American Scripture

BRIAN: Welcome to BackStory — the show that explains the history behind today’s headlines. I’m Brian Balogh. If you’re new to the podcast, each week, along with my colleagues Nathan Connolly, Joanne Freeman, and Ed Ayers, we explore a different aspect of American history.

If you’re not new to the podcast, you might know that for close to ten years, Ed and I hosted BackStory along with our friend and colleague Peter Onuf. Peter is professor emeritus of history at the University of Virginia. Well, I’m pleased to tell you that Peter is back with us today. Hello Peter, and welcome back!

PETER: Hey Brian thanks, it’s great to be here.

BRIAN: Peter you’re probably wondering why you’re sitting in this studio. You’re there to help us kick off a new series we’re doing here at BackStory. These are episodes in which all five of BackStory’s hosts, yes Peter you are one, will look back on their time with the show and bring you — the listener — some of our favorite moments.

So think of this episode as the Best of BackStory — the Peter Onuf edition. Which means, Peter, you need to walk us through what we’ll be hearing today.

PETER: It’s a pleasure, and I’m really flattered to having a whole show devoted to some of the fun I had with you and Ed, and various people that I had the chance to interview. One of the great things about the show is the interview segment, especially when you get a good friend on and you get some good laughs.

So, I’ve chosen a couple of interviews and then a riff that you and Ed and I did, which was a lot of fun. So in this episode you’re going to learn how the meaning of independence has changed over time. And you’ll learn about the invention of Santa Claus in the 1820s.

PETER: Brian, if I asked you to quote something from the Declaration of Independence, what would it be?

BRIAN: Oh, c’mon Peter, that’s pretty self evident.

PETER: Well, Brian, good for you you got the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence. I think as a serious student you have to read the whole thing, because it gets much more interesting at the end. In fact, it’s the last paragraph that’s the most important, at least according to the late Pauline Maier. And we had a nice conversation some years ago about July 4th.

So Brian as you listen to this you’ll see what good fun Pauline and I had, and it was always fun to talk with Pauline Maier, a great historian and a good friend. It’s not always easy to do interviews. It can be hard to get a good conversation going, but never with Pauline. On this occasion, she had some very fresh insights to share.

One of the things I want you to listen for is how unimportant that quotation that you lifted from the Declaration really is. All those ideas about equality, I know they’re important to you and me and to most Americans today, but that wasn’t the most important thing in 1776. It was in the last paragraph, where we actually declared independence.

But what does that mean to be independent? Because that’s the takeaway. It means that you have a people that declares independence. Where did that people come from? This is the creative magic of the Declaration of Independence is to conjure into existence a people and a nation.

BRIAN: I have to say Peter, that branding, calling it “Declaration,” that’s pretty smart.

PETER: You’re right, I do declare, I think you’ve got something there.

So, here is our conversation from the show Independence Daze – that’s with a “Z” folks – the History of July 4th.

PAULINE MAIER: When I was first asked to write a quote “modern history of the Declaration of Independence,” I turned it down. I said, that document is hyped out of all proportion to its real significance. I mean, obviously the Declaration of Independence was important, but what was its importance? We all think of it as important for the first couple phrases of the second paragraph, but that’s part of a later life of the document.
The most important part of the document in the summer of 1776 was the last paragraph. And people say, that last paragraph? That’s the part that– (SINGING) da da da da da da da– declared independence. And that was what was new. The statements of Enlightenment principles in the second paragraph that we all remember were not at all unique to the document. It appeared other places, most notably in the Virginia Declaration of Rights, which had been drafted by George Mason and was adopted in June.

PETER: So the important parts of the Declaration at the time were all those grievances and complaints culminating in the Declaration, with the fanfare that you indicated. The first parts that we remember most are boilerplate potted social contract theory.

PAULINE MAIER: I think that’s pretty much the way it looked initially. The question is how attention turned from the last paragraph to the second paragraph. And that takes about 20 years. And I think the process of change starts in the 1790s, after we have the Constitution and we have what we remember as the Bill of Rights.
What is clear is that there is nothing in either the Constitution or the first 10 Amendments that repeats those assertions that are in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence. There’s no statement about equality. There’s nothing about natural rights that God gave all men.
Now, as the children of Englishman, and we hadn’t quite stopped being the children of Englishmen in the 1790s, people felt the need of a document to cite to ground those beliefs. And the declaration was made to serve that function because it was the only national document that performed that function.

PETER: Pauline, one of the things I love about your book is that you ask us to think about the Declaration as a people’s declaration. The people identified with these principles, of course, they read them in different ways, and they explained them away in some cases. Is it still a people’s document in the same way it was during those decades of early American history when abolitionists and women at Seneca Falls in 1948–

PAULINE MAIER: –used it. Yeah. I think it is still a people’s document, in that people often justify whatever cause they’re defending, however flaky, in terms of the Declaration of Independence. I mean, people send me clippings all the time. I remember there was somebody off the coast of Maine who was having great trouble. He used to dig clams at a neighboring beach, and the town decided to make their beach residents only. And he argued he had the Constitution on his side because it said he had a right to pursue happiness. And his happiness was digging clams on the neighboring beach.

PETER: Happy as a clam. Right.

[LAUGHING]

PAULINE MAIER: Well, the problem is, of course, among other things, it wasn’t the Constitution. It wasn’t the Declaration of Independence, and it wasn’t at all clear that it referred to digging clams.

PETER: There seems to me a fundamental contradiction or tension. If you think about the Declaration in its own context, it makes a kind of a federal state that’s recognized by other powers of the Earth. That’s the whole point of the Declaration, is to get recognition. But as you were just saying about your clam digger, the Declaration really has a libertarian clause now, and a document that made the state is an anti-statist text.

PAULINE MAIER: That’s a point. That’s a good point.

PETER: So it suggests in a way that these founding texts or documents are subject to multiple infinite interpretations– of course, the Constitution is– and that every generation finds its own equilibrium, ways to read those text together.

PAULINE MAIER: You know, if it wasn’t true, they’d be dead. I mean, this is what Lincoln said when Stephen Douglas, let’s say, the Declaration was meant to declare independence. Historically, of course, Stephen Douglas was right. Morally, Abraham Lincoln was right. It is a protector of personal liberty, he said. If it wasn’t that, if it just declared independence, it’s history, in the bad sense. That is, it’s buried in the past. And he had that wonderful phrase, it’s like bandages left on the battlefield after the battle is over.
I mean, it’s really buried in the past. You had to find new meaning in it that was relevant to your life, to his life, to the lives of people of a later time, or it was just sort of some archival piece of for leftover junk from the past.

PETER: Well, thank you so much, Pauline, for helping us understand better the Declaration of Independence. It’s been great talking to you.

PAULINE MAIER: Thank you Peter. This was fun.

PETER: Pauline Maier was a professor of history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the author of many books, including “American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence.” She died in 2013 and is greatly missed.