Authorship and the Texas textbook dispute
Bob Zadek opened a “Best of” episode by describing a decision he attributed to the conservative Texas textbook writing commission, which he said had voted to excise Thomas Jefferson as a founding political philosopher and to omit him from that listing. Zadek enumerated what he called Jefferson’s accomplishments: writing the Declaration of Independence, writing the Virginia Declaration of Religious Freedom, scholarship of the revolutionary era, service as third president and as first Secretary of State. Best of: Changing the Face of History (2010)
Zadek asked what Jefferson had done wrong and answered with the letter to a Baptist minister in which Jefferson discussed the separation of church and state and wrote the phrase “a wall of separation between church and state.” Zadek characterized that phrase as Jefferson’s interpretation of the Bill of Rights, written in private correspondence, and said the textbook commissioners had decided Jefferson did not sufficiently embrace the church and therefore had to be excised as a founding philosopher. He framed the episode as revisionism and asked whether elected officials should decide what is history. Best of: Changing the Face of History (2010)
The Declaration as a test of assimilation
In a discussion with Yoram Hazony, Zadek distinguished two kinds of diversity. The first, he said, comes from different backgrounds, perhaps racial, and consists of external areas of difference. Where people who look different, speak different and hold other differences in belief system nevertheless sign on to the American system of freedom, individual rights, personal property, doing no harm to others and being protected from harm, Zadek said that diversity is “kind of irrelevant” — they are in the program. He described signing on to the Declaration of Independence, “to be a bit simplistic,” as the marker of membership. Liberalism vs. Nationalism (2018)
Zadek said he was so pro-immigration that he did not fear a wave of immigration from anywhere in the world, on the reasoning that immigrants, whether they know it or not, simply want to participate in the principles in the Declaration of Independence. He asked Hazony whether he was being a bit naive. Hazony answered that he was, a bit, and compared the proposition to going into Iraq and believing that 4,000 years of that country’s history, civilization and religion would evaporate because someone read the Declaration of Independence or an advanced course in Lockean political philosophy. Hazony said that if some number of Iraqis were brought to the United States there was a good chance they would fit in well, but that 100,000 is not the same as a million, a million not the same as 10 million, and 10 million not the same as 100 million. Liberalism vs. Nationalism (2018)
Zadek replied that there was one core difference: immigrants come voluntarily, whereas when the United States goes abroad it imposes its system, so that one case involves coercion and the other is purely voluntary. Liberalism vs. Nationalism (2018)
Benjamin Rush and the signers
Harlo Unger told Zadek that Benjamin Rush was the only MD who signed the Declaration of Independence, and that five others who called themselves doctor had never studied medicine. Unger said Rush was America’s first and, at the time, only great humanitarian, and that almost all the other signers were wealthy merchants, bankers and plantation owners, most of them with slaves. Rush, by contrast, was a man of modest means who actually believed the words of the preamble that all men were created equal and entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and who became the champion of Americans the other founders forgot: women, slaves, indentured workers, laborers, prisoners, the poor, the indigent sick and the mentally ill. Founding Healer (2019)
Unger said that 90% of the population of the United States lived in that other America without money and without education, barred from voting and barred from the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and that neither the Declaration of Independence nor the Constitution ever gave women the right to vote, freed the slaves or gave rights to indentured laborers. In most states, he said, only property owners could vote, so both documents were written by the wealthy for the wealthy. Only Rush signed the Declaration, in Unger’s account, because he heard the cries and pleas of the Americans the other founders forgot, and he sacrificed his life, his fortune and his sacred honor to try to heal and bring justice to them. Founding Healer (2019)
Zadek quoted the closing phrase of the Declaration — “And to these ends, we pledge our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor” — and observed that one cannot pledge much more than that. Unger answered that Thomas Jefferson, who wrote those words, afterward fled to his home in Virginia at Monticello, outside Charlottesville, and never fired a shot against the British, risking neither his life nor his fortune during the Revolutionary War. Founding Healer (2019)
