> Rarely during the late 1770s and 1780s was the Declaration publicly read or celebrated. Instead, most Americans celebrated their state constitutions and the promise of liberty contained within them. Or they celebrated their local declarations from 1776. Only during the 1790s was the Declaration revived...
It seems relevant here that the late 1770s and 1780s was also the same period when the United States was governed under the Articles of Confederation, rather than the Constitution we have today (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederation_Period).
The Articles of Confederation established a much weaker central government than the later Constitution would. So it would make sense, in a regime where the several states were still regarded as near-sovereign entities, that people would look to the founding documents of their state as the guarantors of their liberty. And it also makes sense that, when the weak central government proved unable to meet the challenges of the time and people started thinking about replacing it with a stronger one, new attention would be drawn to documents like the Declaration that spoke from a national perspective.
From the article "Rarely during the late 1770s and 1780s was the Declaration publicly read or celebrated. Instead, most Americans celebrated their state constitutions and the promise of liberty contained within them. Or they celebrated their local declarations from 1776."
Though it doesn't say when those state constitutions were enacted, it sounds like the states were already separate things. That would explain the lack of interest in the declaration of independence at the time.
"But Wilson thought its significance lay elsewhere: in confirming that the United States was born a nation rather than a series of independent states."
If there were state constitutions prior to that, I'd say who cares what Wilson thought - facts are facts. Besides, how can you have someone sign from every state if those states are not already meaningful entities? I think a better stance is to say the nation was formed over a period of time, based on a set of principles and ideas (most importantly "we are separate from the old world"). Documents only served to formalize what was happening and agree on how to settle some differences.
Indeed, Massachusetts has the oldest constitution still in force in North America (older than the US federal constitution). People mostly felt loyalty to their own state and that was one reason for opposition to the v2 national constitution, even when it was clear the v1 articles were inadequate.
Even so, they are united States (as opposed to, say, Australia where the so-called "states" are for all intents and purposes merely administrative subdivisions of the continent, and could be remade by passing a law in the federal parliament)
Source: Massachusetts high school education in a school 150 years older than the MA constitution.
>Even so, they are united States (as opposed to, say, Australia where the so-called "states" are for all intents and purposes merely administrative subdivisions of the continent, and could be remade by passing a law in the federal parliament)
I don't think this is accurate. Prior to federation there were no Australian states, there were 6 independent colonies.
The status of the states are part of the Australian Constitution to make changes (such as creating a new state) would require amending the constitution and thus a referendum.
The Australian States have quite a bit of power its one of the "challenges" we have here because of the way our constitution is written in order for a referendum to pass it requires a double majority you need an overall majority as well as a majority in a majority of states (i.e 4 out of 6 states must also have majority support) this is one of the reasons constitutional amendments are so difficult and rarely pass here.
Similar thing with our senate (Upper house) each state has equal representation in the senate so both Tasmania and New South Wales have 12 Senators despite much smaller population in Tas. This is in contrast to House of Representatives (our lower house) is not equal (there are 5 seats in Tasmania vs 47 in NSW) this has a lot of implications in our political process.
As far as people not feeling loyalty to their state that's mostly true but there is still a lot of friendly (or not so friendly rivalry) especially in sporting events.
I actually learned this when visiting Parliament House last year (though it was part of an off-the-tour side discussion +). Having lived in both countries I think the independence of the US states is radically and fundamentally stronger than that of the Australian states, especially since (and because) income tax was federalised 75 years ago.
The only place I know that even comes close to the US independence of the states is Germany.
+ I was visiting a friend who works there; later went out to dinner with him and a colleague who is a constitutional lawyer and who was quite familiar with the American system as well.
I know nothing about US system so I can't really compare the two. The only reason I know anything about our own constitution is I had to do a school project on Sir Henry Parkes way back in high school.
