The Promise of America: Reflections on Our Founding Ideals, by the National Constitution Center
What were America’s foundational principles? Can those principles change? The distinguished essayists who contributed to The Promise of America bring differing, overlapping perspectives to those questions by focusing on the nation’s cornerstone documents, the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.
The bulk of the 1776 Declaration was a charge sheet against King George III, a sometimes-unfair grievance list against a not-absolute monarch for British policies the revolutionists declared as tyrannical. Their enduring point in that list, concerned taxation without representation, which raised questions they did not immediately answer on how to construct a representational government.
The shot heard round the world was fired from the Declaration’s preamble: “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.”
Those ideas, derived from 18th century British and French philosophers, found their way into declarations of independence from many nations, including Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam, as well as the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In his essay, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch calls the preamble’s ideals as “our nation’s report card,” by which we can assess where we stand against the republic’s bold founding assertions.
Ironies abound. Thomas Jefferson, the Declaration’s principal author, arrived in Philadelphia for the Continental Congress waited on by his enslaved servants, including the brother of Sally Hemings, who bore him children. Patrick “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death” Henry, a slave owner, was troubled by the institution but also by the “inconvenience of living without” the enslaved.
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And yet … and yet: Publishing those ideals released the genie from the bottle. The promise of fairness based on universal human dignity continued to nudge Americans toward that “more perfect union” pledged by the U.S. Constitution (1789), a document that enabled slavery to continue.
As for “the pursuit of Happiness,” the founders didn’t mean mindless consumption or a promise that happiness was inevitable. As Robert P. George (Princeton) explains in his essay, “the Founders viewed the pursuit of happiness as a lifelong quest for character improvement, which requires a commitment to practicing the daily habits that lead to self-regulation, emotional intelligence, flourishing, and growth.” We don’t hear much about that in today’s partisanship.
In his introduction to The Promise of America, retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer stresses that the Constitution’s authors took the principles expressed by the Declaration of Independence as a given. To achieve those ideals, they established a regime where “no part of government would become too powerful.” Breyer adds, “How do we make certain that this experiment succeeds? It is up to us—up to all of us.”
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