Anniversaries are prime opportunities to honor and reflect upon the past while making relevant meaning for our present and future \u2014 work that mirrors key demands of our history classrooms. This year\u2019s 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence offers us an opportunity to consider how people from the center to the margins of American society have made meaning of our founding document. Just as in 1776, the document\u2019s framing is essential to any analysis and reflection. In that spirit, I\u2019d like to share and discuss some of the documents that I present to my students to engage with the Declaration.<\/p>\n
The anchor and centerpiece of course is the Declaration<\/a> itself. And while there are a wealth of lessons in rhetoric, history, and politics to be gleaned from the entirety of the document, a crucial focus for an anniversary discussion is the second paragraph, which contains the language students will be most familiar with; it contains the evergreen principles and themes that have been upheld, lauded and debated as recurring motifs throughout American history: self-determination, equality, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.\u00a0 The documents that next come to mind in the public imagination are those commemorative and celebratory accounts that both address the aspirational and inspirational nature of the document and seek to reinforce tradition. While sources abound in this category (every July 4th produces preservation-worthy orations), I offer two less-familiar landmark presidential anniversary speeches fitting for this moment: Calvin Coolidge\u2019s speech on the 150th Anniversary of the Declaration<\/a> and Gerald Ford\u2019s Bicentennial Remarks <\/a>at the National Archives.\u00a0 Students are less familiar with the presidents who held office during these anniversary celebrations, but they recognize the significance of 1926 and 1976, as well as the familiarly commemorative approach both speeches use: asserting the reliability of the Declaration\u2019s principles as a lodestar across time. Coolidge\u2019s speech lauds the Declaration\u2019s \u201cimmortal truths\u201d proven by \u201cunerring logic,\u201d while Ford hails it as the \u201cfixed star of freedom\u201d undergirded by \u201cmoral truths that are eternal.\u201d These addresses also share similar contexts<\/em>: tradition-oriented presidents focusing on the Declaration\u2019s principles as a steadying force in the wake of then-recent agitation and transitions (the Progressive Era in Coolidge\u2019s case; the prior decade of social upheaval and Watergate scandal in Ford\u2019s). The takeaway of the commemorative approach: Americans can look to the Declaration as a source of both uplift and stability.<\/p>\n Then we can consider some documents that explore how the principles of the Declaration withstood America\u2019s greatest existential crisis: the Civil War and Reconstruction Era. In the years preceding the war, abolitionist voices like William Lloyd Garrison<\/a> and Frederick Douglass<\/a> censured slavery as a violation of the Declaration\u2019s principles of freedom and equality. Outraged and pessimistic, Garrison excoriated decades of compromises on the issue of slavery that functionally \u201ctrampled\u201d the principles of the Declaration, a defiance that (for Garrison) delegitimized the Constitution under a pro-slavery social order. Similarly frustrated, Douglass dismissed the Fourth of July as a \u201csham\u201d celebration as long as slavery persisted, yet he maintained hope that \u201cnotwithstanding the dark picture\u201d of his time, the \u201cglorious liberty\u201d potential of the Constitution contained hope for a proper reckoning and eradication of slavery.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n In the wake of the Civil War, political Reconstructors like Congressman John Bingham<\/a> and President Ulysses S. Grant<\/a> contended that assurances of citizenship, equality and voting rights in the Fourteenth<\/a> and Fifteenth<\/a> Amendments validated the Declaration\u2019s principles by encoding them in the Constitution. Along with the abolitionists, these documents challenge us to consider the necessary conditions to realize the promise of the Declaration, in their time and in ours.<\/p>\n Finally, to reinforce the point that everybody (and not just the famous and lauded) has a say in making meaning of the Declaration, I offer perspectives from the margins and grassroots movements that have used the nation\u2019s founding document \u2013 its structure, its principles, its language \u2013 to assert their causes. As with the commemorative examples, we have many available sources<\/a> to choose from, but I\u2019ll offer a few favorites that resonate with my students.. Elizabeth Cady Stanton paraphrases and remixes the document in her Declaration of Sentiments<\/a> on behalf of women\u2019s rights; Martin Luther King insists<\/a> during the Civil Rights Movement that the Declaration was a \u201cpromissory note\u201d in a state of \u201cdefault\u201d as long as its principles remained selectively <\/strong>applied. The tradition of Native American Declarations<\/a> emphasizes the principle of self-determination within the Declaration of Independence to challenge and confront a history of hostility, denigration, and broken treaties. These responses might connect with students who don\u2019t always resonate with the circumstances of 1776, but who can relate to approaches that connect the principles of 1776 to these grassroot movements.<\/p>\n Like so many aspects of our society, the meaning and significance of the Declaration have been the source of democratic public deliberation, and our classrooms must be one of those deliberative spaces. The 250th anniversary of the Declaration invites us to engage in that process by considering voices and perspectives from our past \u2014\u00a0compelling variations on its themes and principles \u2014 and engaging with the voices around us to empower and inform our perspectives and actions today.<\/p>\n Malik Ali, a James Madison Fellow and 2017 graduate of the Master of Arts in American History and Government program, is Tukman Distinguished Teacher of History at the Branson School in Ross, California.<\/em><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/teachingamericanhistory.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/09\/6.-CalvinCoolidge.jpeg.webp)
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