Personally I kind of have opposite view about the states I do think there needs to be a trade off between federal and state power our current system is flawed but probably strikes a good balance. I'm sympathetic to fact that someone living in say Regional QLD has different needs to Melbourne or Sydney and I don't want a system where power is consolidated in the big population centers and no one else's vote really matters but at the same time I'd like voting power to be more proportional as it stands someones vote in Tasmania holds a lot more weight federally then voters from many of the other states due to equal (rather than proportional representation) of the states.
> The only place I know that even comes close to the US independence of the states is Germany.
Canada has pretty strong provinces as well. The Swiss cantons are also more powerful than the central government. I imagine Bosnia and Belgium are also similar, but that's more "the country is made up of two statelets who hate each other's guts" than a true federalist perspective.
> I actually learned this when visiting Parliament House last year (though it was part of an off-the-tour side discussion). Having lived in both countries I think the independence of the US states is radically and fundamentally stronger than that of the Australian states, especially since (and because) income tax was federalised 75 years ago.
It's a mixture of factors, but vertical fiscal imbalance enabled by the First Uniform Tax Case is certainly part of it. As I'm sure you're aware Australians generally have fewer objections to centralised government.
Culturally Australia has historically been significantly more homogeneous across the different states than the US, even our accents are more similar between different states.
> The only place I know that even comes close to the US independence of the states is Germany.
Even so, they are united States (as opposed to, say, Australia where the so-called "states" are for all intents and purposes merely administrative subdivisions of the continent, and could be remade by passing a law in the federal parliament)
This isn't really true. The fundamental setup of the Constitution of Australia is that the separate States retain their existing power to make laws and enforce laws on essentially any matter (with some very specific carve-outs, like the states may not coin money, raise armed forces or try to impose a tax on the Federal government). The Federal Parliament is granted the power to make laws only with respect to an enumerated set of heads of power.
This is, for example, why the Federal Government was able to overrule voluntary euthanasia legislation in both the Territories, but cannot in the case of the State of Victoria.
The vertical fiscal imbalance mentioned elsewhere certainly is an issue, where the State Governments are responsible for most service delivery but the practical revenue-raising ability of the Federal Government is significantly greater. This results in the Federal Government using 'tied grants' to influence State policy, but it is my understanding that a similar thing happens in the US as well (for example in the case of raising the drinking age to 21).
In terms of remaking the States, the Constitution specifically disallows altering the limits of a State without the consent of that State's Parliament and passing a referendum of that State's voters.
Mostly only the "united" part, and amendment 10 still says that stuff not in the constitution (e.g. amendment 13 or 16) ain't in the federal purview. Hence weird contortions like stretching the interstate commerce clause, tying drinking age to highways funding, and the like.
And just look at the presidents who got the job without winning the vote.
I think things would have been better if things had ended up less federal as a result of 1865, but things ended up the way they are now.
> Besides, how can you have someone sign from every state if those states are not already meaningful entities?
The states were meaningful entities as distinct colonies before they declared independence, regardless of the manner in which that independence was declared.
The states were definitely sovereign entities before the nation was created. (Some would say the nation was foisted upon the states through a long period of subterfuge.) Maryland received its charter from the English king in 1632, almost 150 years before the revolution.
In the sense of being somewhat federalised, maybe, but
> had little authority, and could not accomplish anything independent of the states. It had no chief executive, and no court system. Congress lacked the power to levy taxes, regulate foreign or interstate commerce, or effectively negotiate with foreign powers.
Interestingly the EU also doesn't levy taxes. Unlike the US under the Articles of Confederation though, EU member states actually value central government, and so they do actually pay to run it (all EU governments pay in, but EU schemes have the effect that the poorer states get back more than they paid in various forms). That Congress wasn't able to get anything done because in practice the States didn't allow it to get anything done. A lot of the same thinking that's today popular on the US West Coast brought down that government.
"Oh, I'd definitely _voluntarily_ pay for a central government, I just don't want mandatory taxes". "Oh did I say I'd definitely pay? I'm short right now, hit me up next month." "Actually I decided I don't want to contribute to anything I'm not totally in favour of, I need veto over all decisions or else I won't be paying". "Huh, funny, why did the government fail?"
