DETROIT – Happy Fourth of July! Years ago, people got together outdoors on this day, a mayor or some dignitary read the Declaration of Independence aloud, and everyone cheered.
That doesn’t seem to happen as much these days. We still do picnics and fireworks and sometimes sing the national anthem, but I have the feeling that the Declaration, like the Constitution that was ratified a dozen years later, is far more praised than read.
What does happen, though, is a lot of soul-searching and arguing about what the Founding Fathers would have thought of us, and the nation they created, if they could magically come back to life.
Would they beam with wonder and happiness over the fact that their creation has now lasted almost 250 years? Or would they be totally repulsed by our society today, our manners and customs, same-sex marriage and — gasp! — racial and sexual equality.
Well, I think I’ve got as close to an answer as we can get, barring the invention of a time machine to snatch people from the past. Back in 2005, I was interviewing the late Doug Fraser, who had been close to the legendary Walter Reuther, and then himself led the United Auto Workers union after Reuther was killed in a 1970 plane crash.
When I asked what Reuther, then dead for 35 years would have thought of some current labor issue, Fraser chuckled. “Nobody can know what Walter would have thought of anything today. That was a long time ago, the world is different, and anyone who claims to know what he would think doesn’t know what he is talking about.”
That, I realized, made perfect sense. So if we can’t know what someone who died in 1970 would think now, how can we imagine what men who lived in 1776 would make of our democracy today?
They lived in a world utterly different from ours. The entire population of the colonies in 1776 was about 2.5 million people, about a fourth of Michigan’s population today, and at least 200,000 of those were slaves. (Detroit had a mere 2,144 people in 1780, and a British fort crammed with about 500 American prisoners of war.)
Thomas Jefferson’s words about “created equal” and “endowed with certain inalienable rights” applied at most, to a million or so white men. The founders had qualms about slavery, and hoped to see it abolished, but it seems safe to say that none of them could have imagined a President Barack Obama.
Nor could they have foreseen the internet, the automobile, airplane, or anesthesia. What they did have in common with us was the truly revolutionary belief that government was only legitimate if it flowed from the consent of the governed.
Interestingly, what few realize is that while we see the Constitution as an immortal document, the men who wrote it did not. George Washington said in 1787 that “I do not expect the Constitution to last more than 20 years.” Alexander Hamilton thought it “worthless fabric.” Thomas Jefferson thought every generation should remake it. Only James Madison, perhaps the prime mover behind the document itself, thought it might last more than a century.
But they built far better than they knew.
Their genius was to make it possible, but not too easy, to amend the Constitution, making it flexible enough to adapt to changing realities, but not too easy to change. Since the Bill of Rights was added in 1791, the Constitution has been amended only 17 times in 233 years, and two of those (Prohibition) canceled each other out.
Half a century ago, the Founding Fathers were glorified and seen as Greek or Roman gods in powdered wigs. Now, in part thanks to the play Hamilton, we know they weren’t. Hamilton was a Clintonesque womanizer, and wasted his brilliant life in a stupid duel with Aaron Burr, who was then vice-president.
Thomas Jefferson did indeed father children with his teenage slave mistress. Benjamin Franklin treated his wife Deborah shabbily, and John Adams could be a tiresome and petty prig who, as one historian said, might today have been on Prozac.
Even George Washington padded his expense account, and tried to deny that political parties were inevitable.
Yet they were all willing to risk their lives to give us self-government, and, as the Declaration shows, were and would be now totally against dictators, even a dictator for a day.
“A republic, if you can keep it,” Franklin famously told a woman who asked him what kind of government the constitutional convention had given the United States of America.
It’s been often endangered, but we have kept it. Let’s celebrate that today, and do our best to keep it still.
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(A version of this column appeared in the Toledo Blade)
