Spreading the Word, from July 4, 1776, to Today

Philly’s Museum of the American Revolution explores pitfalls, perils, triumphs, and flops as the Declaration of Independence went worldwide.

G reetings from rainy, snowy, icy, and flu-ish Vermont. Yes, though normally a cheetah dashing from place to place, I was felled, walloped, really, by the flu ten days ago on the way back home from a wedding in Philadelphia. I’m feeling better and ranty. Yes, the wedding was the joyful and supreme blend of the bride’s and groom’s personalities, families, and friends, and, yes, it’s good to start 2026 in Philadelphia. It was also a salve to visit the Museum of the American Revolution, which opened in 2017 and tells a rousing — and blessedly coherent — story. Among much else, the museum displays George Washington’s field tent for sleeping and working while he and his army fought in New Jersey.

The Declaration’s Journey is the museum’s salvo exhibition for America’s 250th birthday, with lots more to come in terms of programs and exhibitions. It’s all well and good to declare independence. It’s a different, more intricate matter to get the news out. “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” — unalienable rights as opposed to “nasty, brutish, short, and under-the-boot-heel existence” — were shiny, new genies out of the bottle. Over many, many decades, emboldened embrace by nations from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe led to thousands of movements, with tweaks here and there, copying our Declaration of Independence.

The Declaration’s Journey is a smart, punchy, moving, and mind-opening take on July 4, 1776, and much of what followed. It covers far too much ground, and I would have done it differently, but 2026 is young. The show raises all the right questions. It’s an optimist’s take, too, but “from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe” is a hint. Tried a lot elsewhere, our Declaration of Independence might still play to full houses, with grumbling here and there, from West Quoddy Head in Maine to Cape Flattery on the Olympic Peninsula. It has bombed a lot, too, sometimes a whiff, often with much flop sweat, sometimes in a dumpster fire. Actually, the westernmost point in the continental U.S. is Cape Alava, but I’m taking my own liberty — it’s my column — by picking Cape Flattery, east by a smidgen, to pay us Americans a compliment. The Declaration has worked here because we’re unique, in part because of our bloody-minded English and Scots-Irish dissident roots and in part because God blessed us with a vast, rich expanse of real estate.

The exhibition covers 1776 to, more or less, today. It’s about the dissemination of the Declaration — getting the news out — and this is a marketing-and-communication theme. The Declaration of Independence is a document, but it’s also a mega-thrust earthquake, aftershocks and all. How the ideas unfolded is, as our pivotal French allies would say, “très compliqué.”

A more auspicious spread than “Afghanistan to Zimbabwe” — and it’s a jolter — starts The Declaration’s Journey. It’s from one chair to another, from what’s likely the Windsor chair on which Thomas Jefferson sat as he wrote the Declaration of Independence in early summer 1776 to the Birmingham, Ala., jail-cell bench where Martin Luther King wrote his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail” on April 16, 1963. King had just been arrested for defying a local ban on boycotts and demonstrations against segregation in local businesses.

I like relics, in this case artifacts that are silent witnesses to front-page, red-letter, mind-blowing moments. I like old chairs, too. They’re humankind’s oldest furniture. Jefferson’s Windsor chair is simple and elegant, gently cradling the butt. Its spindles are attenuated and delicate but alert to the weight and shifts they have to accommodate while still balancing regal bearing and a touch of sass. It’s aesthetic and cerebral and egalitarian and rigorous. King’s jail-cell bench is squat, deliberately uncomfortable, basic and frank and crypto-Brutalist, not concrete but metal, and forget about back support. We expect highbrow ideas to flow from the writer seated in Jefferson’s Windsor chair. King’s bench? We expect words infused with aches and pains, with patience worn to the nub — visceral and pithy points — to come from it.

What do the two have to do with each other? That’s an exhibition in itself. The Declaration is much shorter — 1,300 words as opposed to King’s nearly 7,000. Both are laundry lists of grievances, both are philosophical statements, and both are calls for action. King mentions the Declaration only once, and tangentially. Both cried “No more,” no more assaults on human dignity and human rights, and no more waiting. “‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘never,’” King wrote. No more deferrals of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. King’s strategy was civil, peaceful disobedience. The Declaration’s was treason and war.

The two chairs and two declarations are certainly attention-grabbing. There aren’t any glib answers. I’m at the edge of my seat wondering what’s next.

I’d never read King’s letter before. It’s effective, part sermon, part statement of facts, part short story, and part a masterclass in composition and persuasion. The Declaration’s target audience was national and, to an extent, international. King’s letter aimed at highbrow, mostly white churches in the South but also at those throughout the country who were clinging to silence in the face of the sore-thumb status quo that was Jim Crow Birmingham. The New York Times wouldn’t publish the letter. The American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker group, eventually did. For a time, it was the case statement of the civil rights movement.

