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What Does “Created Equal” Mean?

A society that puts equality ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom.

Editor’s note: This essay is an excerpt of the new Hoover Press book  Milton Friedman on Freedom , edited by Robert Leeson and Charles G. Palm. This essay by Friedman originally appeared in the book Free to Choose: A Personal Statement .

“Equality, liberty”—what precisely do these words from the Declaration of Independence mean? Can the ideals they express be realized in practice? Are equality and liberty consistent one with the other or are they in conflict?

Since well before the Declaration of Independence, these questions have played a central role in the history of the United States. The attempt to answer them has shaped the intellectual climate of opinion, led to bloody wars, and produced major changes in economic and political institutions. This attempt continues to dominate our political debate. It will shape our future as it has our past.

In the early decades of the Republic, equality meant equality before God; liberty meant the liberty to shape one’s own life. The obvious conflict between the Declaration of Independence and the institution of slavery occupied the center of the stage. That conflict was finally resolved by the Civil War. The debate then moved to a different level. Equality came more and more to be interpreted as “equality of opportunity” in the sense that no one should be prevented by arbitrary obstacles from using his capacities to pursue his own objectives. That is still its dominant meaning to most citizens of the United States.

Neither equality before God nor equality of opportunity presented any conflict with liberty to shape one’s own life. Quite the opposite. Equality and liberty were two faces of the same basic value—that every individual should be regarded as an end in himself.

A very different meaning of equality has emerged in the United States in recent decades—equality of outcome. Everyone should have the same level of living or of income, should finish the race at the same time. Equality of outcome is in clear conflict with liberty. The attempt to promote it has been a major source of bigger and bigger government and of government-imposed restrictions on our liberty.

Equality Before God

When Thomas Jefferson, at the age of thirty-three, wrote “all men are created equal,” he and his contemporaries did not take these words literally. They did not regard men—or as we would say today, persons—as equal in physical characteristics, emotional reactions, mechanical and intellectual abilities. Thomas Jefferson himself was a most remarkable person. At the age of twenty-six he designed his beautiful house at Monticello (Italian for “little mountain”), supervised its construction, and, indeed, is said to have done some of the work himself. In the course of his life, he was an inventor, a scholar, an author, a statesman, governor of the State of Virginia, president of the United States, minister to France, founder of the University of Virginia—hardly an average man.

The clue to what Thomas Jefferson and his contemporaries meant by equal is seen in the next phrase of the Declaration—“endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” Men were equal before God. Each person is precious in and of himself. He has unalienable rights, rights that no one else is entitled to invade. He is entitled to serve his own purposes and not to be treated simply as an instrument to promote someone else’s purposes. “Liberty” is part of the definition of equality, not in conflict with it.

Equality before God—personal equality—is important precisely because people are not identical. Their different values, their different tastes, their different capacities will lead them to want to lead very different lives. Personal equality requires respect for their right to do so, not the imposition on them of someone else’s values or judgment. Jefferson had no doubt that some men were superior to others, that there was an elite. But that did not give them the right to rule others.

If an elite did not have the right to impose its will on others, neither did any other group, even a majority. Every person was to be his own ruler—provided that he did not interfere with the similar right of others. Government was established to protect that right—from fellow citizens and from external threat—not to give a majority unbridled rule. Jefferson had three achievements he wanted to be remembered for inscribed on his tombstone: the Virginia statute for religious freedom (a precursor of the US Bill of Rights designed to protect minorities against domination by majorities), authorship of the Declaration of Independence, and the founding of the University of Virginia. The goal of the framers of the Constitution of the United States, drafted by Jefferson’s contemporaries, was a national government strong enough to defend the country and promote the general welfare but at the same time sufficiently limited in power to protect the individual citizen, and the separate state governments, from domination by the national government. Democratic, in the sense of widespread participation in government, yes; in the political sense of majority rule, clearly no.

Similarly, Alexis de Tocqueville, the famous French political philosopher and sociologist, in his classic Democracy in America, written after a lengthy visit in the 1830s, saw equality, not majority rule, as the outstanding characteristic of America. “In America,” he wrote, “the aristocratic element has always been feeble from its birth; and if at the present day it is not actually destroyed, it is at any rate so completely disabled, that we can scarcely assign to it any degree of influence on the course of affairs. The democratic principle, on the contrary, has gained so much strength by time, by events, and by legislation, as to have become not only predominant but all-powerful. There is no family or corporate authority. . . . America, then, exhibits in her social state a most extraordinary phenomenon. Men are there seen on a greater equality in point of fortune and intellect, or, in other words, more equal in their strength, than in any other country of the world, or in any age of which history has preserved the remembrance.”

Tocqueville admired much of what he observed, but he was by no means an uncritical admirer, fearing that democracy carried too far might undermine civic virtue. As he put it, “There is . . . a manly and lawful passion for equality which incites men to wish all to be powerful and honored. This passion tends to elevate the humble to the rank of the great; but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level, and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom.”

It is striking testimony to the changing meaning of words that in recent decades the Democratic Party of the United States has been the chief instrument for strengthening that government power that Jefferson and many of his contemporaries viewed as the greatest threat to democracy. And it has striven to increase government power in the name of a concept of “equality” that is almost the opposite of the concept of equality Jefferson identified with liberty and Tocqueville with democracy.

Of course the practice of the Founding Fathers did not always correspond to their preaching. The most obvious conflict was slavery. Thomas Jefferson himself owned slaves until the day he died—July 4, 1826. He agonized repeatedly about slavery, suggested in his notes and correspondence plans for eliminating slavery, but never publicly proposed any such plans or campaigned against the institution.

Yet the Declaration he drafted had either to be blatantly violated by the nation he did so much to create and form or slavery had to be abolished. Little wonder that the early decades of the Republic saw a rising tide of controversy about the institution of slavery. That controversy ended in a Civil War that, in the words of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, tested whether a “nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal . . . can long endure.” The nation endured but only at a tremendous cost in lives, property, and social cohesion.

Equality of Opportunity

Once the Civil War abolished slavery and the concept of personal equality—equality before God and the law—came closer to realization, emphasis shifted, in intellectual discussion and in government and private policy, to a different concept—equality of opportunity.

Literal equality of opportunity—in the sense of identity—is impossible. One child is born blind, another with sight. One child has parents deeply concerned about his welfare who provide a background of culture and understanding; another has dissolute, improvident parents. One child is born in the United States, another in India or China or Russia. They clearly do not have identical opportunities open to them at birth, and there is no way that their opportunities can be made identical.

Like personal equality, equality of opportunity is not to be interpreted literally. Its real meaning is perhaps best expressed by the French expression dating from the French Revolution:  Une carrière ouverte aux les talents —a career open to the talents. No arbitrary obstacles should prevent people from achieving those positions for which their talents fit them and for which their values lead them to seek. Not birth, nationality, color, religion, sex, or any other irrelevant characteristic should determine the opportunities that are open to a person—only his abilities.

On this interpretation, equality of opportunity simply spells out in more detail the meaning of personal equality, of equality before the law. And like personal equality, it has meaning and importance precisely because people are different in their genetic and cultural characteristics and hence both want to and can pursue different careers.

Equality of opportunity, like personal equality, is not inconsistent with liberty; on the contrary, it is an essential component of liberty. If some people are denied access to particular positions in life for which they are qualified simply because of their ethnic background, color, or religion, that is an interference with their right to “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” It denies equality of opportunity and, by the same token, sacrifices the freedom of some for the advantage of others.

Like every ideal, equality of opportunity is incapable of being fully realized. The most serious departure was undoubtedly with respect to the blacks, particularly in the South but in the North as well. Yet there was also tremendous progress for blacks and for other groups. The very concept of a melting pot reflected the goal of equality of opportunity. So also did the expansion of free education at elementary, secondary, and higher levels, though this development has not been an unmixed blessing.

The priority given to equality of opportunity in the hierarchy of values generally accepted by the public after the Civil War is manifested particularly in economic policy. The catchwords were free enterprise, competition, laissez-faire. Everyone was to be free to go into any business, follow any occupation, buy any property, subject only to the agreement of the other parties to the transaction. Each was to have the opportunity to reap the benefits if he succeeded, to suffer the costs if he failed. There were to be no arbitrary obstacles. Performance, not birth, religion, or nationality, was the touchstone.

One corollary was the development of what many who regarded themselves as the cultural elite sneered at as vulgar materialism—an emphasis on the almighty dollar, on wealth as both the symbol and the seal of success. As Tocqueville pointed out, this emphasis reflected the unwillingness of the community to accept the traditional criteria in feudal and aristocratic societies, namely, birth and parentage. Performance was the obvious alternative, and the accumulation of wealth was the most readily available measure of performance.

Another corollary, of course, was an enormous release of human energy that made America an increasingly productive and dynamic society in which social mobility was an everyday reality. Still another, perhaps surprisingly, was an explosion in charitable activity. This explosion was made possible by the rapid growth in wealth. It took the form it did—of nonprofit hospitals, privately endowed colleges and universities, a plethora of charitable organizations directed to helping the poor—because of the dominant values of the society, including, especially, promotion of equality of opportunity.

Of course, in the economic sphere as elsewhere, practice did not always conform to the ideal. Government was kept to a minor role; no major obstacles to enterprise were erected; and, by the end of the nineteenth century, positive government measures, especially the Sherman Anti-Trust Law, were adopted to eliminate private barriers to competition. But extralegal arrangements continued to interfere with the freedom of individuals to enter various businesses or professions, and social practices unquestionably gave special advantages to persons born in the “right” families, of the “right” color, and of the “right” religion. However, the rapid rise in the economic and social position of various less privileged groups demonstrates that these obstacles were by no means insurmountable.

