AMERICA 250
My series on the highlights and lowlights of American history, marking this nation’s 250th birthday. The whole idea being we, as a nation, have done great things and we’ve done rotten things. And sometimes the things we’ve done have been both great and rotten. We are, to be sure, all too human.
So desperate were the Colonies to break away from the English crown that the northern contingent pinched its collective nose and went to bed with the slave-holding Southern bunch. Each half figured the Revolution would be a bomb if the other wasn’t spooning with it at night.
How does that sound?
It’s the best possible spin I can think of to put on the contradiction that was the creation of the United States of America, a brand new nation in 1776 that bragged “All Men Are Created Equal” while initiating a mass assassination of Indigenous Peoples and counting Black slaves as less than human. And, you know, it wasn’t the last time this holy land embraced a savage, sadistic bedmate. Consider our World War II allies, the Soviets. Old Joe Stalin had just finished whacking some 7-10 million of his fellow countrymen in order to further his program of collectivization and remind the remainder of Russian et al citizenry that he could very well slit their throats too if they weren’t careful.
We’ll get to FDR’s decision to throw in our lot with the Soviets in 1942 later in this series on the highlights and lowlights of our nation’s history.
For now, let’s look at both the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution.
To iterate what I wrote last week about our land’s two founding documents:
Those White, erstwhile Brits decided to form their own country, issuing a Declaration of Independence, and then writing themselves a Constitution. They preached, “All men are created equal.” Beautiful words. Gorgeous words. No society had ever before advanced the notion that people could govern themselves, without relying on a god-given noble class, without submitting to a powerful priesthood, without acknowledging that one group of people were superior to another. Except, women weren’t included under the rubric “people.” Nor were non-landowners. Black’s were fractions of people, 3/5 to be precise. It took fully 188 years before the United States got around to ensuring that every human being, no matter their sex, gender, skin color, wealth or lack thereof, was equal under the law. And to this day, forces within this nation continue to chafe against those guarantees.
I’ll say it again — as an aspiration, the Declaration was beautiful. As a national charter, the Constitution was spectacularly good, except it carried within itself small (and large) print that said, “Yeah, but….”
Counting slaves as 3/5 human, considering women as 0/5 human, and viewing Natives as pests to be pushed westward or exterminated all were written, either explicitly or by legal wink into the Constitution. In that sense, we were no better than the Nazis, whom we justifiably continue to vilify to this day (well, most of us do; some Americans, apparently, are more “tolerant” of White male supremacy.
A Patriot Front Member.
America felt the Nazis were such an awful gang that we had to link arms with a putatively less awful nation in order to defeat them. Pragmatism, I guess. The same rationale, I suppose, that drove northern abolitionists to ally with southern slave-holders.
Anyway, the Constitution is filled with admirable Articles and clauses, The ability the change it, leading to the Bill of Rights that includes freedoms of speech and assembly, calls for redress and remedies for government wrongs, and later Amendments calling for due process and equal protection under the law and women’s suffrage show the 1787 document to be one of humanity’s greatest achievements.
“We the people” is the Constitution’s momentous opening line. It may be the most important thesis in all of human history. And, as Molly Ivins has pointed out, we’ve spent all the succeeding years of our history trying to include everybody in that club.
It’s the ifs, ands, and buts of the Constitution that rob the original draft of its sheen. I’ll put another spin on things — no document, philosophy, charter, hypothesis, or machine is ever fully realized (or perfect, in the word’s strict definition) right off the bat. Each must be kneaded, massaged, oiled, salted, tweaked, and/or pummeled into a better form. It would be of little solace to a Black woman living in South Carolina in 1830 to be told that the Constitution of 2026 would give her progeny a fair shake, but it’s true.
Lyndon Johnson Signs the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The US Constitution, it’s 27 Amendments inclusive, is a vastly greater legal guarantee than James Madison et al‘s first stab at it. It’s a living thing. As such, it also can be maimed or even killed.
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