The exhibition focuses on close-to-the-ground, get-the-word-out moves in Philadelphia in the weeks after July 4, 1776. In early July, the Second Continental Congress, about to approve the Declaration, hired John Dunlap, a Philadelphia printer, to print broadside, or poster-size, copies for distribution. The signatures, among them John Hancock’s swanky, marquee-size name, came later. The early copies listed names by colony — among them Jefferson, John Adams, Ben Franklin, a Morris and a Livingston from New York, all rich men who became, in signing, traitors to the Crown. Americans were high on literacy and, even in the 1770s, huge consumers of news and newspapers. Word got out. Printers throughout the colonies made their own broadsides. Ministers read them from pulpits. Town criers read them en plein air. Within days of July 4, the Declaration was translated into German and printed in German-language newspapers serving more than 200,000 Americans of German stock.

Jonas Phillips, a Jewish immigrant merchant who owned a general store in Philadelphia, sent what’s thought to have been a stack of Dunlap’s broadsides to Jewish friends in Amsterdam with a note in Yiddish explaining what the Declaration signified, but the British intercepted his parcel. His stack and note have lived in a British archive since then, but now Phillips’s note and one of his copies are back in Philadelphia and on view. William Penn, of course, had promoted colonial Pennsylvania as a hub of religious tolerance, and Phillips was among the organizers of Philadelphia’s first synagogue. He thought the Declaration, foregrounding liberty and individuality, would make the new country a haven for Jews, adding, “I think we’re going to win.” He later fought for a clause in the U.S. Constitution prohibiting religious tests for officeholders.

A section in A Declaration’s Journey focuses on the incorporation of the Declaration in new state constitutions. I didn’t realize how quickly these developed after July 4, 1776. The New York State Constitution, written in 1777, quoted the entire Declaration in its preamble. New Jersey’s first state constitution, approved two days before the Declaration of Independence, gave property-owning women and blacks the right to vote. By 1787, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island had abolished slavery. Even before the American Revolution ended in 1783, state courts here and there were quoting the Declaration’s “all men are created equal” language to free male and female slaves by court order.

The Declaration’s Journey misconceives the role of Native tribes in the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration’s final grievance attacks King George III for supporting “merciless Indian savages” who were attacking American frontier settlements, killing women and children. The curators headline this as “injustice toward Native Americans in the Declaration” and suggest that all Native tribes supported independence from Britain, which is wrong. There were many dozens of tribes, some supporting the Loyalists. Patriots tended to view tribes on the fringes of the 13 former colonies and beyond as independent nations.

At early points like these, the exhibition as well as many Americans slip and slide over “injustice,” “equal,” and “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” That’s not terrible since, especially between 1776 and the ratification of the U.S. Constitution in 1787, more inchoate and chaotic times are hard to conceive. The Declaration is, in part, a concept piece. The Constitution gives it bones, flesh, and organs. And that naturally meant compromise, backtracks, and fudging. We’re born equal in having our basic humanity and inalienable rights derived from God. One is the right to life — no one, state or individual, can destroy or co-opt another’s body and soul. Another, liberty, is freedom to think and act and achieve self-realization. “Pursuit of happiness” doesn’t just mean the freedom to buy a Cadillac or a Lincoln or, drawing from my recent piece on 2026’s Color of the Year, the freedom to paint my walls a serene, lofty Cloud Dancer — also known as white and picked by Pantone — or Silhouette, the umber-and-charcoal mix pushed by Benjamin Moore. Jefferson and the Declaration’s other signers — and little old me — see it as striving for a life of purpose and fulfillment that includes good and active citizenship.

Much as gunfire in Lexington and Concord in 1775 was “the shot heard round the world,” the Declaration was the message read and absorbed nearly round the world and a catalyst. Drawing substantially from the Declaration were Haiti’s and France’s revolutions, both catastrophic, and the Spanish colonial revolutions from 1810 into the 1830s, all repeat disasters of the needless-stuck-in-the-groove variety. The exhibition takes imitation as the sincerest form of flattery and exhibits good artifacts.

In the late 1780s and in Paris, Lafayette worked with Jefferson, then our minister to France, on the French Declaration of the Rights of Men; a draft of which is in the show along with Mather Brown’s 1786 portrait of Jefferson, the earliest portrait of the Declaration’s writer that we have. Jefferson looks like he lives in the clouds, a dreamer and abstract thinker untuned to how vague “equality” and “all men are created equal” are and how flammable they could become. John Brown, the Confederate states, and the 1848 Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments each drew from the Declaration of Independence, often using the same language, in pushing their causes. The Declaration’s role in the Civil War is a topic for an exhibition all its own.