In respect of government measures, one major deviation from free markets was in foreign trade, where Alexander Hamilton’s Report on Manufactures had enshrined tariff protection for domestic industries as part of the American way. Tariff protection was inconsistent with thoroughgoing equality of opportunity and, indeed, with the free immigration of persons, which was the rule until World War I, except Orientals. Yet it could be rationalized both by the needs of national defense and on the very different ground that equality stops at the water’s edge—an illogical rationalization that is adopted also by most of today’s proponents of a very different concept of equality.

Equality of Outcome

That different concept, equality of outcome, has been gaining ground in this century. It first affected government policy in Great Britain and on the European continent. Over the past half-century it has increasingly affected government policy in the United States as well. In some intellectual circles the desirability of equality of outcome has become an article of religious faith: everyone should finish the race at the same time. As the Dodo said in Alice in Wonderland, “Everybody has won, and all must have prizes.”

For this concept, as for the other two, equal is not to be interpreted literally as identical. No one really maintains that everyone, regardless of age or sex or other physical attributes, should have identical rations of each separate item of food, clothing, and so on. The goal is rather fairness, a much vaguer notion—indeed, one that it is difficult, if not impossible, to define precisely. “Fair shares for all” is the modern slogan that has replaced Karl Marx’s, “To each according to his needs, from each according to his ability.”

This concept of equality differs radically from the other two. Government measures that promote personal equality or equality of opportunity enhance liberty; government measures to achieve fair shares for all reduce liberty. If what people get is to be determined by fairness, who is to decide what is fair? As a chorus of voices asked the Dodo, “But who is to give the prizes?” Fairness is not an objectively determined concept once it departs from -identity. Fairness, like needs, is in the eye of the beholder. If all are to have fair shares, someone or some group of people must decide what shares are fair—and they must be able to impose their decisions on others, taking from those who have more than their fair share and giving to those who have less. Are those who make and impose such decisions equal to those for whom they decide? Are we not in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, where “all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others”?

In addition, if what people get is determined by fairness and not by what they produce, where are the prizes to come from? What incentive is there to work and produce? How is it to be decided who is to be the doctor, who the lawyer, who the garbage collector, who the street sweeper? What assures that people will accept the roles assigned to them and then carry out those roles in accordance with their abilities? Clearly, only force or the threat of force will work.

The key point is not merely that practice will depart from the ideal. Of course it will, as it does with respect to the other two concepts of equality as well. The point is rather that there is a fundamental conflict between the ideal of fair shares, or of its precursor, “to each according to his needs,” and the ideal of personal liberty. This conflict has plagued every attempt to make equality of outcome the overriding principle of social organization. The end result has invariably been a state of terror: Russia, China, and, more recently, Cambodia offer clear and convincing evidence. And even terror has not equalized outcomes. In every case, wide inequality persists by any criterion; inequality between the rulers and the ruled, not only in power but also in material standards of life.

The far less extreme measures taken in Western countries in the name of equality of outcome have shared the same fate to a lesser extent. They, too, have restricted individual liberty. They, too, have failed to achieve their objective. It has proved impossible to define fair shares in a way that is generally acceptable or to satisfy the members of the community that they are being treated fairly. On the contrary, dissatisfaction has mounted with every additional attempt to implement equality of outcome.

Much of the moral fervor behind the drive for equality of outcome comes from the widespread belief that it is not fair that some children should have a great advantage over others simply because they happen to have wealthy parents. Of course it is not fair. However, unfairness can take many forms. It can take the form of the inheritance of property—bonds and stocks, houses, factories; it can also take the form of the inheritance of talent—musical ability, strength, mathematical genius. The inheritance of property can be interfered with more readily than the inheritance of talent. But from an ethical point of view, is there any difference between the two? Yet many people resent the inheritance of property but not the inheritance of talent.

Look at the same issue from the point of view of the parent. If you want to assure your child a higher income in life, you can do so in various ways. You can buy him (or her) an education that will equip him to pursue an occupation yielding a high income; or you can set him up in a business that will yield a higher income than he could earn as a salaried employee; or you can leave him property, the income from which will enable him to live better. Is there any ethical difference among these three ways of using your property? Or again, if the state leaves you any money to spend over and above taxes, should the state permit you to spend it on riotous living but not to leave it to your children?

The ethical issues involved are subtle and complex. They are not to be resolved by such simplistic formulas as fair shares for all. Indeed, if we took that seriously, youngsters with less musical skill should be given the greatest amount of musical training in order to compensate for their inherited disadvantage and those with greater musical aptitude should be prevented from having access to good musical training, similarly with all other categories of inherited personal qualities. That might be fair to the youngsters lacking in talent, but would it be fair to the talented, let alone to those who had to work to pay for training the youngsters lacking talent or to the persons deprived of the benefits that might have come from the cultivation of the talents of the gifted?

Life is not fair. It is tempting to believe that government can rectify what nature has spawned. But it is also important to recognize how much we benefit from the very unfairness we deplore. There’s nothing fair about Marlene Dietrich’s having been born with beautiful legs that we all want to look at or about Muhammad Ali’s having been born with the skill that made him a great fighter. But on the other side, millions of people who have enjoyed looking at Marlene Dietrich’s legs or watching one of Muhammad Ali’s fights have benefited from nature’s unfairness in producing a Marlene Dietrich and a Muhammad Ali. What kind of a world would it be if everyone were a duplicate of everyone else?

It is certainly not fair that Muhammad Ali should be able to earn millions of dollars in one night. But wouldn’t it have been even more unfair to the people who enjoyed watching him if, in the pursuit of some abstract ideal of equality, Muhammad Ali had not been permitted to earn more for one night’s fight—or for each day spent in preparing for a fight—than the lowest man on the totem pole could get for a day’s unskilled work on the docks? It might have been possible to do that, but the result would have been to deny people the opportunity to watch Muhammad Ali. We doubt very much that he would have been willing to undergo the arduous regimen of training that preceded his fights or to subject himself to the kind of fights he has had, if he were limited to the pay of an unskilled dockworker.

Still another facet of this complex issue of fairness can be illustrated by considering a game of chance, for example, an evening at baccarat. The people who choose to play may start the evening with equal piles of chips, but as the play progresses, those piles will become unequal. By the end of the evening, some will be big winners, others big losers. In the name of the ideal of equality, should the winners be required to repay the losers? That would take all the fun out of the game. Not even the losers would like that. They might like it for the one evening, but would they come back again to play if they knew that, whatever happened, they’d end up exactly where they started?

This example has a great deal more to do with the real world than one might at first suppose. Every day each of us makes decisions that involve taking a chance. Occasionally it’s a big chance—as when we decide what occupation to pursue, whom to marry, whether to buy a house or make a major investment. More often it’s a small chance, as when we decide what movie to go to, whether to cross the street against the traffic, whether to buy one security rather than another. Each time the question is who is to decide what chances we take? That in turn depends on who bears the consequences of the decision. If we bear the consequences, we can make the decision. But if someone else bears the consequences, should we or will we be permitted to make the decision? If you play baccarat as an agent for someone else with his money, will he, or should he, permit you unlimited scope for decision making? Is he not almost certain to set some limit to your discretion? Will he not lay down some rules for you to observe? To take a very different example, if the government (i.e., your fellow taxpayers) assumes the costs of flood damage to your house, can you be permitted to decide freely whether to build your house on a floodplain? It is no accident that increasing government intervention into personal decisions has gone hand in hand with the drive for fair shares for all.

The system under which people can make their own choices—and bear most of the consequences of their decisions—is the system that has prevailed for most of our history. It is the system that gave the Henry Fords, the Thomas Alva Edisons, the George Eastmans, the John D. Rockefellers, the James Cash Penneys the incentive to transform our society over the past two centuries. It is the system that gave other people an incentive to furnish venture capital to finance the risky enterprises that these ambitious inventors and captains of industry undertook. Of course, there were many losers along the way—probably more losers than winners. We don’t remember their names. But for the most part they went in with their eyes open. They knew they were taking chances. And win or lose, society as a whole benefited from their willingness to take a chance.

The fortunes that this system produced came overwhelmingly from developing new products or services or new ways of -producing products or services or of distributing them widely. The resulting addition to the wealth of the community as a whole, to the well-being of the masses of the people, amounted to many times the wealth accumulated by the innovators. Henry Ford acquired a great fortune. The country acquired a cheap and reliable means of transportation and the techniques of mass production. Moreover, in many cases the private fortunes were largely devoted in the end to the benefit of society. The Rockefeller, Ford, and Carnegie Foundations are only the most prominent of the numerous private benefactions that are so wonderful as a consequence of the operation of a system that corresponded to “equality of opportunity” and “liberty” as these terms were understood until recently.

One limited sample may give the flavor of the outpouring of philanthropic activity in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. In a book devoted to “cultural philanthropy in Chicago from the 1880s to 1917,” Helen Horowitz writes: “At the turn of the century, Chicago was a city of contradictory impulses: it was both a commercial center dealing in the basic commodities of an industrial society and a community caught in the winds of cultural uplift. As one commentator put it, the city was ‘a strange combination of pork and Plato.’ A major manifestation of Chicago’s drive toward culture was the establishment of the city’s great cultural institutions in the 1880s and early 1890s (the Art Institute, the Newberry Library, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the University of Chicago, the Field Museum, the Crerar Library). . . . These institutions were a new phenomenon in the city. Whatever the initial impetus behind their founding, they were largely organized, sustained, and controlled by a group of businessmen. . . . Yet while privately supported and managed, the institutions were designed for the whole city. Their trustees had turned to cultural philanthropy not so much to satisfy personal aesthetic or scholarly yearnings as to accomplish social goals. Disturbed by social forces they could not control and filled with idealistic notions of culture, these businessmen saw in the museum, the library, the symphony orchestra, and the university a way to purify their city and to generate a civic renaissance.”

