Thomas Jefferson’s Promise of Equality in the Declaration of Independence of 1776 created false expectations for most poor and white colonial Americans, enslaved black people, indigenous people, new immigrants and women. Many founding fathers and framers of the Constitution were slaveowners, but only a minority of those slaveowners professed to abhor slavery. In a draft of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson complained that King George “has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him”. Yet, the passage was stricken in order to gain consensus among the rebelling colonies, and because freeing the enslaved would cause tremendous trouble in the South. But even if they could have abolished slavery, not many could fathom a society in which free, formerly enslaved people of color could live side by side with white people and their former enslavers. Not even Abraham Lincoln.
Mark Twain purportedly said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” In my book Democracy of the Wild West, I identify four periods in which progress was made towards the fulfilment of the Promise of Equality for immigrants as well as the formerly enslaved or their descendants despite stiff resistance in the guise of the Supreme Court, religious fanaticism, discrimination and voter suppression.
The four periods of progress
First, the struggle to end slavery defined most of the nineteenth century. The adopted Constitution entrenched slavery in the structures of government. And as the country expanded westward out of a divine sense of Manifest Destiny, the battle over the spread of slavery threatened to pull the precarious Union apart. I recently visited Ashland, the estate of Henry Clay, one of the most underrated American statesmen. Clay was known as The Great Compromiser, instrumental as he was in forestalling an early break-up of the United States over slavery. Still, he could not prevent further polarization which resulted, for instance, in the worst Supreme Court decision in history in 1850, when the Court declared black people “so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man is bound to respect (…).” Irish Catholic immigrants were also considered inferior and non-white in order to justify their discrimination. Henry Clay died in 1852 and did not see the rise of nativism and the anti-immigrant Know Nothing party, or the violent run-up to the Civil War.
Interior of Ashland, the estate of Henry Clay in Lexington, Kentucky
Secondly, after that Civil War legal equality came to all who were born in the United States with the Reconstruction Amendments to the Constitution. But the Reconstruction optimism was short-lived. As most of the attention went to the expansion westwards, it became the time of the Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow. This system of oppression targeted mainly the formerly enslaved, but also immigrants, this time from places like China. The Supreme Court rubberstamped a doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ that kept people of color in separate facilities throughout society. It was the so-called Gilded Age during which the ‘robber barons’, the oligarchs of that time, caused even further economic inequality in America. In the early twentieth century European immigrants from Italy and the wider Mediterranean were met with the same scorn as the Irish decades earlier. America First became a popular slogan and was a call to keep America from the world, and to keep the world from America: not only America First, but Americans First. But who was to be included in the term ‘American’?
It took a World War fought outside of the US and a moral awakening at home for America to take another step, the third period. Starting with a new Supreme Court that overruled the principle of ‘separate but equal’ in 1954, the successes of a sometimes violent civil rights movement reached a legal climax in the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act in the 1960s. Finally, the constitutional right to equality was protected by law. But the seeds of resistance to that rising equality were sown early on. Fears of communism and a changing social order sparked another religious awakening and groups like the John Birch Society advocated extremism to combat those fears. A broad conservative movement was harnessed by Richard Nixon through to Ronald Reagan. The Religious Right got a permanent seat at the table. A colorblind society was the new stated goal, but the War on Drugs became the new Jim Crow.
Today, we live in a fourth period that started with the election of Barack Obama in 2008. It saw the advent of not only constitutional equality and its protection, but also that of equal opportunity and equal participation. The backlash to this step towards the fulfilment of the Promise of Equality came fast and furious. Obama’s election gave birth to the Tea Party, but also to the Black Lives Matter movement. The Tea Party revived the fear of communism, which has always been a thin disguise for the fear of equal status of colored people in America and the loss of political power. Meanwhile, the Black Lives Matter movement showed America that people of color were demanding their equal position in society as well as equal treatment. Immigration is once again at the top of the political agenda. Even the Supreme Court has been in the mix, eroding the protections of the Voting Rights Act and the power of the federal government bit by bit, piece by piece.
The myth called America
‘Make America Great Again’ – MAGA – and ‘America First’ are therefore not only rehashed slogans of the past, but symptoms of the same ills that have plagued the United States from its very founding. Demographic and other societal changes, such as secularization and technological innovations can be scary things, which explains why a relatively small minority always makes sure to make its voice heard loud and clear. Because a final step towards the fulfilment of the Promise of Equality means irreparable harm to the America they know or to the America they want.
The America that some people want can be summed up in a modified slogan: Make America John Wayne Again. It is their mythical America, in which John Wayne and other god-fearing and gun-toting heroes peacefully govern the country, more or less democratically, and in a ‘colorblind’ manner. In this America, everyone just has to work hard and take care of themselves – lift themselves up by their bootstraps, as the saying goes. Violence is sometimes necessary, as is the imposition and maintenance of traditional, Protestant norms and values. The social and racial hierarchy is a given, and the federal government – any government – is deeply mistrusted and kept at a distance. But in reality, that America has never existed.
In the next installment we’ll learn about the second promise, the Promise of the Consent of the Governed, and the paradox it entails.
Kenneth Manusama is an international lawyer and America expert. He completed his studies at VU Amsterdam and taught at New York University and Amsterdam University College. Kenneth is a regular guest speaker at various Dutch media outlets and programs, and an expert on the US Constitution and legal aspect of American politics. He is also the host of the podcast Amerikaanse Toestanden and the author of Democratie van het Wilde Westen.