Nothing says “ends with a thud” more clearly than a combo of the United Nations and Eleanor Roosevelt, but that’s what we get and, alas, no, I couldn’t get a double scotch afterward at the museum café. The U.N. adopted its Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, based on the Declaration of Independence and sans those lines about Indian savages, occupying armies, show trials, and swarms of petty bureaucrats eating out our substance. The nag, limo lib, goody two-shoes Roosevelt was in the thick of it. Eleanor’s been dead since 1962, and the U.N. has no credibility. And The Declaration’s Journey doesn’t exactly end neatly with Eleanor but in a bit of a jumble. Gay rights, the pro-life and pro-abortion movements, socialized-medicine boosters, environmentalism, and life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness movements in India, Ireland, Vietnam, and Korea get snapshots. It seems by the end that the Declaration means everything to everyone, which is a way of meaning nothing real.

As a curatorial enterprise, I might have anchored The Declaration’s Journey to the Declaration itself and MLK’s Birmingham letter. Both are great writing. When I read the words “King’s bench,” I thought about not the metal bench in the jail cell but the King’s Bench, the highest of the old English common-law courts, dating from medieval times. It was the bulwark court that protected people from tyranny. Jefferson’s Windsor chair — timeless, simple, refined, strong, and reliable — is very English and also, by Jefferson’s day, very American. From King’s bench, the jailed minister, teacher, and leader didn’t so much beg and beseech as demand the end of Jim Crow, linking ancient English law, the Declaration, and his own movement. Aside from Jim Crow, he didn’t want to break anything. He wanted to be part of the new world ushered in by Jefferson and the other signers.

This straight line would mean dropping Afghanistan, Zimbabwe, Eleanor, Bolivar, Haiti, the Mexicans, the French, and so much more background noise. A focus on the Declaration, the Constitution’s compromises, the entrenchment of a rich, Southern slaveholding class and cult, Lincoln, and Reconstruction and other false starts would be more useful, until we get to 1963 and the dams bursting.

I review exhibitions on many fronts, among them coherence, clarity, and production values. Putting aside my own beliefs, I’m looking for meaty stories, protagonists, and focus. The Museum of the American Revolution delivers, which is why I like it so much. And an exhibition on why so many Declaration copycats failed would probably be incendiary. Insalubrious traditions, bad leadership, and blinkered, selfish citizenries would figure in any honest assessment. “The pursuit of happiness” is a rich, difficult topic to be plumbed, but for many it’s a stumbling block that hinders their understanding of the Declaration’s meaning to the band of rich rebel philosophers who signed it. “Why didn’t the Declaration free the slaves?,” “Why were women excluded?,” and “Why weren’t our Indian savage neighbors embraced?” are all dumb questions that, alas, need to be rousingly answered given the state of civic-mindedness today.

The Museum of the American Revolution plays a vital part. We’re experiencing a renaissance in citizenship, but rot and cluelessness run deep. The museum’s permanent galleries are dense with graphics and information, but the Revolution is among the epics of the ages. It’s an awesome place, though it dwells too much on the erasure of women, Native Americans, and slaves. The Revolution was fought and led by men of pallor, and, to me, leadership is an immense part of the story. Why the Patriots won is a story of brave, smart leaders. The museum, in the heart of old Philadelphia, is a treasure. It doesn’t do dumb-downs and isn’t for hijacking by left-wing liars and opportunists. It took lots of flack two or three years ago from that crowd for hosting a Moms for Liberty event. To the wailers and whiners, Moms for Liberty is “far right” for boosting parents’ rights. As the only son of an Italian mother, I see motherhood as sacred, so I defer to them in having the freedom to do what’s best. Earlier this week, I saw that the museum got a $2.7 million grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support its America 250 work. That’s money well spent.

This brings me back to my two pieces on Princeton University’s new art museum. Never one to dwell, I’m still astonished that Peale’s great portrait of Washington at the Battle of Princeton is so cheapened and tarred by catty, trite references to his slaveholding and his slash-and-burn strategy during, of all times, the French and Indian War, with a circuitous reference to, of all people, Sally Hemings, possibly Jefferson’s mistress. Where’s the awe? Where’s the perspective? Where’s the depth? Where’s the common sense? All are much more likely to be found at the Museum of the American Revolution and need to be imported to Princeton, ASAP.