Philanthropy was by no means restricted to cultural institutions. There was, as Horowitz writes in another connection, “a kind of explosion of activity on many different levels.” And Chicago was not an isolated case. Rather, as Horowitz puts it, -“Chicago seemed to epitomize America.” The same period saw the establishment of Hull House in Chicago under Jane Addams, the first of many settlement houses established throughout the nation to spread culture and education among the poor and to assist them in their daily problems. Many hospitals, orphanages, and other charitable agencies were set up in the same period.

There is no inconsistency between a free market system and the pursuit of broad social and cultural goals or between a free market system and compassion for the less fortunate, whether that compassion takes the form, as it did in the nineteenth century, of private charitable activity or, as it has done increasingly in the twentieth, of assistance through government—provided that in both cases it is an expression of a desire to help others. There is all the difference in the world, however, between two kinds of assistance through government that seem superficially similar: first, 90 percent of us agreeing to impose taxes on ourselves in order to help the bottom 10 percent and, second, 80 percent voting to impose taxes on the top 10 percent to help the bottom 10 -percent—William Graham Sumner’s famous example of B and C deciding what D shall do for A. The first may be wise or unwise, an effective or an ineffective way to help the -disadvantaged—but it is consistent with belief in both equality of opportunity and liberty. The second seeks equality of outcome and is entirely antithetical to liberty.

Who Favors Equality of Outcome?

There is little support for the goal of equality of outcome despite the extent to which it has become almost an article of religious faith among intellectuals and despite its prominence in the speeches of politicians and the preambles of legislation. The talk is belied alike by the behavior of government, of the intellectuals who most ardently espouse egalitarian sentiments, and of the public at large.

For government, one obvious example is the policy toward lotteries and gambling. New York State—and particularly New York City—is widely and correctly regarded as a stronghold of egalitarian sentiment. Yet the New York State government conducts lotteries and provides facilities for off-track betting on races. It advertises extensively to induce its citizens to buy lottery tickets and bet on the races—at terms that yield a very large profit to the government. At the same time it tries to suppress the numbers game, which, as it happens, offers better odds than the government lottery (especially when account is taken of the greater ease of avoiding tax on winnings). Great Britain, a stronghold, if not the birthplace, of egalitarian sentiment, permits private gambling clubs and betting on races and other sporting events. Indeed, wagering is a national pastime and a major source of government income.

For intellectuals, the clearest evidence is their failure to practice what so many of them preach. Equality of outcome can be promoted on a do-it-yourself basis. First, decide exactly what you mean by equality. Do you want to achieve equality within the United States? in a selected group of countries as a whole? in the world as a whole? Is equality to be judged in terms of income per person, per family, per year, per decade, per lifetime, income in the form of money alone? Or including such nonmonetary items as the rental value of an owned home; food grown for one’s own use; services rendered by members of the family not employed for money, notably the housewife? How are physical and mental handicaps or advantages to be allowed for?

However you decide these issues, you can, if you are an egalitarian, estimate what money income would correspond to your concept of equality. If your actual income is higher than that, you can keep that amount and distribute the rest to people who are below that level. If your criterion were to encompass the world—as most egalitarian rhetoric suggests it should—something less than, say, $200 a year (in 1979 dollars) per person would be an amount that would correspond to the conception of equality that seems implicit in most egalitarian rhetoric. That is about the average income per person worldwide.

What Irving Kristol has called the “new class”—government bureaucrats, academics whose research is supported by government funds or who are employed in government-financed think tanks, staffs of the many so-called general interest or public policy groups, journalists and others in the communications -industry—are among the most ardent preachers of the doctrine of equality. Yet they remind us very much of the old, if unfair, saw about the Quakers: “They came to the New World to do good and ended up doing well.” The members of the new class are in general among the highest paid persons in the community. And for many among them, preaching equality and promoting or administering the resulting legislation has proved an effective means of achieving such high incomes. All of us find it easy to identify our own welfare with the welfare of the community.

Of course, an egalitarian may protest that he is but a drop in the ocean, that he would be willing to redistribute the excess of his income over his concept of an equal income if everyone else were compelled to do the same. On one level this contention that compulsion would change matters is wrong; even if everyone else did the same, his specific contribution to the income of others would still be a drop in the ocean. His individual contribution would be just as large if he were the only contributor as if he were one of many. Indeed it would be more valuable because he could target his contribution to go to the very worst off among those he regards as appropriate recipients. On another level compulsion would change matters drastically; the kind of society that would emerge if such acts of redistribution were voluntary is altogether different—and, by our standards, infinitely preferable—to the kind that would emerge if redistribution were compulsory.

Persons who believe that a society of enforced equality is preferable can also practice what they preach. They can join one of the many communes in this country and elsewhere or establish new ones. And, of course, it is entirely consistent with a belief in personal equality or equality of opportunity and liberty that any group of individuals who wish to live in that way should be free to do so. Our thesis that support for equality of outcome is word-deep receives strong support from the small number of persons who have wished to join such communes and from the fragility of the communes that have been established.

Egalitarians in the United States may object that the fewness of communes and their fragility reflect the opprobrium that a predominantly capitalist society visits on such communes and the resulting discrimination to which they are subjected. That may be true for the United States but as Robert Nozick has pointed out, there is one country where that is not true, where, on the contrary, egalitarian communes are highly regarded and prized. That country is Israel. The kibbutz played a major role in early Jewish settlement in Palestine and continues to play an important role in the state of Israel. A disproportionate fraction of the leaders of the Israeli state were drawn from the kibbutzim. Far from being a source of disapproval, membership in a kibbutz confers social status and commands approbation. Everyone is free to join or leave a kibbutz, and kibbutzim have been viable social organizations. Yet at no time, and certainly not today, have more than about 5 percent of the Jewish population of Israel chosen to be members of a kibbutz. That percentage can be regarded as an upper estimate of the fraction of people who would voluntarily choose a system enforcing equality of outcome in preference to a system characterized by inequality, diversity, and opportunity.

Public attitudes about graduated income taxes are more mixed. Recent referenda on the introduction of graduated state income taxes in some states that do not have them, and on an increase in the extent of graduation in other states, have generally been defeated. On the other hand, the federal income tax is highly graduated, at least on paper, though it also contains a large number of provisions (loopholes) that greatly reduce the extent of graduation in practice. On this showing, there is at least public tolerance of a moderate amount of redistributive taxation.

However, we venture to suggest that the popularity of Reno, Las Vegas, and now Atlantic City is no less faithful an indication of the preferences of the public than the federal income tax, the editorials in the New York Times and the Washington Post, and the pages of the New York Review of Books.

Consequences of Egalitarian Policies

In shaping our own policy, we can learn from the experience of Western countries with which we share a common intellectual and cultural background and from which we derive many of our values. Perhaps the most instructive example is Great Britain, which led the way in the nineteenth century toward implementing equality of opportunity and in the twentieth toward implementing equality of outcome.

Since the end of World War II, British domestic policy has been dominated by the search for greater equality of outcome. Measure after measure has been adopted designed to take from the rich and give to the poor. Taxes were raised on income until they reached a top rate of 98 percent on property income and 83 percent on earned income and were supplemented by ever heavier taxes on inheritances. State-provided medical, housing, and other welfare services were greatly expanded, along with payments to the unemployed and the aged. Unfortunately, the results have been very different from those that were intended by the people who were quite properly offended by the class structure that dominated Britain for centuries. There has been a vast redistribution of wealth, but the end result is not an equitable distribution.

Instead, new classes of privileged have been created to replace or supplement the old: the bureaucrats, secure in their jobs, protected against inflation both when they work and when they retire; the trade unions that profess to represent the most downtrodden workers but in fact consist of the highest paid laborers in the land—the aristocrats of the labor movement; and the new millionaires—people who have been cleverest at finding ways around the laws, the rules, the regulations that have poured from Parliament and the bureaucracy, who have found ways to avoid paying taxes on their income and to get their wealth overseas beyond the grasp of the tax collectors. A vast reshuffling of income and wealth has taken place, greater equity, hardly.

The drive for equality in Britain failed, not because the wrong measures were adopted, though some no doubt were; not because they were badly administered, though some no doubt were; not because the wrong people administered them, though no doubt some did. The drive for equality failed for a much more fundamental reason. It went against one of the most basic instincts of all human beings. In the words of Adam Smith, that condition is “The uniform, constant, and uninterrupted effort of every man to better his condition”—and, one may add, the condition of his children and his children’s children. Smith, of course, meant by that condition not merely material well-being, though certainly that was one component. He had a much broader concept in mind, one that included all of the values by which men judge their -success—in particular the kind of social values that gave rise to the outpouring of philanthropic activities in the nineteenth century.

When the law interferes with people’s pursuit of their own values, they will try to find a way around. They will evade the law, they will break the law, or they will leave the country. Few of us believe in a moral code that justifies forcing people to give up much of what they produce to finance payments to persons they do not know for purposes they may not approve of. When the law contradicts what most people regard as moral and proper, they will break the law—whether the law is enacted in the name of a noble ideal such as equality or in the naked interest of one group at the expense of another. Only fear of punishment, not a sense of justice and morality, will lead people to obey the law.

