We do not read the documents of the American Revolution. They make us uneasy and even guilty when we understand them, and most of the time, we do not understand them. They use language that is above us. The common discourse of American politics in 1776 was beyond what most university faculty members are capable of understanding.
You think I’m exaggerating. I’m not. My friend Bertel Sparks used to teach in the Duke University Law School. Every year, he conducted an experiment. He wanted to put his first year law students—among the cream of the crop of American college graduates—in their place.
He assigned an extract from Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England. This was the most important legal document of the American Revolution era. It was written in the 1760′s. Every American lawyer read all four volumes. It was read by American lawyers for a generation after the Revolution. Sparks would assign a section on the rights of property. He made them take it home, and then return to class, ready to discuss it.
When they returned, they could not discuss it. The language was too foreign. The concepts were too foreign. The students were utterly confused.
Then Sparks would hold up the source of the extract from Blackstone. The source was the Sixth McGuffey reader, the most popular American public school textbook series of the second half of the 19th century.
That put the kiddies in their place.
If you want to be put in your place, pick up a copy of the Sixth McGuffey reader and try to read it.
Try to read the "Federalist Papers." These were newspaper columns written to persuade the voters of New York to elect representatives to ratify the Constitution. These essays were political tracts. They were aimed at the average voter. Few college graduates could get through them today, so students are not asked to read them in their American history course, which isn’t required for graduation anyway.
We Have Done It to Ourselves
Our march into what Jefferson would have described as tyranny has been a self-imposed march. Voters today would be unwilling to go to war to restore the Declaration’s ideal of liberty. In fact, Americans would go to war to keep from having the Declaration’s ideal of liberty from being imposed on us. By today’s standards, King George III was indeed a madman: a libertarian madman, a character out of an Ayn Rand novel that never got published. On politics and economics, Jefferson was madder than King George.
Forty years ago, Stan Freberg produced an LP record, "Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America." It was a musical. Freberg is one of America’s great comic geniuses, but he spent most of his career after 1962 creating advertisements.
In the musical, Thomas Jefferson comes to Ben Franklin to persuade him to sign the Declaration. Franklin reads it over briefly. Then he refuses to sign. “Why not?” asks Jefferson. "It sounds a little pinko to me," Franklin replies. Also, there was the question of spelling. Franklin asks: "Life, liberty, and the perfuit of happineff?"
It was a funny skit, and the music was really good. (The song for the first Thanksgiving, "Take an Indian to Lunch," remains my favorite.) But "pinko," Jefferson wasn’t. Calling for secession was not the same as calling for a social revolution. The revolutionaries were calling for secession in the name of traditional rights of Englishmen. They were calling for a reversal of a slow-motion political revolution by the Parliament, an erosion of political rights. They saw themselves as conservatives involved in a counter-revolution.
They won the battle. We have lost the war.
Generation after generation, Americans have imposed taxation with representation. We could use less taxation and less representation. But voters believe in lots of representation and lots of taxation to match. Voters elect more politicians, who then hire far more officials, than King George ever thought about sending to the colonies.
Voters send these politicians off to the various capital cities with a mandate: "Bring more swag back home than those other crooks extract from us." Voters hand a credit card to their representatives and tell them: "Make sure the bill that you send to us at the end of the year is less than the value of the loot that you send to us." So, the bills keep getting bigger. We think Garrison Keeler is funny with his description of Lake Wobegon: "Where all the children are above average." But we all want our elected representatives to keep our tax bills below average.
Cartoonist Walt Kelly drew "Pogo" for decades. "Pogo" was probably the most politically sophisticated of all American comic strips, including "Doonesbury," although not the funniest. Kelly immortalized a phrase, which he put into the mouth of Pogo Possum: "We have met the enemy and he is us." The statement rings true because it is true. We did it to ourselves.
This is why the American Revolution seems like a museum display. Our hearts may be with those men of old, but our minds are not. We live in a fundamentally different world. Europe is on the far side of Marx and Engels, while we are on the far side of Wilson and Roosevelt.
