Obama Must Offer an Alternative Historical Narrative

• Published in: Valley news (West Lebanon, N.H.)
• Main Author: Ellis, Joseph J
• Format: Newspaper Article
• Language: English
• Published: White River Junction, Vt Valley News 13.05.2012
• Subjects: Jefferson, Thomas
• ISSN: 1072-6179

The most famous speech in American history begins this way: "Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." Lincoln's eloquence at Gettysburg was lyrical but not historically accurate. For no such thing as a "new nation" had been proposed in 1776; only a temporary union of sovereign states, declaring their independence from Britain, then presumably going their separate ways. Indeed, the magic words of the Declaration of Independence to which Lincoln referred, Thomas Jefferson's words starting with "We hold these truths to be self-evident," located sovereignty in neither the national nor state governments but in the souls of individual citizens. Taken literally, this was a recipe for anarchy. Taken seriously, this meant that any robust expression of government power was put on the permanent defensive. Government was "them," not "us." Finally, at the dawn of the 20th century, both Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson led another expansion of federal authority, eventually consolidated in Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. FDR explained it best in his 1932 Commonwealth Club address in which he described the end of the frontier, the shift from an agrarian to an industrial society and the social and economic inequalities and dislocations generated by laissez-faire capitalism (that is, the Depression) as developments requiring what we now call the liberal state. Government had become "us" rather than "them."