When people start to break one set of laws, the lack of respect for the law inevitably spreads to all laws, even those that everyone regards as moral and proper—laws against violence, theft, and vandalism. Hard as it may be to believe, the growth of crude criminality in Britain in recent decades may well be one consequence of the drive for equality.

In addition, that drive for equality has driven out of Britain some of its ablest, best-trained, most vigorous citizens, much to the benefit of the United States and other countries that have given them a greater opportunity to use their talents for their own benefit. Finally, who can doubt the effect that the drive for equality has had on efficiency and productivity? Surely, that is one of the main reasons why economic growth in Britain has fallen so far behind its continental neighbors, the United States, Japan, and other nations over the past few decades.

We in the United States have not gone as far as Britain in promoting the goal of equality of outcome. Yet many of the same consequences are already evident—from a failure of egalitarian measures to achieve their objectives, to a reshuffling of wealth that by no standards can be regarded as equitable, to a rise in criminality, to a depressing effect on productivity and efficiency.

Capitalism and Equality

Everywhere in the world there are gross inequities of income and wealth. They offend most of us. Few can fail to be moved by the contrast between the luxury enjoyed by some and the grinding poverty suffered by others.

In the past century a myth has grown up that free market capitalism—equality of opportunity as we have interpreted that term—increases such inequalities, that it is a system under which the rich exploit the poor.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Wherever the free market has been permitted to operate, wherever anything approaching equality of opportunity has existed, the ordinary man has been able to attain levels of living never dreamed of before. Nowhere is the gap between rich and poor wider, nowhere are the rich richer and the poor poorer, than in those societies that do not permit the free market to operate. That is true of feudal societies like medieval Europe, India before independence, and much of modern South America, where inherited status determines position. It is equally true of centrally planned societies, like Russia or China or India since independence, where access to government determines position. It is true even where central planning was introduced, as in all three of these countries, in the name of equality.

Russia is a country of two nations: a small privileged upper class of bureaucrats, Communist Party officials, technicians, and a great mass of people living little better than their great-grandparents did. The upper class has access to special shops, schools, and luxuries of all kind; the masses are condemned to enjoy little more than the basic necessities. We remember asking a tourist guide in Moscow the cost of a large automobile that we saw and being told, “Oh, those aren’t for sale; they’re only for the Politburo.” Several recent books by American journalists document in great detail the contrast between the privileged life of the upper classes and the poverty of the masses. Even on a simpler level, it is noteworthy that the average wage of a foreman is a larger multiple of the average wage of an ordinary worker in a Russian factory than in a factory in the United States—and no doubt he deserves it. After all, an American foreman only has to worry about being fired; a Russian foreman also has to worry about being shot.

China, too, is a nation with wide differences in income—between the politically powerful and the rest; between city and countryside; between some workers in the cities and other workers. A perceptive student of China writes that “the inequality between rich and poor regions in China was more acute in 1957 than in any of the larger nations of the world except perhaps Brazil.” He quotes another scholar as saying, “These examples suggest that the Chinese industrial wage structure is not significantly more egalitarian than that of other countries.” And he concludes his examination of equality in China, “How evenly distributed would China’s income be today? Certainly, it would not be as even as Taiwan’s or South Korea’s. . . . On the other hand, income distribution in China is obviously more even than in Brazil or South America. . . . We must conclude that China is far from being a society of complete equality. In fact, income differences in China may be quite a bit greater than in a number of countries commonly associated with ‘fascist’ elites and exploited masses.”

Industrial progress, mechanical improvement, and all the great wonders of the modern era have meant relatively little to the wealthy. The rich in Ancient Greece would have benefited hardly at all from modern plumbing: running servants replaced running water. Television and radio—the patricians of Rome could enjoy the leading musicians and actors in their home, could have the leading artists as domestic retainers. Ready-to-wear clothing, supermarkets; all these and many other modern developments would have added little to their life. They would have welcomed the improvements in transportation and in medicine, but for the rest, the great achievements of Western capitalism have redounded primarily to the benefit of the ordinary person. These achievements have made available to the masses conveniences and amenities that were previously the exclusive prerogative of the rich and powerful.

In 1848 John Stuart Mill wrote: “Hitherto it is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day’s toil of any human being. They have enabled a greater population to live the same life of drudgery and imprisonment, and an increased number of manufacturers and others to make fortunes. They have increased the comforts of the middle classes. But they have not yet begun to effect those great changes in human destiny, which it is in their nature and in their futurity to accomplish.”

No one could say that today. You can travel from one end of the industrialized world to the other and almost the only people you will find engaging in backbreaking toil are people who are doing it for sport. To find people whose day’s toil has not been lightened by mechanical invention, you must go to the non-capitalist world: to Russia, China, India, or Bangladesh, parts of Yugoslavia or to the more backward capitalist countries—to Africa, the Mideast, South America and, until recently, Spain or Italy.

A society that puts equality—in the sense of equality of -outcome—ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests.

On the other hand, a society that puts freedom first will, as a happy by-product, end up with both greater freedom and greater equality. Though a by-product of freedom, greater equality is not an accident. A free society releases the energies and abilities of people to pursue their own objectives. It prevents some people from arbitrarily suppressing others. It does not prevent some people from achieving positions of privilege, but so long as freedom is maintained, it prevents those positions of privilege from becoming institutionalized; they are subject to continued attack by other able, ambitious people. Freedom means diversity but also mobility. It preserves the opportunity for today’s disadvantaged to become tomorrow’s privileged and, in the process, enables almost everyone, from top to bottom, to enjoy a fuller and richer life.

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Text of the Declaration of Independence

Note: The source for this transcription is the first printing of the Declaration of Independence, the broadside produced by John Dunlap on the night of July 4, 1776. Nearly every printed or manuscript edition of the Declaration of Independence has slight differences in punctuation, capitalization, and even wording. To find out more about the diverse textual tradition of the Declaration, check out our Which Version is This, and Why Does it Matter? resource.

        WHEN in the Course of human Events, it becomes necessary for one People to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the Separation.           We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness—-That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes; and accordingly all Experience hath shewn, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security. Such has been the patient Sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the Necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The History of the present King of Great-Britain is a History of repeated Injuries and Usurpations, all having in direct Object the Establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid World.           He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public Good.           He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing Importance, unless suspended in their Operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.            He has refused to pass other Laws for the Accommodation of large Districts of People, unless those People would relinquish the Right of Representation in the Legislature, a Right inestimable to them, and formidable to Tyrants only.           He has called together Legislative Bodies at Places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the Depository of their public Records, for the sole Purpose of fatiguing them into Compliance with his Measures.           He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly Firmness his Invasions on the Rights of the People.           He has refused for a long Time, after such Dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative Powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the Dangers of Invasion from without, and Convulsions within.            He has endeavoured to prevent the Population of these States; for that Purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their Migrations hither, and raising the Conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.           He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary Powers.           He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the Tenure of their Offices, and the Amount and Payment of their Salaries.           He has erected a Multitude of new Offices, and sent hither Swarms of Officers to harrass our People, and eat out their Substance.           He has kept among us, in Times of Peace, Standing Armies, without the consent of our Legislatures.           He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.           He has combined with others to subject us to a Jurisdiction foreign to our Constitution, and unacknowledged by our Laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:           For quartering large Bodies of Armed Troops among us:           For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from Punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:           For cutting off our Trade with all Parts of the World:           For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:           For depriving us, in many Cases, of the Benefits of Trial by Jury:           For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended Offences:           For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an arbitrary Government, and enlarging its Boundaries, so as to render it at once an Example and fit Instrument for introducing the same absolute Rule into these Colonies:           For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:           For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with Power to legislate for us in all Cases whatsoever.           He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.           He has plundered our Seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our Towns, and destroyed the Lives of our People.           He is, at this Time, transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the Works of Death, Desolation, and Tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty and Perfidy, scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous Ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized Nation.           He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the Executioners of their Friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.           He has excited domestic Insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the Inhabitants of our Frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known Rule of Warfare, is an undistinguished Destruction, of all Ages, Sexes and Conditions.           In every stage of these Oppressions we have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble Terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated Injury. A Prince, whose Character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the Ruler of a free People.           Nor have we been wanting in Attentions to our British Brethren. We have warned them from Time to Time of Attempts by their Legislature to extend an unwarrantable Jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the Circumstances of our Emigration and Settlement here. We have appealed to their native Justice and Magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the Ties of our common Kindred to disavow these Usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our Connections and Correspondence. They too have been deaf to the Voice of Justice and of Consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the Necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of Mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace, Friends.           We, therefore, the Representatives of the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the World for the Rectitude of our Intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly Publish and Declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be, Free and Independent States; that they are absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political Connection between them and the State of Great-Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm Reliance on the Protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.

Signed by Order and in Behalf of the Congress, JOHN HANCOCK, President.

Attest. CHARLES THOMSON, Secretary.

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In the decades following the Declaration of Independence, Americans began reading the affirmation that “all men are created equal” in different ways than the framers intended, says Stanford historian Jack Rakove .

