The Meaning of the Declaration of Independence

Around this time every year, I start looking forward to National Public Radio's annual reading of the Declaration of Independence. NPR's annual reading began almost a quarter century ago and features many radio personalities. For years, I'd get a thrill when I heard the late Red Barber, the legendary play-by-play baseball announcer, reading his part from the Declaration.

If you haven't read the Declaration of Independence in a while, it may strike you as a bit repetitious. People tend to remember the first and last few lines — the one's with the big important ideas on liberty and equality "[w]e hold these truths to be self-evident ..." but usually forget the long, repetitious middle.

That middle is called the Bill of Indictment. It consists of a laundry list of grievances against King George, and represents the colonists' justification for declaring independence from the British crown. A major point of the Declaration is to argue the colonists' case for independence before the world — "When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another ... a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation." When it comes to the actual declaration of independence, it is a single run-on sentence near the end.

The Bill of Indictment makes for interesting reading because it sets the boundaries beyond which the signatories felt a people should not be forced to endure. In it are the kernels of the Bill of Rights, "[f]or Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us," "[f]or depriving us ... of Trial by Jury", and other injustices ranging from outright attacks, "[h]e has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns ...", to simple governmental neglect, "[h]e has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance."

Measured against the colonists' grievances against the British Crown, our current dissatisfactions with Washington seem petty and trite by comparison.

Sure, in the Declaration you'll find the perennial complaint about taxes, but not against taxation itself — taxation without representation: "For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent." Today, only the citizens of the District of Columbia have the right to complain about that. The signers also complained about an unresponsive and ineffective governmental structure — something we can all sympathize with — but even here it is evident that what they are complaining about isn't just the slow wheels of government, but in not having any say in the matter. Indeed, many of the original grievances would be addressed by what the founders did later — in establishing the Constitution and the Bill of Rights — and so cannot serve as a rationale for our current dissatisfaction with Washington. Greeted with a list of our grievances, the original signers would likely remark, "You live under a representative form of government. If you don't like your laws, then change them!"

While we may rant and rail against Washington, I think our greatest disgruntlement isn't really against our government, but against our fellow citizens. Yes, the federal government has it problems. For instance, the Constitution makes the passage of laws a very messy and conservative process. (Once something has been through the meat grinder of Congress, it often bears little resemblance to what we thought it should be.) But, we — the people — often speak confusingly and at cross purposes. And so, more often than not these days, the body politic has fallen into factional fighting rather than seeking the common good. For some, factional loyalty has become so strong that if they can't have it their way, they'd rather see the whole enterprise fail.

The Founders saw what they had achieved as a grand experiment, and even made predictions on how long it would last. The United States has exceeded their wildest dreams, partly because of the government they conceived, but to a larger extent on each generation's determination to make our republic endure.

As Thomas Paine wrote in 1776: "Let it be told to the future world [that] ... when nothing but hope and virtue could survive, ... the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet it."

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