Zadek said he was smiling because he knew Unger was not a great fan of Jefferson, and described Jefferson as a complex and quite hypocritical figure who did not walk the walk but only talked the talk. Zadek said Rush was not a political animal and was a true humanitarian rather than a politician, and that his interest in independence came primarily from the humanitarian benefits he saw in a country true to the principles of the Declaration. Unger agreed and said Rush could not have been a politician because he owned no property, since only property owners could involve themselves in politics. Founding Healer (2019)
Unger described Rush’s route into the Second Congress: Rush, having studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh under the patronage of Benjamin Franklin, returned to America without money, stayed with an older brother in Philadelphia, and went into the poorest sections of the city knocking on doors asking whether anyone needed a doctor. When the second Congress came to Philadelphia to write the Declaration of Independence in reaction to what had happened at Lexington, Rush jumped into a carriage carrying John Adams and Samuel Adams, invited them to stay at the Rush home, and through that friendship was introduced to other members of the Second Congress and was himself named to it. Founding Healer (2019)
Lincoln and the promise of the Declaration
John Cribb told Zadek that the Founders had come under criticism, especially lately, for talking a good game — for writing and talking about equality and freedom while setting up a country that institutionalized racism and slavery. Cribb said Lincoln argued the Founders knew slavery was wrong, and that even slaveholders among them, like Thomas Jefferson, recognized it: in an early draft of the Declaration of Independence Jefferson wrote that slavery is a “cruel war against human nature itself,” and Benjamin Franklin called it an “atrocious debasement of human nature.” America’s Second Founding (2021)
Cribb said Lincoln explained that the Founders realized they could not fight a war against one of the greatest military powers on earth, set up a brand new country, launch an experiment that had never been tried before, hold 13 very different states together and get rid of slavery all at the same time. Lincoln drew a metaphor, Cribb said: the Founders realized slavery was like a cancer in the body politic, but that cutting it out all at once would cause the patient to bleed to death. What they could do, and did, was lay down principles in the Declaration of Independence that spelled the doom of slavery, and they did it on purpose. America’s Second Founding (2021)
Cribb identified those principles as the statement that “all men are created equal” and are all “endowed by their creator with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” He said the declaration of those principles, at a time when the vast majority of people on earth enjoyed little or no freedom, was a magnificent step forward, and the first time in history a nation was created out of the idea that people should be free and govern themselves. Those founding principles, he said, were a promise to future generations, and the Civil War ultimately turned into a fight to redeem that promise for millions of enslaved Americans — which is why Lincoln speaks in the Gettysburg Address of a “new birth of freedom,” a rededication to the ideals in the Declaration. America’s Second Founding (2021)
Cribb said Lincoln understood the founding as tragically flawed by slavery and yet as the glorious beginning of a long and sometimes very hard journey, one that has brought hope and freedom to millions of people both in the United States and around the world. America’s Second Founding (2021)
Across episodes: the Declaration as a standard
The excerpts show the Declaration invoked in more than one episode as a standard against which people and institutions are measured, but they do not show a single question argued through to a changed position. In the Texas textbook episode, Zadek treats the document’s authorship as something worth defending against excision; in the Hazony conversation, he treats assent to its principles as the test of whether newcomers belong, and Hazony pushes back on how far that test can carry; in the Rush episode, Unger measures the signers against the preamble’s promises and finds almost all of them wanting; and in the Cribb episode, Lincoln is presented as reading the Declaration’s principles as a deliberate promise that later generations were obliged to redeem. The treatments differ in emphasis rather than in argument, and no guest in these excerpts disputes the Declaration’s standing as the statement of American founding principles.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not give the date of the Declaration’s adoption, the names of the other signers beyond Rush and the general description of them, or the text of the document beyond the phrases quoted above. They do not state what the Texas textbook commission’s vote actually provided, when it occurred, or what became of it, and they do not identify the Baptist minister to whom Jefferson wrote. The Rush excerpts break off mid-sentence in the middle of a section on intuition and hygiene, and the Hazony excerpt ends with the close of the program, so neither carries its topic to a stated conclusion.