With each generation, the words expressed in the Declaration of Independence have expanded beyond what the founding fathers originally intended when they adopted the historic document on July 4, 1776, says Stanford historian Jack Rakove. (Image credit: Getty Images)

On July 4, 1776, when the Continental Congress adopted the historic text drafted by Thomas Jefferson, they did not intend it to mean individual equality. Rather, what they declared was that American colonists, as a people , had the same rights to self-government as other nations. Because they possessed this fundamental right, Rakove said, they could establish new governments within each of the states and collectively assume their “separate and equal station” with other nations. It was only in the decades after the American Revolutionary War that the phrase acquired its compelling reputation as a statement of individual equality.

Here, Rakove reflects on this history and how now, in a time of heightened scrutiny of the country’s founders and the legacy of slavery and racial injustices they perpetuated, Americans can better understand the limitations and failings of their past governments.

Rakove is the William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies and professor of political science, emeritus, in the School of Humanities and Sciences. His book, Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution  (1996), won the Pulitzer Prize in History. His new book, Beyond Belief, Beyond Conscience: The Radical Significance of the Free Exercise of Religion will be published next month.

With the U.S. confronting its history of systemic racism, are there any problems that Americans are reckoning with today that can be traced back to the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution?

I view the Declaration as a point of departure and a promise, and the Constitution as a set of commitments that had lasting consequences – some troubling, others transformative. The Declaration, in its remarkable concision, gives us self-evident truths that form the premises of the right to revolution and the capacity to create new governments resting on popular consent. The original Constitution, by contrast, involved a set of political commitments that recognized the legal status of slavery within the states and made the federal government partially responsible for upholding “the peculiar institution.” As my late colleague Don Fehrenbacher argued, the Constitution was deeply implicated in establishing “a slaveholders’ republic” that protected slavery in complex ways down to 1861.

But the Reconstruction amendments of 1865-1870 marked a second constitutional founding that rested on other premises. Together they made a broader definition of equality part of the constitutional order, and they gave the national government an effective basis for challenging racial inequalities within the states. It sadly took far too long for the Second Reconstruction of the 1960s to implement that commitment, but when it did, it was a fulfillment of the original vision of the 1860s.

As people critically examine the country’s founding history, what might they be surprised to learn from your research that can inform their understanding of American history today?

Two things. First, the toughest question we face in thinking about the nation’s founding pivots on whether the slaveholding South should have been part of it or not. If you think it should have been, it is difficult to imagine how the framers of the Constitution could have attained that end without making some set of “compromises” accepting the legal existence of slavery. When we discuss the Constitutional Convention, we often praise the compromise giving each state an equal vote in the Senate and condemn the Three Fifths Clause allowing the southern states to count their slaves for purposes of political representation. But where the quarrel between large and small states had nothing to do with the lasting interests of citizens – you never vote on the basis of the size of the state in which you live – slavery was a real and persisting interest that one had to accommodate for the Union to survive.

Second, the greatest tragedy of American constitutional history was not the failure of the framers to eliminate slavery in 1787. That option was simply not available to them. The real tragedy was the failure of Reconstruction and the ensuing emergence of Jim Crow segregation in the late 19th century that took many decades to overturn. That was the great constitutional opportunity that Americans failed to grasp, perhaps because four years of Civil War and a decade of the military occupation of the South simply exhausted Northern public opinion. Even now, if you look at issues of voter suppression, we are still wrestling with its consequences.

You argue that in the decades after the Declaration of Independence, Americans began understanding the Declaration of Independence’s affirmation that “all men are created equal” in a different way than the framers intended. How did the founding fathers view equality? And how did these diverging interpretations emerge?

When Jefferson wrote “all men are created equal” in the preamble to the Declaration, he was not talking about individual equality. What he really meant was that the American colonists, as a people , had the same rights of self-government as other peoples, and hence could declare independence, create new governments and assume their “separate and equal station” among other nations. But after the Revolution succeeded, Americans began reading that famous phrase another way. It now became a statement of individual equality that everyone and every member of a deprived group could claim for himself or herself. With each passing generation, our notion of who that statement covers has expanded. It is that promise of equality that has always defined our constitutional creed.

Thomas Jefferson drafted a passage in the Declaration, later struck out by Congress, that blamed the British monarchy for imposing slavery on unwilling American colonists, describing it as “the cruel war against human nature.” Why was this passage removed?

At different moments, the Virginia colonists had tried to limit the extent of the slave trade, but the British crown had blocked those efforts. But Virginians also knew that their slave system was reproducing itself naturally. They could eliminate the slave trade without eliminating slavery. That was not true in the West Indies or Brazil.

The deeper reason for the deletion of this passage was that the members of the Continental Congress were morally embarrassed about the colonies’ willing involvement in the system of chattel slavery. To make any claim of this nature would open them to charges of rank hypocrisy that were best left unstated.

If the founding fathers, including Thomas Jefferson, thought slavery was morally corrupt, how did they reconcile owning slaves themselves, and how was it still built into American law?

Two arguments offer the bare beginnings of an answer to this complicated question. The first is that the desire to exploit labor was a central feature of most colonizing societies in the Americas, especially those that relied on the exportation of valuable commodities like sugar, tobacco, rice and (much later) cotton. Cheap labor in large quantities was the critical factor that made these commodities profitable, and planters did not care who provided it – the indigenous population, white indentured servants and eventually African slaves – so long as they were there to be exploited.

To say that this system of exploitation was morally corrupt requires one to identify when moral arguments against slavery began to appear. One also has to recognize that there were two sources of moral opposition to slavery, and they only emerged after 1750. One came from radical Protestant sects like the Quakers and Baptists, who came to perceive that the exploitation of slaves was inherently sinful. The other came from the revolutionaries who recognized, as Jefferson argued in his Notes on the State of Virginia , that the very act of owning slaves would implant an “unremitting despotism” that would destroy the capacity of slaveowners to act as republican citizens. The moral corruption that Jefferson worried about, in other words, was what would happen to slaveowners who would become victims of their own “boisterous passions.”

But the great problem that Jefferson faced – and which many of his modern critics ignore – is that he could not imagine how black and white peoples could ever coexist as free citizens in one republic. There was, he argued in Query XIV of his Notes , already too much foul history dividing these peoples. And worse still, Jefferson hypothesized, in proto-racist terms, that the differences between the peoples would also doom this relationship. He thought that African Americans should be freed – but colonized elsewhere. This is the aspect of Jefferson’s thinking that we find so distressing and depressing, for obvious reasons. Yet we also have to recognize that he was trying to grapple, I think sincerely, with a real problem.

No historical account of the origins of American slavery would ever satisfy our moral conscience today, but as I have repeatedly tried to explain to my Stanford students, the task of thinking historically is not about making moral judgments about people in the past. That’s not hard work if you want to do it, but your condemnation, however justified, will never explain why people in the past acted as they did. That’s our real challenge as historians.

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Melissa De Witte, Stanford News Service: (650) 723-6438; [email protected]

When Thomas Jefferson penned “all men are created equal,” he did not mean individual equality, says Stanford scholar

In the decades following the Declaration of Independence, Americans began reading the affirmation that “all men are created equal” in different ways than the framers intended, says Stanford historian   Jack Rakove .

On July 4, 1776, when the Continental Congress adopted the historic text drafted by Thomas Jefferson, they did not intend it to mean individual equality. Rather, what they declared was that American colonists,   as a people , had the same rights to self-government as other nations. Because they possessed this fundamental right, Rakove said, they could establish new governments within each of the states and collectively assume their “separate and equal station” with other nations. It was only in the decades after the American Revolutionary War that the phrase acquired its compelling reputation as a statement of individual equality.

Here, Rakove reflects on this history and how now, in a time of heightened scrutiny of the country’s founders and the legacy of slavery and racial injustices they perpetuated, Americans can better understand the limitations and failings of their past governments.

Rakove is the William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies and professor of political science, emeritus, in the School of Humanities and Sciences. His book,   Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution  (1996), won the Pulitzer Prize in History. His new book,   Beyond Belief, Beyond Conscience: The Radical Significance of the Free Exercise of Religion will be published next month.

With the U.S. confronting its history of systemic racism, are there any problems that Americans are reckoning with today that can be traced back to the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution?

I view the Declaration as a point of departure and a promise, and the Constitution as a set of commitments that had lasting consequences – some troubling, others transformative. The Declaration, in its remarkable concision, gives us self-evident truths that form the premises of the right to revolution and the capacity to create new governments resting on popular consent. The original Constitution, by contrast, involved a set of political commitments that recognized the legal status of slavery within the states and made the federal government partially responsible for upholding “the peculiar institution.” As   my late colleague Don Fehrenbacher   argued, the Constitution was deeply implicated in establishing “a slaveholders’ republic” that protected slavery in complex ways down to 1861.

With each generation, the words expressed in the Declaration of Independence have expanded beyond what the founding fathers originally intended when they adopted the historic document on July 4, 1776, says Stanford historian Jack Rakove.

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America's Founding Documents

The Declaration of Independence

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. Preamble to the Declaration of Independence

The Declaration of Independence states the principles on which our government, and our identity as Americans, are based. Unlike the other founding documents, the Declaration of Independence is not legally binding, but it is powerful. Abraham Lincoln called it “a rebuke and a stumbling-block to tyranny and oppression.” It continues to inspire people around the world to fight for freedom and equality.

The Declaration of Independence (front)

The condition of the parchment Declaration of Independence is a sign of the place it has held in the hearts of many Americans. Years of public display have faded and worn this treasured document. Today it is maintained under the most exacting archival conditions possible.

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The Declaration of Independence (back)

When we removed the Declaration of Independence from the Rotunda in 2001 to prepare it for a new case, we were able to look at the reverse side. No treasure map was found, but there were two lines of text, "Original Declaration of Independence dated 4th. July 1776" written along the bottom edge. This docket (identifying label) could be read when the document was rolled up for storage.