And that's why the modern US government has tax raising powers. Just as the UK can rightly say it tried not having kings, hated it, so got a new king but now very clearly at the whim of the people; the US can say it has tried not having mandatory taxation and that didn't work so yes it now has taxes (with or without representation) and that won't be changing.
I grew up in Florida (Rep. Joe Scarborough's district, back when he was a rabid conservative and a leader in the Republican revolution) and Alabama, worked as an intern at a neoconservative K Street think tank in the late 1990s/early 2000s, and went to law school in Virginia in the late 2000s. I've lived and worked on and off in the Bay Area for nearly 15 of the last 20 years, and have plenty of family in Southern California (including a sister and cousin who are active politically, one progressive the other more a Californian conservative), so understand the vibe down there.
The sentiments of the techno-utopians on the west coast and the settlers before them shouldn't be equivocated to the anti-civic sentiments of Southern conservatism and the national conservative movement that emerged principally from the Bible belt and Sunbelt states in the 1990s.
Keep making that mistake and we'll have decades more of civic and political nihilism. Even the most starry-eyed Silicon Valley billionaires dreaming about basic incomes and robo-basilisks still seek to engage with government and the state. Gingrich, perhaps more than any other politician (he did lead the Republican Revolution, after all), is a walking incarnation of the modern Republican ideology, and he's an avowed nihilist when it comes to government.
Similar all-or-nothing, bitter attitudes are creeping into the political left and it will likewise lead to political decay. It's not healthy. People should feel to disagree with and criticize Benihoff, Mayer, Musk, Zuckerberg, etc; but step back and compare them to people like Carla Fioroni. Who's politics should you really be afraid of?
The U.S. was still at war until 1783. The declaration wouldn't have meant anything if the U.S. had lost. Jefferson was the original author, although it did undergo edits at the behest of Congress.
It's also pretty well established that the document was complete by July 2nd (so the mention about Jefferson going shopping on the 4th is sort of weird) and most of the Congress had signed it then, but not all...so it went into effect July 4th.
The declaration was read in town squares all over the country. It wasn't forgotten about while people were dodging musket fire by red coats. It's sort of a ridiculous assertion.
It's just: war is messy. And the business of laying the foundations for a country afterwards is fraught with risk and uncertainty.
There's a plaque on the wall of a building on the main street of a town I used to live in, which says something like "This marks the site of the tavern where the townspeople assembled in July 1776 to hear the Declaration of Independence read aloud. The news was greeted by much cheering and toasting."
> It's also pretty well established that the document was complete by July 2nd (so the mention about Jefferson going shopping on the 4th is sort of weird) and most of the Congress had signed it then, but not all...so it went into effect July 4th.
The story I recall hearing from the park ranger in Philly is 1) it was sent to the printers on the 2nd, to be available on the 4th, and 2) it gave certain signers two days head start out of town on a fast horse.
They were meeting in a room across the hall from the British court where they would have been tried for treason. It was sobering to me to think that ten steps away from their writing desks where they signed their names to a treasonous document, was the court that could convict them and sentence them to death. Likely by being drawn and quartered. There is a reason our constitution has a prohibition against "cruel and unusual" punishment. There are times when creativity is not to be celebrated.
Jefferson was the assigned leader of the committee that wrote the declaration. It's really more accurate to say he was the editor.
It's not universal opinion, but it's very likely that most of the declaration, especially the most-quoted parts ("inalienable rights", "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness", etc.) were written by Thomas Paine. However as a very recent immigrant from England, crediting Paine would have been politically unthinkable.
"[R]econstruction of Thomas Jefferson's 'original Rough draught' of the Declaration of Independence before it was revised by the other members of the Committee of Five and by Congress":
It already contains all of those. If anything, Jefferson was cribbing from George Mason. But all of these men were well read (e.g. in the works of John Locke), and they presumably were well read in each others' publications considering their political and social associations.