My professor, Robert Nisbet, remarked in an autobiographical passage in one of his books that when he was born, in 1913, the only contact that most Americans had with the Federal Government was the Post Office. It was in that year that the first income tax forms were mailed out. Take a look at the original Form 1040. Consider that the average American family in 1913 earned less than $1,000 a year. Then look at the tax rates.
http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-utl/1913.pdf
We say that we want our high school graduates to be familiar with American history. But do we? Really? The history of America is the story of our surrender to a philosophy of government that was alien to the West in 1776. What Jefferson regarded as a tyranny worth dying to oppose, American voters today regard as a world so unjust economically that no moral person would want to live in it, let alone risk his life and wealth to obtain it for himself and his posterity.
Voters get what they think they really want. When things turn out badly, they re-think what it is that they really want.
What the signers of the Declaration of Independence really wanted was the right of self-government, beginning with individual self-government. To achieve this, they demanded the right of home rule politically. They fought a war to attain this.
We have used home rule to place above us men whose views of the rights of citizens Jefferson would have regarded as beyond anything King George III dreamed of in his madness.
Millions of voters who regard the present social and political order as morally valid are not interested in telling the story of the Revolution from the words of those who began the fight. They elect Superintendants of Public Instruction to hire teachers who also do not like that story. The senior bureaucrats then ask these teachers to abandon the teaching of the story of America prior to 1900, and substitute social studies.
I am not exaggerating about this either. The battle at the state level to retain the teaching of American history prior to 1900 has been going on in Texas high schools for over a decade. Texas public schools buy so many textbooks that what Texas does—along with New York, California, and Illinois—determines what the rest of the nation’s students will be taught. The state of Texas allows a committee that includes laymen to sit in judgment on the textbooks. This is why Mel and Norma Gabler have been able to inflict so much economic pain on liberal textbook publishers for the last 30 years. But theirs is at best a holding action.
http://members.aol.com/TxtbkRevws/about.htm
http://members.aol.com/TxtbkRevws/moreinfo.htm
Conclusion
The story of America is the story of this nation’s self-imposed abandonment of the Declaration of Independence. This is why the story of the Declaration is rarely taught in school, and is taught badly when it is taught.
If you want to re-gain your liberty, a good place to begin is with the primary source documents of the world that existed a century before the Declaration was written, before the kings of England meddled very much in colonial affairs. It is hard to believe, but Jefferson would have been regarded as a little bit pinko in 1676.
That is the world we have lost. Fireworks won’t get it back.
Home schooling just might.
Happy Fireworks Day – Part 2
We do not read the documents of the American Revolution. They make us uneasy and even guilty when we understand them, and most of the time, we do not understand them. They use language that is above us. The common discourse of American politics in 1776 was beyond what most university faculty members are capable of understanding.
You think I’m exaggerating. I’m not. My friend Bertel Sparks used to teach in the Duke University Law School. Every year, he conducted an experiment. He wanted to put his first year law students—among the cream of the crop of American college graduates—in their place.
He assigned an extract from Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England. This was the most important legal document of the American Revolution era. It was written in the 1760′s. Every American lawyer read all four volumes. It was read by American lawyers for a generation after the Revolution. Sparks would assign a section on the rights of property. He made them take it home, and then return to class, ready to discuss it.
When they returned, they could not discuss it. The language was too foreign. The concepts were too foreign. The students were utterly confused.
Then Sparks would hold up the source of the extract from Blackstone. The source was the Sixth McGuffey reader, the most popular American public school textbook series of the second half of the 19th century.
That put the kiddies in their place.
If you want to be put in your place, pick up a copy of the Sixth McGuffey reader and try to read it.
Try to read the "Federalist Papers." These were newspaper columns written to persuade the voters of New York to elect representatives to ratify the Constitution. These essays were political tracts. They were aimed at the average voter. Few college graduates could get through them today, so students are not asked to read them in their American history course, which isn’t required for graduation anyway.
We Have Done It to Ourselves
Our march into what Jefferson would have described as tyranny has been a self-imposed march. Voters today would be unwilling to go to war to restore the Declaration’s ideal of liberty. In fact, Americans would go to war to keep from having the Declaration’s ideal of liberty from being imposed on us. By today’s standards, King George III was indeed a madman: a libertarian madman, a character out of an Ayn Rand novel that never got published. On politics and economics, Jefferson was madder than King George.
Forty years ago, Stan Freberg produced an LP record, "Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America." It was a musical. Freberg is one of America’s great comic geniuses, but he spent most of his career after 1962 creating advertisements.