Stone Engraving of the Declaration of Independence

In 1820, the Declaration of Independence was already showing signs of age. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams commissioned printer William J. Stone to make a full-size copperplate engraving. This plate was used to print copies of the Declaration. The 1823 Stone engraving is the most frequently reproduced version of the Declaration.

Read Articles About the Declaration

• The article "The Declaration of Independence: A History," provides a detailed account of the Declaration, from its drafting through its preservation today at the National Archives.
• "The Stylistic Artistry of the Declaration of Independence" by Stephen Lucas. By closely examining its language, this perceptive article sheds light on the Declaration as a work of literature and of persuasion. From Prologue, Spring 1990.
• The Virginia Declaration of Rights strongly influenced Thomas Jefferson in writing the first part of the Declaration of Independence. It later provided the foundation for the Bill of Rights.

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The Abolitionists

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Created Equal Scholar Essays

The National Endowment for the Humanities and the Gilder Lehrman Institute invited four distinguished scholars to write brief essays related to each of the documentaries. These essays explore the larger themes and questions at the heart of each film and can serve as a guide in creating public programs.

Richard S. Newman on The Abolitionists

The abolitionist struggle was America’s first civil rights movement. For nearly a century following the American Revolution, waves of abolitionists fought to end both slavery and racial injustice. From visionary free black activists and runaway slaves to shrewd lawyers and advocates of civil disobedience, the abolitionist movement was also diverse and constantly changing. As the aging abolitionist hero Frederick Douglass commented in the 1890s, it would take American historians years to understand just what abolitionism had accomplished.  In many ways, we are still learning about the brave men and women who put their lives on the line to slay slavery.

Although the most important era of abolitionism occurred before the Civil War, the movement had deep roots in American society. In 1688, a quarter of religious visionaries issued the Germantown Protest challenging Quakers to eradicate slaveholding in their midst. A bevy of runaway ads in colonial newspapers also testified to enslaved peoples’ constant stride for freedom. By the revolutionary era, these antislavery traditions inspired the creation of the world’s inaugural abolition societies. The Pennsylvania Abolition Society debuted in 1775; twenty years later, abolitionist groups stretched from Rhode Island to Virginia.  Led by men of conscience (such as Quaker pamphleteer Anthony Benezet) as well as antislavery jurists (including constitutional law expert William Rawle), early abolitionists identified bondage as an affront to American liberty. Success came slowly but abolitionists did achieve key results. By the early 1800s, they had secured gradual abolition laws (or outright bans on bondage) throughout the North, built international antislavery alliances, and passed slave-trading bans in Great Britain and the United States. Even black abolitionists expressed optimism about the future. “It is in our posterity enjoying the same privileges with your own,” legendary black activist Richard Allen challenged white Americans in 1794, “that you ought to look for better things.”

Slavery’s massive growth derailed Allen’s dreams. By the 1830s, when the United States contained roughly two million enslaved people (or quadruple the number of 1776), a more confrontational generation of abolitionists appeared in American society. Spurred by free black activism in the North, as well as British and Caribbean antislavery struggles, abolitionists now espoused immediate (not gradual) attacks on slavery; they also eschewed moderation. Influenced by religious revivalism, immediate abolitionists called slavery a sin and Americans hypocrites for not embracing universal emancipation. “I will not equivocate,” William Lloyd Garrison famously declared in The Liberator in 1831, “and I will be heard!”

Yet the growth of abolitionism after 1830 depended on a multitude of activists. Once marginalized, African Americans and women now played essential roles in the movement. In towns large and small, African Americans built powerful abolitionist networks. In Philadelphia James Forten provided funding to Garrison’s radical newspaper while in New York David Ruggles convinced white as well as black activists to aid fugitive slaves. Following in the footsteps of the militant black pamphleteer David Walker, antebellum African Americans envisioned themselves as the vanguard of a global freedom struggle.

Women’s activism also transformed American abolitionism. As orators, editors, writers and organizers, women pushed abolitionism into churches, homes, neighborhoods, newspapers, and schools. From Massachusetts to Illinois, women circulated antislavery petitions and raised critical funds for the cause. They did more. Betsy Mix Cowles, an Ohio schoolteacher turned radical abolitionist, gained a national reputation for her support of both antislavery political parties and runaway slaves. Sojourner Truth, the ex-slave turned abolitionist orator, captivated audiences everywhere with her rousing calls for freedom.  By the time Harriet Beecher Stowe published her best-selling antislavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852, abolitionist women had been battling bondage for decades.

Both men and women knew that abolitionist activism was exhilarating yet dangerous. Whites North and South argued that abolition would undo the nation’s economy. Many whites also opposed abolitionist visions of racial equality. Abolitionists were verbally threatened, and sometimes brutally assaulted, above as well as below the Mason-Dixon line. In May 1838, it took all of four days before a Philadelphia mob torched Pennsylvania Hall, a spectacular new building dedicated to abolitionist free speech. The hall was never rebuilt.

Such opposition prompted further abolitionist change. In the 1840s and 1850s, as slavery grew still further, abolitionists formed political parties, supported physical confrontations with slaveholders, and advocated compensated emancipation in the South. If abolitionists could not end slavery before the Civil War erupted in 1861, they still exerted a powerful influence on the nation’s political culture. By attacking slavery as unjust and championing racial equality in the ringing tones of the Declaration of Independence, abolitionists envisioned the United States as anything but a slaveholding Republic. Indeed, it may have taken sectional strife to eradicate American bondage. But without generations of abolitionists seeking liberty and justice across the color line, the very idea of racial equality would have been impossible, now no less than in 1865.

Richard S. Newman is Professor of History at Rochester Institute of Technology. He is the author of Freedom’s Prophet: Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers and The Transformation of American Abolitionism: Fighting Slavery in the Early Republic.

Humanities Themes from The Abolitionists

The Truly Long Civil Rights Movement: White and black abolitionists struggled to end both slavery and racial injustice from 1776 through the 1860s, providing subsequent generations of civil rights activists with a language of equality.

Diversity and Multiculturalism: The abolitionist movement was comprised of diverse sets of reformers from the American Revolution onward. African Americans played a particularly important role in the rise of abolitionist militancy after 1830. But black and white women were also key players in the abolitionist movement during the nineteenth century, demonstrating the importance of diversity in American reform movements.

Free Speech and Democratic Activism in Civil Society: The abolitionists consistently pushed the boundaries of free speech and democratic activism in American civic culture. Anti-abolitionists North and South often opposed abolitionists’ rights to speak out against slavery, petition on behalf of black freedom and equality, and engage in civil disobedience to achieve racial justice. In this way, abolitionists offered a towering example of social movement activism to subsequent generations of reformers, from labor activists to women’s rights groups to modern environmentalists.

Global Scope of Abolitionism: The abolitionist struggle always encompassed international reformers and influences, from American alliances with British activists seeking to end the slave trade at the close of the eighteenth century to black reformers’ longstanding use of the Haitian Rebellion as inspiration for civil rights militancy in the nineteenth century.

W. Fitzhugh Brundage on Slavery by Another Name

For African Americans after the Civil War, the abolition of slavery in 1865 was a landmark in human history. But blacks came to recognize that while slavery had been abolished, their newly secured freedom was at risk despite the Reconstruction-era constitutional amendments. New forms of coerced labor proliferated in the post-Civil War South, as trumped-up criminal charges were used as a pretext for the virtual re-enslavement of thousands of able-bodied southern black men and women.

The origins of these exploitative practices lay in a toxic confluence of postwar economic dislocation, weak state institutions, and white racism. Impoverished southern state governments had to contend with the expense of a new class of state charges—black criminals. Previously, slaveholders had punished black criminals privately. Now the costs of criminal justice ballooned. With state governments desperate to offload the expenses associated with convicts and white landlords eager to secure cheap labor, state and local authorities began to lease out convicts to contractors who paid the convicts’ legal fees.

While some white workers fell victim to the convict-leasing system, the economic vulnerability of African Americans meant that black men and women were the system’s principal targets. Thousands of innocent blacks were coerced into forced labor between the 1870s and 1940s. Countless black men were charged with the spurious offense of vagrancy, which could have been applied to almost any black man in the rural South. Then they were brought before a county judge and fined. Because many of the men couldn’t afford to pay the fines, they were sentenced to a term of hard labor. Court and legal fees were levied. As a result, their sentences were often extended; they would work for a portion of their sentence to pay off their fines for vagrancy and the remainder of their sentence to pay off their court fees. After their sentence was determined, their labor and, for all practical purposes, their bodies were sold to mine owners, lumbermen, planters, railroads, or corporations. In return the company paid a monthly fee to the county, which would eventually satisfy the convicts’ outstanding fines and fees.

The thousands of black people falsely imprisoned in mines, lumber camps, brickyards, quarries, and plantations were victims not of an anonymous bureaucracy but rather of the face-to-face cruelty and contrivances of white authorities, both prominent and obscure. Once the convicts left their cells in the South’s local jails, they became de facto slaves to the companies who had leased them. With virtually no legal liability for the treatment of the convicts, convict contractors ruthlessly exploited them. Convicts were maimed by their work and by the punishments they received from their guards, and many died from malnutrition and disease. Only a minority survived the ordeal with their bodies intact.

For many white southerners, this system fostered the belief that there was a rise in black crime, cementing the relationship between criminality and race. Among African Americans, it created profound and enduring disillusionment about the significance of emancipation.