There was a book about it in 1947 that was never really refuted. But basically, the famous writing style of the declaration doesn't match any of Thomas Jefferson's pre-1776 writings at all. Nor anyone else on the committee of 5. And the "original draft" of Jefferson's contains copy errors indicating itself was copied from another source. There's also the fact that the content--very anti-slavery, and very anti-monarchy--doesn't much resemble Thomas Jeferson's contemporary philosophy either.
There is one thing it does resemble, very closely: Common Sense, written by Thomas Paine and released in the same year. Here you can read them side-by-side:
One of the other reasons we know the "original rough draft" of Jefferson's that you mention was a copy of another document is that John Adams also made a copy of the original draft, and his is different. Notably his draft includes a lot of weird (by American standards of the day) punctuation, spelling, and word choice which is typical of Paine's writing but was edited out of Jefferson's "rough draft."
In any case I did point out that this is not a universal belief. But I will be bold enough to say that we can divide historians into two groups: the vast majority who were taught that Jefferson wrote it and believe it, and the few who have actually looked at the evidence and concluded that someone else did, quite probably Thomas Paine. The evidence is that compelling.
(Thomas Jefferson never in his life claimed that he write the declaration. He in fact played down his involvement numerous times. It was, however, necessary in the sphere of global politics that the declaration be perceived to have been written by the continental congress, which Jefferson was a member of, and not a dirt poor recent immigrant who was the editor of a failing newspaper that and happened to be friends with Jefferson, Adams and Franklin.)
Thank you. I've read Paine's Rights of Man and understood him to be at least as capable a writer and thinker as Jefferson and others, but didn't know (or at least didn't remember) much about the details of his associations.
Perhaps because I read Rights of Man I've always thought of Paine as a (two-way) bridge between American and Continental revolutionary thought and activism, neglecting to appreciate his other direct roles in historical affairs--as opposed to the more indirect influence of Common Sense.
Paine was also directly involved in the French Revolution, and was elected to serve in the french assembly (or whatever the revolutionaries called their congress), which he did even though he didn't speak a word of french.
> There's also the fact that the content--very anti-slavery, and very anti-monarchy--doesn't much resemble Thomas Jeferson's contemporary philosophy either.
Jefferson was one of the most outspoken voices in the US in favor of France during the French Revolution, even when it slipped into the extreme Reign of Terror phase, and Jefferson was also the spearhead of the movement to abolish the international slave trade.
My recollection is that Jefferson's draft of the Declaration of Independence wasn't so much anti-slavery, as it was anti-slave-trade specifically. The fact that Jefferson was consistently opposed to the slave trade, much more so than the institution of slavery itself, means that the attitude towards slavery in the early drafts isn't at odds with his personal philosophy.
Even if Jefferson were friends with Paine, and consulted with him, it's hard to imagine that he, Franklin and Adams just let Paine write away with a blank slate. Jefferson was assigned the task by the Congress. He owned it. All of those men were prolific writers and thinkers in their own right.
As a side note, his home town, Charlottesville, canceled the holiday celebrating Thomas Jefferson's birthday[0][1]. It seems to me that our society is too focused on condemning historical persons for their flaws than celebrating them for their noteworthy deeds.
Well, yes. It was unmitigated praise for men like Jefferson for a lot of years, which sent the message that those flaws you mentioned were nonexistent or unimportant. Now our society is attempting to demonstrate to people of color that those flaws as you say, which constitute extremely egregious crimes against humanity no matter how commonplace they were amongst the aristocracy of the time, were in fact real and were in fact important. The country remains rather divided on the subject but it sounds like these city officials are trying to say that black lives do, in fact, matter.
The country fought a bloody war 160 years ago to settle that dispute and it was pretty resoundly settled.
Not only that but there isn't a country on the planet that doesn't have equally horrific past. But that's horrific to us only because Jefferson and the colonists won. And their philosophy won. There's nothing inevitable about the destruction of monarchy. We might have been ruled by Kings and lords for another 2000 years. Who the hell knows?
The people aggravating other people for celebrating American heritage have sick aims. No amount of time or human sacrifice will be enough until all pride in U.S. is snuffed out. And then, what are we left with?
