When America celebrated its bicentennial, in 1976, Rodney Smolla was in law school at Duke University.
The country had emerged from the tumult of the conflict in Vietnam, the Civil Rights movement and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. President Richard M. Nixon, facing impeachment, had resigned a couple of years before.
The 200th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, which Smolla witnessed at the age of 23, was a moment of unity, however brief.
“I remember all the tall ships” that sailed around to America’s East Coast harbors. There was a sense of ceremony that transcended everyday life and the political concerns of the moment and focused on the nation’s fundamental principles. “I was very stirred by it,” Smolla said.
Smolla is participating in the July 4 festivities in Strafford, where he’ll give brief remarks and read from the Declaration of Independence. If the sense of unity he remembers from 50 years ago doesn’t emerge, he won’t be surprised.
“I think it’s harder,” Smolla said. “We have such a polarized politics now.”
Legitimate differences over how the nation should address key issues now regularly devolve into demonizing people on the other side.
As residents of Strafford, the Upper Valley and the country look back at the nation’s founding, it might help to recognize it not only as a moment of clarity, but as a big bang: The spark of the divine met the volatile human desire for freedom. The result was cataclysmic, a destruction of an old order based on oppression. That violence is with us yet.
The Declaration of Independence set the terms of the national and global debate by asserting that all people have rights and that all are equal, Russell Muirhead, the Robert Clements Professor of Democracy and Politics at Dartmouth College. It’s perhaps the most radical political event of all time.
“The Declaration that we’re celebrating is a very dangerous thing,” Muirhead said. The signers’ immediate intent was to set the colonies free from British rule, but the language went much further. “It remade the world,” he said.
The country spent the next 15 years getting its footing, fighting the Revolutionary War as individual states drafted their constitutions. The U.S. Constitution, which went into effect in March 1789, was the conservative punctuation at the end of the revolutionary sentence. The Constitution provided some framework for the ongoing debate over the Declaration’s rights and equality.
“Those disagreements have at times been so violent” that they’ve threatened to tear the country apart, Muirhead said.
The Civil War, in the 1860s, and the Civil Rights movement, in the 1960s, are the most notable periods of upheaval, but not the only ones.
And that drive for inalienable rights and equality have spread around the globe, and it is not over.
On Wednesday, U.S. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-NH, joined with colleagues on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to condemn a new “ethnic unity law” enacted by the Chinese government. The law gives China’s totalitarian regime the power to crack down on religious expression, language use, political views, anything that runs counter to the ruling Communist Party.
“All people deserve to have a say in their own future, preserve their culture and freely express their religious beliefs,” the legislators concluded.
In reading over the Declaration and preparing his remarks for Strafford’s celebration, Smolla said that rights and equality left the strongest impression.
“What I’m struck by is not so much the idea of democracy … but the idea of rights.” The declaration’s great promise is that “everybody is endowed with certain unalienable rights.” And those rights are meant to be equal for everyone.
That it hasn’t always, or even most of the time, worked that way is not an indictment of the document, but of how Americans have worked with it. Birthplace, skin color, gender, sexual orientation, economic status, education and other circumstances all have played roles in whose rights are recognized. The declaration itself, though, says “all.”
“It’s been a gradual exploration of what we mean by equality,” Smolla said.
As an expert in Constitutional law, Smolla spent Tuesday morning examining the U.S. Supreme Court decisions handed down that day. It was another example, not that any was needed, of the nation’s divisions.
“I think the way I’d put it is there’s certainly contention over many of the basic Constitutional principles that define our society,” he said.
The people who wrote and signed the Declaration were idealists, Smolla said, but they weren’t perfect, and they built “a system that takes into account human imperfection.”
The primary author of the Declaration, Thomas Jefferson, was invited to celebrate the achievement 50 years later, in 1826. He was in ill health and couldn’t attend.
In his letter to Roger Weightman, declining the honor, Jefferson wrote that the Declaration bore “the fate of the world.” It conveyed “the signal of arousing men to burst the chains, under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government.”
“All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man,” he continued. “… These are the grounds of hope for others. For ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them.”
By empowering individuals, the Declaration makes celebrating its existence as much a personal or community exercise as a national one.
“I’m not a super-patriotic type of person,” said Strafford native Sarah Root, who is slated to give a welcome address in her hometown on Saturday. She’s descended from the man who signed the town charter in 1761. She’ll be celebrating Strafford and its longtime residents, going back to the Abenaki, as much as she will the Declaration of Independence.
“I don’t know that we all feel that we have freedom in this country right now,” Root said.
Strafford itself feels a connection to the nation’s roots, because it was home to U.S. Sen. Justin Morrill, who crafted the legislation that created the land grant university system. Before the Morrill Homestead became a state property, its caretaker used to let Strafford children play house there, Root said.
“It’s a really neat feeling to have a connection,” she said. It instilled in her a sense of pride in her community, regardless of how she feels about the direction of the nation.
“Maybe if our country was in a different place right now, I’d feel a stronger connection,” Root said.
This is part of the freedom the Declaration ushered in, and that the Constitution codified. The freedom to disagree, vocally, with the direction of the country. The Declaration of Independence recognizes the lonely voice.
Regardless of how one feels about the country, its spark started a flame that still burns.
“I think it’s still available to us,” Muirhead said. “It’s available to us as communities, it’s available to us as individuals, to reflect on the promise of the Declaration.”