Occasionally, an upstanding state prison official would protest the convict-leasing system. But wherever convict leasing was commonplace, too many local officials profited from the system to tolerate serious reform. Even the federal government turned a blind eye to the practice. During Theodore Roosevelt’s administration, the Department of Justice displayed concern about coerced labor in the South. Although a few courageous white southerners took the lead in exposing the practice of convict leasing and secured the conviction of several prominent planters and officials, prosecution through the courts failed to end convict leasing. The planters and companies that leased convicts learned that skilled legal defenses could ensure that even successful prosecutions for peonage only won token fines.

It was not until the 1940s that economic changes and political pressures finally brought an end to the exploitation of southern convicts. Changes in southern agriculture and industry had diminished the need for large numbers of disposable laborers. World War II lent strength to organized efforts by the NAACP and labor unions to end convict leasing. Concerned about egregious violations of civil rights that tarnished the United States’ international reputation, President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1941 ordered the Department of Justice to prosecute convict labor cases. Only then did the Justice Department hasten the end of an institution that had thrived for more than three quarters of a century after the abolition of slavery.

W. Fitzhugh Brundage is the William B. Umstead Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Department of History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is the author of A Socialist Utopia in the New South: The Ruskin Colonies in Tennessee and Georgia, 1894–1901 and Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880–1930.

Humanities Themes from Slavery by Another Name

The Limits and Contingency of Freedom: The history of “neo-slavery” or convict leasing in the South reminds us that freedom for former slaves and their descendants was insecure. Even before Jim Crow segregation was codified in law at the turn of the twentieth century black freedom was severely circumscribed in the South. Neither the Thirteenth Amendment, which ended slavery, nor the Fourteenth Amendment, which provided a guarantee of due process for each American, offered protection against the convict-leasing system. Indeed, the prevalence and persistence of convict leasing illustrates how laws can be used to limit and erode seemingly fundamental and inviolable rights.

Race and American Criminal Justice: Some whites became ensnared in the convict-leasing system in the South, but they were the exceptions. Black men and women were its principal victims because their rights were vulnerable due to poverty and racism. This system bred among southern African Americans both disillusionment about the significance of emancipation and cynicism about the possibility of true justice in the American South.

Corporate Ethics and Coerced Labor: Some commentators have drawn parallels between the corporate responsibility of companies that exploited slave labor in Nazi Germany and that of southerners who bought convict labor. The point of this comparison is not to equate the Nazi Holocaust with racial oppression in the Jim Crow South, but rather to accentuate the complicity of southern white elites and national corporations in the exploitation of de facto slaves.

Convict Leasing and Organized Labor in the American South: Not only did convict leasing produce great wealth, but it also served as a bulwark against unionized labor in the South. For U.S. Steel and other industrial firms convict laborers were a dependable and cheap pool of labor that posed no threat of unionizing or striking. A corporate officer explained to Alabama officials the benefit of convict leasing: “The chief inducement for the hiring of convicts was the certainty of a supply of coal for our manufacturing operations in the contingency of labor troubles.” Thus, the coerced labor of convicts eroded the economic leverage and opportunities for free black and white laborers in southern industry.

Jane Dailey on The Loving Story

Laws governing interracial sex and marriage followed the arrival of the British in North America in the seventeenth century and lasted for more than three centuries. These laws remained on the books in many states until 1967, when the United States Supreme Court found them unconstitutional in Loving v. Virginia , its only civil rights decision ever to appeal to fundamental principles of “vital personal rights.”

Prior to the Civil War, the Constitution guaranteed individual rights only against the federal government. After the Civil War, however, the Fourteenth Amendment (1868) expressly defined national citizenship and prohibited any state to deprive any person of “life, liberty or property without due process of law,” to deny any citizen the “privileges and immunities” of citizenship, or to deny any person “the equal protection of the laws.”

After the Supreme Court effectively neutralized this amendment through its decisions in the Civil Rights Cases (1883) and Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), southern states built legal barriers between blacks and whites in nearly every aspect of life. Blacks and whites were nursed in separate hospitals, educated in separate schools, buried in separate cemeteries, and forbidden to marry each other in the majority of American states, especially in the West, like California.

For segregation to work, people had to be racially categorized by law. Depending on the state and the decade, people who were more than one-fourth black, one-eighth black, one-sixteenth black, even one-thirty-second black, were categorized for the purpose of Jim Crow as “non-white.” Even so, racial identity was mutable and grounded in behavior as well as genealogy. Recognizing decades of white men’s sexual relationships with black women, usually slaves, an 1835 South Carolina statute explained that a person’s racial status “is not to be determined solely by the distinct and visible mixture of negro blood, but by reputation, by his reception into society, and his having commonly exercised the privileges of a white man.” This “social construction” of “race” allowed for some flexibility within the white supremacist regime, which ironically enabled states to harden the boundaries between black and white.

By 1900, white supremacy and racial purity had become articles of civic faith and Jim Crow laws abounded. Virginia’s 1924 Act for the Preservation of Racial Integrity was the logical culmination of this trend, and provided that any trace of nonwhite ancestry (the infamous “one drop” rule) defined someone as ineligible to marry anyone defined as white. This statute became the blueprint for Nazi Germany’s 1935 Blood Protection Law, which prohibited the marriage of gentiles and Jews.

The secular racial regime was backed up by the belief of many white southern Christians that segregation was God’s will, that God separated the races to preserve their purity, and that disobeying that plan was blasphemous. Civil rights leaders responded with religious arguments of their own, insisting that “segregation is a blatant denial of the unity which we all have in Jesus Christ.” The “God is on our side” argument became a staple of civil rights advocates, but was fiercely resisted by white champions of racial segregation.

Unlike voting rights and segregated public education, racially restrictive marriage laws were never challenged on a mass level. Neither were they of special interest to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Congress, or the executive. This was in marked contrast to the emerging category of human rights associated with the United Nations, whose 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights condemned bans on interracial marriage and upheld freedom of choice in marriage.

Preceded by a 1942 decision that defined marriage and procreation together as “one of the basic civil rights of man” that could not be restricted in the absence of a compelling state interest, the Supreme Court finally declared racially restrictive marriage laws unconstitutional.** In Loving , a unanimous Court explained that “the freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men. . . . To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State’s citizens of liberty without due process of law. . . . Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.”

**The 1967 case Loving v. Virginia was a suit brought by Mildred and Richard Loving, an interracial couple, to overturn the 1924 Virginia act.

Jane Dailey is Associate Professor of American History in the Department of History, the College, and the Law School at the University of Chicago. She is the author of several books about the post-emancipation South, including Before Jim Crow: The Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia and The Age of Jim Crow: A Norton Documentary History.

Humanities Themes from The Loving Story

The Social Construction of Race: Racial identity was composed of many elements, some genealogical, some social. Violators of racially restrictive marriage laws undermined clear notions of “race” and contributed to a southern disposition towards anxiety about racial identity.

Religion and Social Movements: Both sides of the Civil Rights Movement rooted their positions in Christian righteousness, bringing religion back into civil discourse in a way not seen since the abolitionist movement.

Civil Rights and Human Rights: The fight for civil rights merged in the mid-twentieth century with new arguments for human rights that broadened the spectrum of fundamental freedoms.

Law and Social Movements: The repeal of anti-miscegenation laws was accomplished entirely through the courts, and highlights the complementary roles of mass protest and judicial intervention.

Raymond Arsenault on Freedom Riders

May 21, 1961: a Sunday in the age of John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier, when freedom was on the line in Montgomery, Alabama. Over a thousand black Americans, including Martin Luther King, Jr., had gathered at the First Baptist Church to support a band of activists known as Freedom Riders. Just blocks from the state capitol, where Jefferson Davis had sworn allegiance to the Confederate cause in 1861, First Baptist had been the setting for a number of dramatic events. But the church had never witnessed anything like the situation that was unfolding. For hours the Freedom Riders sang songs and listened to testimonials about courage and commitment. But as hope rose inside the sanctuary, a mood of defiance developed outside.

By nightfall the church was besieged by white protesters defending segregation. Screaming racial epithets and hurling Molotov cocktails, the protesters threatened to overwhelm a beleaguered group of federal marshals who feared that the mob was intent on burning the church to the ground. When it became obvious that the marshals were overmatched, the governor of Alabama, John Patterson, deployed a National Guard battalion to disperse the crowd. It was morning before the streets were secure enough for the Freedom Riders to leave the church. Loaded into a convoy of military trucks, the Freedom Riders were escorted back to a black community that must have wondered what other challenges lay ahead. The battle of May 21 was over, but the struggle for racial justice would continue.

How the Freedom Riders came to be at First Baptist, why they inspired so much hope and fear, and what happened to them—and the hundreds of other Americans who joined their ranks—are the questions that drive the American Experience documentary Freedom Riders . These are questions that should engage anyone concerned with freedom, justice, and the realization of America’s democratic ideals.

With plot lines rivaling those of the most imaginative fiction, the saga of the Freedom Rides is an almost unbelievable story of sacrifice and triumph. In 1961, during the first year of Kennedy’s presidency, more than 400 Americans participated in an experiment designed to awaken the conscience of the nation. Inspired by visions of social revolution, these Freedom Riders challenged the mores of a segregated society by performing a disarmingly simple act. Traveling in small interracial groups, they sat where they pleased on buses and trains and demanded unrestricted access to terminal restaurants and waiting rooms, even in areas of the Deep South where such behavior was forbidden.

