The Creation Myth of America, and Why We Need to Remember It Now
I feel most American when I’m reminded of my country’s birth story. It’s the foundational myth of America that gets to me. When I hear about the days of Lexington and Concord and am momentarily transported to the barricades at Bunker Hall facing a bayonet charge by red-coated British regulars, as happened recently inside Independence Hall in Philadelphia (the ‘transported’ part, not the bayonets) — guess whose side I’m on?
All civilizations begin with a myth. The myth of our country’s idealistic beginnings has supported and nourished our country’s growth and progress for two and a half centuries. I think there’s still water in that well; fuel in that tank. And after a recent holiday season visit to the sacred sites of the birthplace of American democracy, I emerged a refreshed believer.
What happened 244 years ago in Philadelphia still has meaning for Americans today. We need to remember who we are.
Nobody called the building where the country’s founders debated and signed the Declaration of Independence “Independence Hall” until, fifty years later, the aging Marquis de Lafayette returned to the country he had fought to create (while serving as one of George Washington’s principal aides) for a memorial visit. What, his hosts inquired, did he wish to see?
More than anything, Lafayette told them, he desired to visit the site where the birth of a nation founded on the principle of humanity’s “natural rights” — the first such claim in human history — was proclaimed. And where also, a decade later, the governing structure of that new nation, the United States Constitution, based on those same idealistic principles, was hammered out and offered to Americans for their approval.
That site was a sturdy British-built building in the heart of Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love. For almost a whole year representatives from all 13 English speaking colonies met in the colony of Pennsylvania Statehouse, but were unable to agree on a definitive plan of action in the face of oppressive rule by an empire based on the other side of the Atlantic.
It is easy to see why there would be problems. Why would delegates from prosperous Pennsylvania or the plantations of Virginia and the Carolinas risk their safety and property because merchants in Yankee New England were being squeezed by taxes on their trade? And then, as Colonial opposition to British measures increased and British soldiers were quartered in the trading center of Boston, that regional economic center faced occupation by a foreign power claiming sovereignty over the lives of Colonial subjects.
The 13 English colonies of North America were home to Calvinist preachers, Philadelphia Quakers, Maryland Catholics, and adherents of dozens of other Protestant sects; to wealthy merchant shippers, poor laborers, sailors, independent and tenant farmers; aristocratic plantation owners and their enslaved workers; as well as to rowdy apprentices and indentured servants agitating for the right to get drunk in the streets and celebrate Christmas.
Were all these people “created equal”? Equal to wealthy financiers such as Boston’s John Hancock, who chaired the Continental Congress, and to aristocratic planters such as Thomas Jefferson and the Virginia Lees?
Were they all endowed by their creator with certain fundamental rights?
And how could the rulers of a rigidly class-based society such as Georgian England be expected to sympathize with such radical notions — ideas they attributed to dangerously radical French philosophers, even though some of these propositions (stated in more moderate terms) stemmed their own influential theorist John Locke?
Local and logistical problems held up progress as well. Delaware sent only one delegate, who was frequently ill and unable to attend. When the majority of delegates finally agreed to the preparation of a “declaration” of their intent to cut ties with the British Empire and govern themselves independently, they waited on tenterhooks for the wealthy colony of New York to break ties on crucial issues. New York had sent three delegates, but forbade them from making any decisions without explicit instructions from the state’s Assembly — instructions that almost never came.
And when Jefferson managed to pen what would prove an immortal document, representatives of the slave-dependent states insisted there be no mention of slavery in that document despite its emphasis on “human” rights.
Yet in the end the Continental Congress — despite members’ differing interests, lifestyles, values, religions, and social backgrounds — agreed to take this very radical, and dangerous, step. Before that decision, however, those delegates who opposed independence made an impressive case against so dangerous a course. If you declare yourself in rebellion against the king, they warned, your supporters will likely be defeated by the world’s greatest and richest power. You will take extreme personal risks. Your property will be seized, your families impoverished, and your lives — in all probability — forfeited. If by chance you succeed, or even appear to be succeeding, the poorer ranks of society will take to heart the example of your rebellion and overthrow your privileged status.
If all were “equal,” they argued, why should some members of society be entitled to more than their fair share of the world’s goods? You are encouraging the poor to overthrow the fundamental basis of society, they warned: the class system.
