The second line of America’s famous Declaration of Independence has been called “the most potent single sentence in American history.” Even if we edit the last bit to ‘written in English,’ it might arguably still be true.
The line in question, adopted in Philadelphia by the US Continental Congress on 4 July 1776, runs as follows: “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.”
This exposition of human rights is followed by a derivative social contract that outlines the new republic’s democracy: “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” These went down in history as the words of Thomas Jefferson, a rights-focused lawyer who wrote the document’s first draft.
Some credit for editing it, though, must go to Benjamin Franklin, a scientist who dared fly a kite in a thunderstorm to check if lightning was electricity, as legend has it, and is said to have replaced “sacred & undeniable” with “self-evident” to describe those “truths,” thus giving them an axiomatic twist, a concept whose origin goes back to the early days of math.
This switch is notable because the country’s subsequent success was based not just on liberty, America’s core ideal, but also on its offspring—science.
While foresight is evident in how the US placed universal values over particular pass-downs, myopia marks its record of living up to its own basic ideals. Scandalously, native Americans were peripheral to its vision, with their rights all but ignored. Worse, scarcely was an eyelid bat over the inhuman slavery of folks wrenched from Africa—a horror that persisted for almost a century after equality was held aloft as an axiom of humankind.
Buying the absurdity of a divinely appointed ruler, as argued by Thomas Paine’s 1776 classic Common Sense, was one thing; taking that revolution to its logical conclusion was another.
Even after slavery ended and every adult got the right to vote, the US, for all its economic and tech advances, has been a wobbly upholder of what it deemed self-evident not just among citizens, but everyone.
Seen from overseas, Uncle Sam’s long trail of armed interventions across the globe form a mixed but sorry picture. Its World War II win was heroic, no doubt, given the Nazi evil it fought, but its own ill-treatment of captives over the decades since has smudged its global reputation.
Indeed, exertion of power has gotten the better of its judgement far too often. Perhaps the biggest irony of all has been US backing of Israel’s war on Gaza that neutral scrutiny found genocidal.
To be fair, the US has had significant internal opposition to its conduct abroad. This could be attributed to a sense of values that arose from the sovereignty that its people acquired back in 1776.
It also raises the question of whether the self-corrective impulses of its free market have a political parallel. After all, the demands of capitalism have long shaped US policy. America’s control of the world’s most important price, the cost of capital, is a key aspect of its power.
The more its actions alienate other people, whose opinions it cared for enough to mention in the very first line of its Declaration, the more likely other nations will try to dethrone the dollar as the world’s currency. And it shouldn’t take the sight of a $100 bill, which has Franklin’s image on it, to view that as self-evident too.