In the musical, Thomas Jefferson comes to Ben Franklin to persuade him to sign the Declaration. Franklin reads it over briefly. Then he refuses to sign. “Why not?” asks Jefferson. "It sounds a little pinko to me," Franklin replies. Also, there was the question of spelling. Franklin asks: "Life, liberty, and the perfuit of happineff?"
It was a funny skit, and the music was really good. (The song for the first Thanksgiving, "Take an Indian to Lunch," remains my favorite.) But "pinko," Jefferson wasn’t. Calling for secession was not the same as calling for a social revolution. The revolutionaries were calling for secession in the name of traditional rights of Englishmen. They were calling for a reversal of a slow-motion political revolution by the Parliament, an erosion of political rights. They saw themselves as conservatives involved in a counter-revolution.
They won the battle. We have lost the war.
Generation after generation, Americans have imposed taxation with representation. We could use less taxation and less representation. But voters believe in lots of representation and lots of taxation to match. Voters elect more politicians, who then hire far more officials, than King George ever thought about sending to the colonies.
Voters send these politicians off to the various capital cities with a mandate: "Bring more swag back home than those other crooks extract from us." Voters hand a credit card to their representatives and tell them: "Make sure the bill that you send to us at the end of the year is less than the value of the loot that you send to us." So, the bills keep getting bigger. We think Garrison Keeler is funny with his description of Lake Wobegon: "Where all the children are above average." But we all want our elected representatives to keep our tax bills below average.
Cartoonist Walt Kelly drew "Pogo" for decades. "Pogo" was probably the most politically sophisticated of all American comic strips, including "Doonesbury," although not the funniest. Kelly immortalized a phrase, which he put into the mouth of Pogo Possum: "We have met the enemy and he is us." The statement rings true because it is true. We did it to ourselves.
This is why the American Revolution seems like a museum display. Our hearts may be with those men of old, but our minds are not. We live in a fundamentally different world. Europe is on the far side of Marx and Engels, while we are on the far side of Wilson and Roosevelt.
My professor, Robert Nisbet, remarked in an autobiographical passage in one of his books that when he was born, in 1913, the only contact that most Americans had with the Federal Government was the Post Office. It was in that year that the first income tax forms were mailed out. Take a look at the original Form 1040. Consider that the average American family in 1913 earned less than $1,000 a year. Then look at the tax rates.
http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-utl/1913.pdf
We say that we want our high school graduates to be familiar with American history. But do we? Really? The history of America is the story of our surrender to a philosophy of government that was alien to the West in 1776. What Jefferson regarded as a tyranny worth dying to oppose, American voters today regard as a world so unjust economically that no moral person would want to live in it, let alone risk his life and wealth to obtain it for himself and his posterity.
Voters get what they think they really want. When things turn out badly, they re-think what it is that they really want.
What the signers of the Declaration of Independence really wanted was the right of self-government, beginning with individual self-government. To achieve this, they demanded the right of home rule politically. They fought a war to attain this.
We have used home rule to place above us men whose views of the rights of citizens Jefferson would have regarded as beyond anything King George III dreamed of in his madness.
Millions of voters who regard the present social and political order as morally valid are not interested in telling the story of the Revolution from the words of those who began the fight. They elect Superintendants of Public Instruction to hire teachers who also do not like that story. The senior bureaucrats then ask these teachers to abandon the teaching of the story of America prior to 1900, and substitute social studies.
I am not exaggerating about this either. The battle at the state level to retain the teaching of American history prior to 1900 has been going on in Texas high schools for over a decade. Texas public schools buy so many textbooks that what Texas does—along with New York, California, and Illinois—determines what the rest of the nation’s students will be taught. The state of Texas allows a committee that includes laymen to sit in judgment on the textbooks. This is why Mel and Norma Gabler have been able to inflict so much economic pain on liberal textbook publishers for the last 30 years. But theirs is at best a holding action.
http://members.aol.com/TxtbkRevws/about.htm
http://members.aol.com/TxtbkRevws/moreinfo.htm
Conclusion
The story of America is the story of this nation’s self-imposed abandonment of the Declaration of Independence. This is why the story of the Declaration is rarely taught in school, and is taught badly when it is taught.
If you want to re-gain your liberty, a good place to begin is with the primary source documents of the world that existed a century before the Declaration was written, before the kings of England meddled very much in colonial affairs. It is hard to believe, but Jefferson would have been regarded as a little bit pinko in 1676.
That is the world we have lost. Fireworks won’t get it back.
Home schooling just might.
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