Yes and yet Americans helped save the Jews from extinction and yet they defeated Nazism and imperialism and held off communism and prevented South Korea from being dominated and won two world wars that could have ended in all of the Western hemisphere being conquered.
Of course, there's nothing black and white about history, it's all shades of grey. That goes without saying.
If it's "all shades of grey", I feel like that leaves a lot of room for the feelings and discussion for how and what light they want to view their historical figures. I think "Never meet your heroes" is a popular saying for reasons like that.
I'm not American, albeit, so I might be missing something on a deeper level though. My opinion here probably deserves some grain of salt.
Yeah I know Stalin and the Russians had a lot to do with it too. But the U.S. fought on two fronts. As if the imperial Japanese and their slaughter of Chinese people was any better than the Nazis.
And suppose the U.S. stayed out of that war, what would have Stalin done with Europe, supposing they won outright?
Yes, the Democrat party resisted the outcome of the civil war for decades. Republicans enacted the anti-slavery and equality amendments. Republicans integrated the federal civil service and military. Democrats created the KKK, Jim Crow, and resegregated the federal government first chance they got (Woodrow Wilson).
There has been a heck of a fight, but thankfully, both parties have moved past that, and one of the reasons is the aspirational words in the Declaration, which has inspired generation after generation to live up to what it says, and make a more perfect union.
> Yes, the Democrat party resisted the outcome of the civil war for decades
Large parts of the Democratic Party did so for about a full century, until the parties flipped positions on race with Johnson’s support of the Civil Rights Act of 1965 and the subsequent Republican Southern Strategy to exploit the disaffection of (mostly Southern, hence the name) racists that resulted from Johnson's move. The same group still resists the results of the Civil War, but now they are key part of the Republican base rather than the Democratic base, which is why the South is now a Republican stronghold rather than a Democratic one, why the Democrats that continued in Congress from that time over the next several decades were often either repudiating past positions or switching to the Republican Party, why the KKK has voiced it's support for Trump, etc.
> There has been a heck of a fight, but thankfully, both parties have moved past that
No, they realigned and switched sides (or the factions active in the fight switched parties, to look at it a different way.) They didn't move past it at all: the same fight is still happening.
The KKK is a footnote in history at this time. The last KKK member of congress was a Democrat. Obama said the eulogy at his funeral, and Hilary Clinton said he was "a friend and mentor".
The Civil Rights Act had bipartisan support, but it had been filibustered for years by Democrats. In fact, the modern Senate is based on cloture, which was finally used to break the decades long delay.
Only six Senate Republicans voted against the bill in 1964, while 21 Senate Democrats opposed it. It passed by an overall vote of 73-27. In the House, 96 Democrats and 34 Republicans voted against the Civil Rights Act, passing with an overall 290-130 vote
> The Civil Rights Act had bipartisan support, but it had been filibustered for years by Democrats
Yes, and it was support by the Democratic President, the resulting alienation of Southern racists from the Democratic Party, and the exploitation of that alienation by the Republican Party that were key factors in the political realignment that moved the US from the post-New Deal Fifth Party System to the modern Sixth Party System.
This is a myth and lie. The civil rights act was passed in the 60s. Bill Clinton (D) was from Arkansas in the 90s.
Johnson was from Texas. Reagan was from California. This made up myth about the parties switching because of the CRA is completely bogus. Senator Byrd, of West Virginia, former klansman, died a Democrat.
Nope, Johnson's not support for the CRA and the Republican Southern Strategy in response are actual things that actually happened.
> Bill Clinton (D) was from Arkansas in the 90s.
And your point is...what?
> Senator Byrd, of West Virginia, former klansman, died a Democrat.
Senator Byrd left the Klan a year after joining in 1946, and spent a lot of time repudiating both his long-past Klan membership and his actions up to and during the civil rights fight in the post-CRA Democratic Party specifically because the center of mass in that Party had shifted radically after the CRA.
No, check your history. The southern states didn't become distinctly "red", or republican, until the 90's or 00s in most cases. Can you name a single candidate that had any kind of national appeal that ran on repealing the civil rights act? No.