Patterned after a 1947 Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) project known as the Journey of Reconciliation, the Freedom Rides began in May with a group of thirteen Riders recruited by CORE’s staff. By early summer, the Freedom Rides had become a movement involving hundreds of activists representing a number of civil rights organizations. Attracting diverse volunteers, the movement transcended the traditional approach to civil rights, taking the struggle out of the courtroom and into the streets and jails of the Jim Crow South. Empowered by two U.S. Supreme Court decisions mandating the desegregation of interstate travel facilities, the Freedom Riders flouted segregation statutes, all but daring southern officials to arrest them.

The Riders challenged federal officials to uphold the constitutional right to travel without being subjected to degrading racial restrictions. They did so knowing that their actions would almost certainly prompt a savage response from white supremacists. Invoking the philosophy of nonviolence, they put their bodies on the line for racial justice. After marauding Klansmen used bombs to disrupt the original CORE Freedom Ride, student activists from Nashville organized a Ride of their own, forcing federal officials to intervene on their behalf. Later, when Mississippi officials placed hundreds of Freedom Riders in prison and imposed bond payments that threatened the financial solvency of CORE, the net effect was to strengthen rather than weaken the movement.

While they characterized the Civil Rights Movement as an irrepressible force, the Freedom Riders knew all too well that they faced enemies backed by regional and national institutions. Fortunately, those who participated in the Freedom Rides had access to institutions of their own. When they boarded the “freedom buses” in 1961, they knew that others had gone before them, figuratively in the case of abolitionists and the soldiers who marched into the South during the Civil War and Reconstruction, and literally in the case of the CORE veterans who participated in the 1947 Journey of Reconciliation. The successes of the NAACP and the strengthening of the Civil Rights Movement since the Second World War, along with the decolonization of the Third World, infused Freedom Riders with the belief that the arc of history was tilting in the right direction. Progress was possible, and the Riders were determined to do all they could to accelerate the pace of change.

Raymond Arsenault is the John Hope Franklin Professor of Southern History and co-director of the Florida Studies Program at the University of South Florida, St. Petersburg. He is the author of several books, including Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice, which became the basis for the Freedom Riders documentary .

Humanities Themes from Freedom Riders

Equality under the Law: The Freedom Riders attacked the discriminatory effects of Jim Crow segregation by demanding equal treatment for all American citizens engaged in interstate travel. In defying state and local segregation law, they were seeking compliance with two U.S. Supreme Court decisions, Morgan v. Virginia (1946) and Boynton v. Virginia (1960), both of which upheld equality under the law in interstate travel.

Grassroots Protest: Enlisting hundreds of participants and drawing  thousands of supporters from all walks of life, the Freedom Rides demonstrated the power of popular insurgency in American life. As one of the first successful direct action campaigns of the 1960s, the Freedom Rides served as a template for a wide range of popular movements that influenced American life in later years. Expanding the realm of citizen politics, the Rides confirmed the notions that reform from below is possible, and that ordinary people can do extraordinary things.

The Use of Nonviolence to Achieve Change: The Freedom Riders’ strict adherence to nonviolence—as both a tactical and philosophical matter—was an essential element of their success. When they were assaulted by angry white supremacists, their consistent refusal to strike back greatly enhanced the moral power of their arguments for change. Without this display of discipline and uncommon courage, the Riders’ challenge to racial discrimination might have failed, and their example of responsible activism would have had far less force.

Raymond Arsenault’s remarks are adapted from the Introduction to Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007) .

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ARE ALL LAWS CREATED EQUAL? A STUDY OF STUDENT-ATHLETE NAME, IMAGE, AND LIKENESS STATE LAWS

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• Many states have implemented legislation allowing student-athletes to be compensated for their Name, Image, and Likeness while competing for the NCAA in collegiate athletics. These state laws have forced the NCAA to adjust their stance on amateurism, one of the main pillars the NCAA has rested on since its inception. All NCAA rules are set at a consistent national standard. With the introduction of state laws, it changes the consistent landscape into varying restrictions and opportunities state by state. This study analyzes the restrictiveness between the student-athlete compensation state laws as they vary state to state.
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The 6 Women Who Shaped America’s Most Macho President

In “The Loves of Theodore Roosevelt,” Edward F. O’Keefe explores the informal kitchen cabinet that helped Roosevelt, the 26th president, speak softly and carry a big stick.

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By Ted Widmer

Ted Widmer is a distinguished lecturer at the Macaulay Honors College of the City University of New York and the author of “Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington.”

THE LOVES OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT: The Women Who Created a President, by Edward F. O’Keefe

We in the United States have yet to be officially led by a woman in the presidency. But in subtle ways, we have come closer than we might think. In certain presidencies, first ladies played vital roles behind the scenes, guiding their husbands with both emotional support and shrewd political advice. Dolley Madison springs to mind; so does Edith Wilson, who wielded near-presidential powers as she restricted access to her husband, Woodrow, after a series of strokes that weakened his body and mind.

Surprisingly, a president who was almost cartoonishly masculine can now be added to the list of leaders who depended on their better halves; Theodore Roosevelt was surrounded by female advisers throughout his life. As Edward F. O’Keefe explains in his new book, “The Loves of Theodore Roosevelt,” the coterie of Teddy-whisperers included his mother (called Mittie), two wives (Alice and Edith), two talented sisters (known as Bamie and Conie) and his daughter Alice.

All were strong individuals, albeit very different. Two left the story early — on Valentine’s Day in 1884, when Roosevelt lost his wife and his mother on the same day. His sisters were there to help him pick up the pieces, and his second wife, Edith, became the perfect political partner: gracious, shrewd and strong (as she needed to be, to restrain his occasional errors in judgment). Collectively, Edith, Bamie and Conie formed a kitchen cabinet of sorts, and O’Keefe presents Roosevelt’s presidency as something of a feminist achievement.

At first blush, this is counterintuitive, for T.R., as he was widely known, was an Alpha president for an Alpha age. As the United States began to flex its muscles on the world stage, he was everywhere — building up the Navy, charging up San Juan Hill and generally doing the kinds of things men liked to do. He compared himself to a Bull Moose , talked of big sticks and celebrated masculine achievement whenever he could. Famously, he lionized “the man in the arena,” his face “marred by dust and sweat and blood.” For T.R., life was a public bromance.

But he was not, actually, alone in the arena. As O’Keefe shows, with meticulous research, Roosevelt’s wife and sisters were always there, in the background, cleaning up messes and helping him to make good decisions. The title is slightly misleading; this is not a potboiler about romantic escapades, but rather a careful study of a president whose career was shaped from the outset by exceptional advisers.

O’Keefe covers Roosevelt’s entire life. The book will not supplant the richly textured biographies written by David McCullough , Edmund Morris and Kathleen Dalton, though the author draws upon them, nor does it try to — it pursues a particular agenda, and with vigor. The chief executive of a foundation behind a presidential library built to honor Roosevelt in North Dakota, O’Keefe is clearly bullish on the Bull Moose.

But at the same time, his book brims with perceptive insights about the challenges faced by a young man who was not always in control of himself. Roosevelt came very near to marrying his second wife, Edith, before he ever knew his first. “Teedie” and “Edie” were in love as teenagers. But one day, seemingly furious after a difficult rejection, he rode recklessly, harming his horse and nearly harming himself. When a dog came too close, he pulled out a pistol and — shades of Kristi Noem, the current South Dakota governor — shot it dead, “rolling it over very neatly as it ran alongside the horse.”

After that painful episode, Roosevelt fell in love with another woman, Alice Lee, whom he met while at Harvard (where his undergraduate thesis was titled “Practicability of Giving Men and Women Equal Rights”) and married after a long and at times difficult courtship. But her early death, in childbirth, nearly unmoored him, and his attempt at healing, by traveling to the Badlands of the Dakotas, was made possible only by the willingness of Bamie to care for his infant daughter.

Eventually, he entered politics, and his sisters were there to steady him, offering counsel and complete loyalty. Roosevelt rose for his own qualities — the book is a little stinting on that topic — but also because of the foundation they and Edith provided. Women could not even vote while he was in office. But they responded to him, and vice versa.

Edith was especially crucial to his career, and O’Keefe argues persuasively for her importance as a Rough Rider in her own right, creating the role of the modern first lady. He makes an arresting point when he suggests that a horse-riding accident removed Edith from Roosevelt’s inner circle of advisers at precisely the moment when he was deciding whether to enter the 1912 campaign as a third-party candidate for what would have been a third term.

With her in the room, that decision might have turned out differently. But that campaign, doomed to failure as it was, did bring consolations, including the full-throated participation of his daughter, Alice, an immense political talent in her own right.

The final years always bring a wistful reckoning. Roosevelt’s strident interventionism, and aggression toward Germany, ultimately contributed to America’s entry into World War I. His children enlisted and fought heroically. But the family was shattered by the death of his son Quentin, and by the time T.R. died in 1919 — the same year the 19th Amendment granted women the right to vote — he seemed diminished, a figure from a distant age.

Still, as O’Keefe reminds us, that picture is not entirely accurate. Even at the end, he was moving forward, embracing racial equality in his last speech and urging rights for women. Edith lived until 1948, advising politicians to the end.

There are occasional misfires with the writing (the story of T.R. in Cuba repeats the phrase “crowded hour” over and over, making it crowded indeed). But O’Keefe has performed a most valuable service by reminding us how much Theodore Roosevelt, the most virile of presidents, owed to the brilliant women in his life.

THE LOVES OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT : The Women Who Created a President | By Edward F. O’Keefe | Simon & Schuster | 447 pp. | $30.99

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