A Clot of Revolutionaries

  Last week I repeated what has become an annual ritual for me: each Fourth of July I read the Declaration of Independence anew.  As always, I was affected to the verge of tears.  Why?  Because a band of revolutionaries again spoke directly to me across a span of almost 250 years.

  I am forever stunned that colonial America, sparsely populated as it was, could accumulate one of those rare "clots of excess genius" about which I have previously written [1, 2].  To see how rare it was, consider this:  If one were to count only seven key founding fathers—John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and George Washington—and scale their number up from the population of the colonies to America's present population, one would have to find over a thousand today who have such political and philosophical brilliance.  I would be hard put to name half a dozen.

  What brings me to tears is not just the Enlightenment ideals of the revolutionaries—as valid today as they were then—and the fact that they were acted on so valiantly.  I am also carried away by the soaring prose of the Declaration.  As familiar as the words are, I cannot help but quote from them here—not from the litany of grievances against George III, trenchant as it is, but from the timeless response to those grievances:  

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.  …

We, therefore, … 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 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.

Don't those words still speak to billions of people now living, who need their encouragement?

  The Declaration united what until then the British had belittled as a ragtag, leaderless collection of insurrectionary militias.  Were it not for the Declarations's stirring articulation of colonial aspirations, the rebellion might indeed have fizzled.  Instead, it created a nation, thereby standing as a major turning point in human history.

  Yet here we are, a quarter millennium later, still witnessing insurrectionary movements the world over that are trying, in the words of the Declaration, "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."  Most are inchoate, unable to create a vision for a prospective nation, and for that reason often cannot establish a coherent polity even if the insurrection itself succeeds.

  How fortunate for America that our clot of revolutionary leaders coalesced so successfully when it did!  I can never complete my celebration of the Fourth without yet again entering their minds by reading the Declaration and thanking them for the heritage they passed on to us.

America's Attic

  I've just finished a scavenger hunt in America's attic, looking for a very particular kind of treasure.  Before I describe my finds though, let me explain how I got there in the first place.

  The same hosts who held the reception that introduced me to the Crowden School hosted another last month, this time in honor of Richard Kurin, undersecretary for history, art and culture of the Smithsonian Institution.  Kurin, who oversees about half of the Smithsonian's activities, gave a talk about how the Institution is fulfilling the vision of its founding donor, James Smithson, a British scientist who died in 1829, willing his entire $500,000 estate to create “at Washington an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge.”  (It was an amazing gift, because Smithson had never set foot in the United States!)  Since that endowment, the Smithsonian has become the world’s largest complex of museums and research centers, encompassing 19 museums, the National Zoo and nine research facilities.  Kurin's overview of all that was eye-opening for me; I'd had no idea of the vastness of it all.

  As I left the reception, I reflected shamefully that I had almost never visited Smithsonian facilities during the dozens of times I visited Washington during my professional career.  For the few purloined hours when I was able to break away from meetings, my favorite destination was the National Gallery, which is not part of the Smithsonian.  Of the Smithsonian's complex, I remember visiting only the Hirshhorn Gallery and the Air and Space Museum.  So, of the Institution's 137 million artifacts, works of art and specimens (of course, never all on display at once, some never displayed), I probably saw substantially fewer than a thousand.

  Most of these items are small (they would have to be, since there are so many millions of them to store), but some are monumental, like the space shuttle Discovery and even Julia Child's kitchen!  Kurin's perspective is that each is a lens that brings into focus part of America's history—its wars, politics, popular movements, constantly changing social setting, racial and ethnic heritages, and technological drivers.

  A little over a year ago, Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum, published A History of the World in 100 Objects.  The objects he selected were all man-made, all owned by the British Museum, and range from a two-million-year-old chopping tool to a modern credit card.  He used a picture of each as a companion for an essay on its surrounding times.  Now Kurin is writing a book on the history of America in 101 objects owned by the Smithsonian.  (How's that for one-upmanship?)  I have no idea how he will choose those objects from a haystack more than a million times that large, even allowing for the many duplicates in it.

  That's what brought me to my scavenger hunt: I was trying to guess what those 101 objects will be.  Here are fifteen possibilities, the result of a rambling on-line search through the Collections section of the Smithsonian's website.  I list them in the serendipitous order in which I came upon them:

• A piece of Plymouth Rock, representing the migration of Europeans to settle in America.

• Eli Whitney's cotton gin, which made slavery an economically viable and indispensable institution for the South.

• Any one of Thomas Edison's many inventions—say the light bulb or the phonograph—representing one of the pre-eminent inventors in American history and the vast impact of such inventors and inventions on our civilization.

• One of the early personal computers—a Commodore or an Apple—which augured the stunning shift to our now-webcentric lives.

• A Model-T Ford, the car that almost alone made Americans mobile.

• The Woolworth's "Whites Only" lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, where in 1960 four African-American college students staged a sit-in, an event that helped ignite that decade's civil rights movement.

• The chairs and table from the Appomattox Court House that Generals Grant and Lee used when signing the documents ending the Civil War.

• The pen used by President Lincoln to sign the Emancipation Proclamation.

• George Washington's Revolutionary War uniform.

• The Wright Flyer, which made the first heavier-than-air flight, an invention that further increased our mobility.

• The shuttle Discovery, representing the advent of the Space Age.

• The ruby slippers worn by Judy Garland in "The Wizard of Oz," symbolizing both the power of the movies in our national culture and the advent of Technicolor.

• The original Star-Spangled Banner from Fort McHenry in 1814—an emblem of the fight to defend the young America from invasion and the inspiration for our National Anthem.

• A poster from the Longest Walk, a 1978 American Indian civil rights march from California to Washington, D.C., protesting the continuing devastation of reservations and violation of treaties and tribal rights that have characterized the fate of Native Americans.

• A barracks sign from one of the relocation centers in which Japanese-Americans were interned during World War II.

Pictures of just those fifteen items, arranged in chronological order with essays attached, would illuminate significant portions of American history.  There would still be huge gaps (like the Depression, World War I and the Vietnam War), but I've left Kurin with 86 more objects to fill them in!

  You should try this game.  I think you'll find yourself in a delightful rummage through the nation's attic, without cobwebs, dust balls or strange odors to offend you!