You might have an argument with regards to abortion. But the civil rights act? Nope.
My point with regards to Bill Clinton should be obvious, he was a Democrat from Arkansas (the deep South). He was governor in the 80s and early 90s. Al Gore was a Senator from Tennessee. Stop with this myth about CRA causing the South to go Republican.
>The southern states didn't become distinctly "red", or republican, until the 90's or 00s in most cases.
Yes, the realignment driven by Johnson's CRA position and the Republican Southern Strategy took about 3 decades to complete, with the last notable bit occurring just after the Republican takeover of the House in 1994. Partisan realignments do tend to take time.
> Can you name a single candidate that had any kind of national appeal that ran on repealing the civil rights act?
The proponents of a new Jim Crow didn't mostly run on repealing the 1964 CRA (or the 1957 or 1960 acts) in the same way that the proponents of the original Jim Crow didn't mostly run on repealing the Civil War Amendments or the CRAs of 1866, 1871, and 1875, but on subverting their intent and effect by other means.
> Stop with this myth about CRA causing the South to go Republican.
The 1960s-1990s realignment driven by the Johnson's shift on Civil Rights and the Republican response is not a myth. It's a real thing which really happened. It's why the people flying the Confederate battle flag today are almost excludively Republicans (if they are in one of the major parties), not Democrats, despite having the same ideology as the people that rallied under the same banner almost exclusively (insofar as they were in a major party) in the Democratic Party in the 1920s through the 1960s.
Just because (like other political realignments) it didn't happen overnight doesn't make it a myth.
Presidential elections lead the transition in the parties, and you can see this as early as 1948, and clearly by 1964, directly traceable to the Civil Rights Act. Barry Goldwater fought against the CRA, and he won Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina that year.
In the 1968 election you can see the transitional effects strongly, as George Wallace won 4 of those 5 states, and the Nixon Southern Strategy succeeds by 1972 with all the southern states voting Republican. And that was the end of the Southern Democrats. 1976 is an outliar, and it's 1992 before there's a crack in the armor and Clinton wins a few southern states. And the strategy as told by Lee Atwater is hardly a myth.
https://www.thenation.com/article/exclusive-lee-atwaters-inf...
That there are additional reasons why southerners flipped to the Republican party, including opposition to increasingly social liberalism of Democrats, does not mean the Southern strategy is a myth. An example of myth is the "lost cause" of the confederacy, revisionist history.
Barry Goldwater had significant reservations about the CRA's constitutionality, that's the only reason he voted against it. And he freely let people use that vote against him, without ever trying in the slightest to make it sound like a good thing to some fraction of voters. He was sort of like the Rand Paul of his day.
"This made up myth about the parties switching because of the CRA is completely bogus."
The USA's two major parties had previously flipped alignment every 70 years. We're overdue.
Contemporaries conflate liberal / conservative, left / right, Democrat / Republican (nee Whig). A less wrong mental model is that parties are coalitions.
LBJ understood this and correctly predicted that CRA would result in the white supremacists switching from Democrat to Republican.
The big political science mystery now is why each party's coalition has become more homogeneous. Where a voter's position on one issue (abortion) is a very strong predictor for many other issues (climate crisis). Stated another way, the need for an explanation for why so many policy issues have become partisan issues.
This comment is "historically accurate" but misleading. Even though the comment they are replying to tried to clarify the situation this commenter continues to push for their agenda without heeding the facts stated.
Political Parties are not set in stone, their goals and morals can change just as easily as your own personal affiliation can change.
I'm addressing the original point, which was claiming that America (implication - in whole, or uniformly) supported Jim Crow. It did not. One party supported that, but the other did not.
I don't belong to any political party, mostly because of the point you are making, but I don't think it is fair to tar all Americans with what only some of us did. Many fought for years against it and credit is due to those who did, and shame is due to those who resisted the change.
Both main parties have moved past this, more or less, and it's great to see slavery, Jim Crow and KKK in the rear view mirror.
