece in the July 2 Washington Post by David Broder. In his
penultimate paragraph, Broder makes it crystal clear that he misses the
point.
"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." Is our belief
in equality truly self-evident? How does it jibe with the growing inequality
of income and wealth and opportunity in this country? And is the pursuit
of happiness, as now understood, wedded to the same sense of duty and
responsibility that animated the men in Philadelphia?
To answer Broder,
the equality of which Jefferson speaks is that arising from the equal
natural rights all men possess, antecedent to the creation of government,
and the political right not to be ruled by another without the former's
consent. As Jefferson wrote to Roger C. Weightman on June 24, 1826, "all
eyes are opened, or opening to the rights of man. The general spread of
the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable
truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born, with saddles on their
backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately,
by the grace of God. These are grounds of hope for others. For ourselves,
let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of
these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them…."
As we celebrate the Fourth of July this week, we should reflect on the
uniqueness of American nationhood arising from the Declaration of Independence.
We have, of course, not always lived up to the "self-evident truths"
articulated in this document, as the history of slavery attests. But these
truths constitute what Lincoln called the "central idea" of
the American republic without which republican government will fail and
the American nation will dissolve.
—
Mackubin Thomas Owens, an NRO contributing editor, is on leave
from the Naval War College to write a history of U.S. civil-military relations.
He led a Marine rifle platoon in Vietnam, 1968-69.
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or all too many Americans, the Fourth of July is just another summer holiday,
albeit one that usually features fireworks. Of course, most Americans
dimly recollect that it was on this day sometime in the distant past that
Americans declared their independence from Great Britain, but they seldom
stop to reflect on the true revolution that the Fourth of July signifies:
the Declaration of Independence and the creation of a nation based on
a universal idea. 
