Today brought the terrible news of the death of historian Gordon Wood. National Review was proud to publish his piece “The Five Greatest Words in the Declaration” earlier this year, in our special issue on America at 250. It’s mournful now to know that it was one of his last.
Wood’s essay opens:
In the Declaration of Independence, the 250th anniversary of which we are celebrating this year, the Founders put down five significant words that came to define America’s culture — “all men are created equal.” No phrase could have been more radical, more momentous. Even the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen in 1789, with its statement that “men are born and remain free and equal in rights,” does not have the same power and significance.
Equality was based on a new understanding of people’s capacity to transform themselves. Educated people in the late 18th century came to believe — it was the basic premise of all enlightened thinking — that people were not born to be what they might become.
And he goes on:
In other words, nurture, not nature, was what mattered — totally. For all previous generations of Western history, blood and inherited characteristics had dominated the culture. A smart and handsome child living in the slums had to be the illegitimate offspring of a wayward aristocrat. Now in the enlightened late 18th century, all that was suddenly reversed. The explosive assumption that nurture was nearly everything became the basis of all modern thinking, and it lay behind the belief that all men were created equal. This radical idea, of course, had roots in Christianity that went back centuries, but by the 18th century, for many of the enlightened, it had taken on a literal and secular significance that remains the foundation of America’s democratic faith.
R.I.P.