I do not agree that the Republican Party is somehow a racist party or that it has somehow "swapped" with the Democrat party on this.
The person who was most recently a KKK member who served in Congress during or after the time of their KKK membership was a Republican at the time he served in Congress. The same is true of the most recent member of the American Nazi Party to serve in Congress. And these are the same individual, David Duke.
The most recent person to serve on Congress who had ever been a KKK member was a Democrat (Robert Byrd), but he left the Klan about 3 years before Duke was born, 5 years before Byrd first ran for Congress, 20 years before Duke joined the Klan, and 30 years before Duke was elected to Congress as a Republican.
A convenient myth. The reality is that once the Southern vote became contestable as the result of Democrat party dominance breaking down, the Republican party managed to mostly grab it without appealing to racism. It's of course fair to criticize Richard "I'm not a crook!" Nixon for his Southern Strategy, but it's not something that describes the Republican party as a whole.
Of course the post-Trump Republican party is indeed very different, so perhaps the parties will have ended up switching after all; and on their overall, broad attitude to 'modernity' in a social sense, encompassing far more than just "race"! Who knows, it all depends on how much sticking power these things have.
> Not only that but there isn't a country on the planet that doesn't have equally horrific past.
And in many of these countries, the role of prominent figures in that history is, for that reason, controversial.
That's why even in the USSR (Which nobody could ever honestly consider to have been blessed with an overabundance of introspection), there's been both a parade with a tank column rolling down the Red Square every 9th of May and official defacement of monuments commemorating one of the 'chief' architects of that victory.
> But that's horrific to us only because Jefferson and the colonists won.
No, it's not.
It's not like slavery isn't viewed as a horrific phase of history in the parts of world that were ruled by Britain and are still under either the British monarchy or a now-separate monarchy that happens to share both the same monarch and the same rules of succession, having never revolted against the Crown and either still being British or having peacefully separated while retaining ties to the monarch.
Nothing says thoughtful engagement like burying controversial subject matter.
It won't be long before right-wingers succeed in building a sustained narrative around MLK's infidelity and communist flirtations that permits them to taint public sentiment. That's par for the course for the vast majority of American Black activists. All the accusations of wrongful equivocation, etc, won't matter, because it's always more convenient to vilify and bury.
I guess it's technically some kind of social progress that traditional American icons are now being vilified and buried.
There's the argument that white guilt is black empowerment. But it seems more like a lateral move and definitely not substantive empowerment of the disenfranchised. What the evolution of victim mentality over the past 20+ years has shown us is that whites and even the rich are able to play the role of victim at least as well as minorities. I suspect there were many more Americans reciting "blue lives matter or "all lives matter" than "black lives matter".
" Add to these, flowing hair, a more elegant symmetry of form, their own judgment in favour of the whites, declared by their preference of them, as uniformly as is the preference of the Oran-utan [orangutan] for the black women over those of his own species. The circumstance of superior beauty, is thought worthy attention in the propagation of our horses, dogs, and other domestic animals; why not in that of man?"
-- Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia[1]
He was a disgusting person who should be relegated to the annals of history, not celebrated with a birthday party like a blood relative.
Please keep fiery denunciation off HN, regardless of how good you are or how bad someone else was. It helps nothing, and adds to the toxic fumes already poisoning this place.
I was responding to someone who wrote "It seems to me that our society is too focused on condemning historical persons for their flaws than celebrating them for their noteworthy deeds." That comment seems to imply that we should forgive (or forget) the sexual assault of a slave because she was assaulted by someone who deserves to be celebrated "for their noteworthy deeds". Since you flagged my comment, will you also flag that other comment? Surely that other comment is more offensive than anything that I wrote?
> That comment seems to imply that we should forgive (or forget) the sexual assault of a slave because she was assaulted by someone who deserves to be celebrated ...
I don't think it implies any such thing. It's a reminder that our standards of morality can change a lot over time, so we shouldn't be surprised when some historical figure who is usually praised for their positive accomplishments turns out to have very severe moral flaws from our own POV. It's not exceptional, it's what we would expect to see in the first place.