Nevertheless, at least partly inspired by Jefferson’s bold philosophical justifications, the delegates chose independence. We’re going to be free, the colonies decided, signing the Declaration of Independence on July 2, 1776, signing revisions on July 4, and proclaiming it publicly — and, to their British rulers, treasonously — on July 8.
We are asserting, the signers of the Declaration proclaimed, our natural and “inalienable” rights as human beings. And our belief that governments “[derive] their just powers from the consent of the governed.” And, further, that if governments fail to protect these rights, “It is the right of the people” to abolish that government and establish a new one.
Of course, brave words, however beautifully stated, would not protect the rebellious colonies from the counter-strokes of their imperial rulers. The odds were certainly in the empire’s favor. History is marked by countless examples of rebellions by local groups against powerful centralized empires or imperial states. How many succeed in throwing off their rulers?
Ask the Irish — or the Indians — how easy it was to get free of the British Empire.
Ask the inhabitants of ancient Judea how easy it was to get free of the Romans.
And even after the Colonial rebels persisted in their revolt and, aided by Lafayette’s nation, succeeded in triumphing in their revolutionary war, a victory in arms was not by itself enough to establish a lasting nation. Once again delegations from the now ‘former’ colonies met in Philadelphia’s venerable hall to hammer out an original plan for a government that would truly be based on “the consent of the governed.”
How many revolutions succeed? How many regime-change new governments endure? How often do the leaders of successful revolutions fall out, almost at once, into warring camps?
How often, as the expression goes, does the revolution “eat its children”?
The unhappy experience of prolonged instability and bloodshed following the overthrow of France’s monarchy in 1789 — the year the lately “United” States were inaugurating their first President and opserving the opening sessions of their newly elected Congress — proved to be the far more likely pattern for independence movements and revolutions in both the Old and the New World.
Today the signal and lasting success of the ‘American experiment,’ as it used to be called, is perhaps best exemplified by the casual ignorance of most of its citizens (particularly citizens by birth) of the details of their country’s origin.
We believe the ‘myth’ — “America is the greatest country in the world” is the most common expression of our unique place in world history — but most of us don’t want to sweat the details.
Why was George Washington unanimously chosen as our country’s first head of state? Because he was a great general? No; in fact he wasn’t. But he was unanimously beloved and respected because of his absolute personal rectitude.
Where did Washington stand on the emoluments clause? That was a question no one would ever have to ask.
Which should come first — your party or your country? Washington and all the leaders of “founding generation” were clear that the primacy of public interest over personal and partisan interests was essential to the sustenance of what they called ‘republican’ government — that is, a government based on the sovereignty of the people rather than rule by a single person or class.
Yet today the US Senate is ruled by an individual who openly proclaims his first loyalty is to party rather than to his oath to uphold the Constitution. The result is open corruption in the country’s highest offices, and not only in the executive and legislative branches.
Reliable party men are seated on the nation’s highest court. Members of Congress sell their votes to the corporate interests that fund their campaigns.
The sale of military weapons to civilians goes unregulated despite repeated episodes of carnage, in deference to the profits of a powerful interest group that profits from the sale of weapons.
A President seeks to bribe a foreign leader for political advantage at home, and his party defends his conduct as “politics as usual.”
Our states regularly jimmy their election rules to aid one party over another, and make it hard for supporters of the opposing party to vote in order to aid their own candidates. As a result, significant minorities are under-represented through major sections of our country, and on the national level presidential candidates who lose the popular vote are nevertheless awarded the election. “The will of the people,” anyone?
And the great majority of Americans, especially those of us born in this country, take the advantages of free and democratic society for granted. We aren’t forced to learn the details of our form of government and so we don’t bother. We assume individual rights and freedom of expression are as natural as breathing. Our government does not openly tell us what to think or what to do, so we assume our freedom is humankind’s natural state.
But in much of the world, perhaps most of it, it isn’t. In this country we are not — or not yet — compelled by state authorities to pour unanimously into the streets on mandated holidays to cheer the god-like Rulers of the Current Day, but such constraints are common in other systems. If we were born into one of those authoritarian systems in which the ‘regime’ desired us to know its lies and fabrications in detail, we would all have memorized them. We would applaud the ruler whenever asked to. His face would be pictured everywhere. His police would listen to our conversations. Our phone numbers would be known, correlated to all the other personal details of our lives, which also would be centrally collected, and our opinions closely monitored.
