(Host) As the 4th of July nears, teacher, historian and commentator Vic
Henningsen suggests that we think carefully about what exactly we’re
celebrating.
(Henningsen) On the muggy morning of June 30th,
1826, a delegation of townsfolk of Quincy, Massachusetts, made a
pilgrimage to the home of their leading citizen, hoping to persuade him
to play the central role in the town’s Fourth of July celebration. This
would be the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of
Independence. Would he lead the parade? Would he make a speech? Would he
at least offer a toast?
Ninety-three years old and ailing, John
Adams was well aware that he had little time left. Commenting on his
health one day, he is supposed to have said: "I have lived in this old
and frail tenement a great many years; it is very much dilapidated; and,
from all I that I can learn, my landlord doesn’t intend to repair it."
Self-deprecating humor aside, Adams knew he was dying. He was struggling
to survive until the 4th – indeed, he would die that day. There was no
way he would, or could, play an active role in Quincy’s celebration.
And
anyway, Adams wasn’t the celebratory type. A skeptic, he rejected the
sunny optimism of Thomas Jefferson, his one-time friend, long-time
political enemy, and now fast friend again, who would also die on the
4th. True son of the Enlightenment, Jefferson believed in the inevitable
perfectibility of man. He saw the American Revolution as only a moment
in the steady march of human freedom everywhere.
But Adams
worried about the inherent fallibility of man. He retained a healthy
dose of New England Puritanism with its strong emphasis on Original Sin
and viewed the future with hope, but without Jefferson’s certainty.
Adams believed that accident, misunderstanding, greed, envy, pride, and
plain old stupidity played significant, at times determining, roles in
human affairs. Nothing was certain.
And so, when asked for a
toast to be offered at the great feast, he responded: "I give you,
‘Independence Forever!" Asked to elaborate, he refused: "Not a word."
But
he actually had elaborated, years before, when he observed that
Americans were "destined in future history to form the brightest or the
blackest page, according to the use or the abuse of those political
institutions by which they shall in time to come be shaped."
In other words, independence was what Americans made of it and would make of it in the future.
Adams
believed that Americans had the capacity to govern themselves wisely,
but he wasn’t convinced that they’d muster the collective will and
self-restraint necessary to do so. History, he noted, provided no remedy
"against the universal gangrene of avarice." "[T]he steady advance of
Wealth," he went on, "has overturned every republic from the beginning
of time."
And so, on this Glorious Fourth, we would do well to
remember Adams’s ambiguous toast – "Independence Forever!" – and take a
moment to ponder what we’re making of it.