Morality does not change over time. You are confusing power with morality. Please read Elaine Pagels and her history of the emergence of the Christians during late Roman times, she makes clear that one of the reasons why slaves flocked to Christianity is because the Christian church took a defiant stand against slave owners raping their slaves:
Where did such ideas come from? During the Roman period it was taken for granted that slave owners would sexually assault their slaves. And yet the slaves knew such behavior was immoral, and the slaves were ready to give their loyalty to the first movement that avowedly took a stand against the slave owners and their sexual practices.
We can and should denounce ancient figures against the immutable and unchanging facts of morality.
About this:
"we shouldn't be surprised when some historical figure who is usually praised for their positive accomplishments turns out to have very severe moral flaws"
I don't think anyone is surprised. Certainly, I am not surprised. I'm simply pointing out that Thomas Jefferson committed a grievous crime and he must be denounced for such a crime. As I said before, for the sheer horror of his immorality, I hope he is burning in the hottest rings of hell.
Continuing flamewar after we asked you to stop is really not ok. If you want to denounce someone for the sheer horror of the immutable and unchanging facts of their grievous criminal immorality, please find some other place for it. Hacker News is for intellectual curiosity, which is totally different.
When the path from another comment to fiery rage is as weak as "seems to imply", that's a good occasion to check one's angrier impulses. The site guidelines include one for just this case: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
Even if you're right about another comment being bad, it doesn't entitle you to break the guidelines yourself. Nor is there any promise of consistency in moderation. There's much too much content here for us to even see it all, let alone read closely and weigh on the scales. If you run across something that should have been moderated but wasn't, the likeliest explanation is just that we didn't see it.
Your comment was flagged by users. They were right. High-indignation, low-information comments are what we don't want here. Would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the spirit of this site?
Joseph J. Ellis, in his book "Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation", makes the case that it wasn't till the 1810s and 1820s that Americans began to argue about the origins of the country, and increasingly settle upon July 4th, 1776, as the starting point of the country.
It's an unusual decision, because most countries base their holidays around when the first battles occur. The French celebrate Bastille Day, which is July 14th. But in the USA there are no celebrations on April 19th, which is a bit surprising. The heroism shown at the battles of Lexington and Concord are forgotten, whereas a bunch of men signing a document is raised to the level of something epic. And it is said that the USA began in 1776, instead of 1775. If the French followed such reasoning, they would say that the French Revolution began on September 20th, 1792, because of the Battle of Valmy.
To suggest that the USA begins on July 4th of 1776 represents a victory for Thomas Jefferson, and for the factions associated with him. The key thing is that Jefferson's factions were very popular during the 1810s and 1820s, when Americans were making up their minds about how they should understand the origin of the country.
> The heroism shown at the battles of Lexington and Concord are forgotten, whereas a bunch of men signing a document is raised to the level of something epic.
The signers were heroes, too, because signing the DoI was a hanging offense. If the Revolution had failed, they would have all hung and they knew it. They were all prominent men, and their families would have been likely ruined as well.
> But in the USA there are no celebrations on April 19th, which is a bit surprising. The heroism shown at the battles of Lexington and Concord are forgotten...
While not national holidays, there is certainly remembrance and celebration.
The war did not end until 1783. The document had an immediate and huge impact in that defined just how real the breach was with the mother country. When news reached New York City, there was actually a riot. Many of the signers paid a steep price, and certainly many who rallied to the cause did as well.
It seems relevant here that the late 1770s and 1780s was also the same period when the United States was governed under the Articles of Confederation, rather than the Constitution we have today (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederation_Period).
The Articles of Confederation established a much weaker central government than the later Constitution would. So it would make sense, in a regime where the several states were still regarded as near-sovereign entities, that people would look to the founding documents of their state as the guarantors of their liberty. And it also makes sense that, when the weak central government proved unable to meet the challenges of the time and people started thinking about replacing it with a stronger one, new attention would be drawn to documents like the Declaration that spoke from a national perspective.