But ours is a free society. Life developed differently here because of the decisions made by those representatives of the 13 English colonies, the central and foundational one being the decision to make our system of government dependent on the consent of the governed.
As a result nobody drinks to the health of the king. Or salutes the dictator in lock-step with every other expendable peon.
We have no palaces. We do have an oversized work-at-home residence for the nation’s chief executive and family, but this white elephant is nobody’s permanent address. New families move in, previous occupants move out with — so far — predictable regularity.
The freedom to possess those “inalienable rights” promised to us by the document signed in Independence Hall comes with a cost. While, happily, the signers of the Declaration did not pay for their boldness with their lives — in part because the Declaration’s signers managed (in Ben Franklin’s famous phrase) to “hang together” — many Americans did lose their lives in the armed struggle that followed.
And was the American independence movement wholly without serious and fundamental flaws?
Of course not. Our Revolutionary generation made the serious (though perhaps inevitable) mistake of excluding all consideration of the rights of the first nations living here before their European ancestors arrived. Our independence champions would have been on firmer moral ground if they had invited delegates from the Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy, the powerful Mohawk tribe, and other unallied tribes, and offered them a seat at the table.
And after we had won independence from the British Empire, the 13 now liberated “states” should have reached out to the native signatories of our many treaties before the Constitutional Convention met in 1787. The sad truth is those first nations to whom promises were broken are still waiting for justice. As demonstrated by our government’s recent willingness to shove an unnecessary pipeline thought native people’s ancestral lands at Standing Rock, we still have not established a just and viable relationship between the nation state we founded in 1789 and the societies that were already here on this continent before Europeans arrived as refugees, adventurers, and seekers of a better life.
Equally indefensible — on any ground other than shame-faced necessity — is the unwillingness of our founders and Constitutional framers to take up the bedeviling question of slavery. As argued above, if Jefferson and his northern allies had refused to drop all mention of the evil institution in the Declaration — or better, had they specifically declared this “the peculiar institution” could not abide in a free society — there might have been no Revolution, and no independent American nation, at least not back in the 18th century. Our founders might have chosen instead to shove their patriotic yearning for independence aside, swallowed the king’s ongoing rule and parliament’s right to tax us, and edged our way to independence over time in the manner of — say — Canada.
Canada is a wonderful country, superior to our own in certain respects. But its origin story lacks the world-significant mythic status of the 1776 Declaration — and the mythic determination to back that claim of the right to independent, popular government purchased by blood and other sacrifices. Where else would the greater world find an example of the shining light of liberty made triumphant?
History, of course, has seen many revolutions, both before and after our own. Ours remains the gold standard, the still-potent energizing myth, in large measure because of the principles on which it was based. It was the Declaration — not a problem with a tea tax, or the personal ambition of its land-owning or wealthy merchant class to rule as kings and oligarchs — that spoke to the world and all humanity.
Big changes don’t come without major visions. (Or if they do, they’re not the changes we want.)
What Americans need to do in 2020 is to reclaim our proud beginnings.
We don’t need to obsess over the horse race of the primaries, question the personal lives of all the candidates, watch every news analysis; or engage in culture wars with those perceived to be our political adversaries.
Instead, we need to go to Philadelphia and take the tour of “Independence Hall,” where a learned and personable guide will give you a solid cram course version of what took place there in the latter 18th century and why it mattered. (You can get started with a virtual National Park Service tour here: https://www.theconstitutional.com/national-park-adventure-video-independence-hall)
And beyond the words of Jefferson, the other members of the founding generation and Constitutional framers, we need leaders who take seriously their oath to uphold those basic egalitarian and democratic principles.
We need men and women of sincere personal rectitude. We need models of just conduct for the rest of us.
Above all, we cannot afford another crooked election.
Nor can we afford another civil war — our weapons have grown enormously powerful, while our intellect and moral vision have, if anything, narrowed. Today’s weapons have nothing in common with the flintlock muskets the founders had in mind when they approved the Second Amendment. It may be argued that in the minds of some 20th and 21st century revolutionaries political power comes from the barrel of a gun (as Mao put it), but to our country’s founders true power to govern derives the fundamental rights of the people and the virtue of their elected leaders. Which path would you choose?
