In the rotunda at the National Archives Museum in Washington D.C., there is a stone engraving of the parchment Declaration of Independence. The word “equal” appears in that legendary document just two times:
“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”
Or, when a bunch of us folk feel compelled to tell the king to shove it, because God says we have a right to be separate and equal, the least we can do is say why.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…”
Or…. well; that one stands as is. Or does it.
Did our Founding generation use the word “equal” as we use it today? What exactly did they mean by “equal.” What do we believe they meant? More important, what does it mean to us today?
One of the most renowned authorities on history and American studies is Professor Jack Rakove from Stanford. On July 1, 2020, Professor Rakove gave an interview to the Stanford News Service about this very subject of equality as the Framers of our nation’s origins thought about it:
“When Jefferson wrote “all men are created equal” in the preamble to the Declaration, he was not talking about individual equality. What he really meant was that the American colonists, as a people, had the same rights of self-government as other peoples, and hence could declare independence, create new governments and assume their “separate and equal station” among other nations. But after the Revolution succeeded, Americans began reading that famous phrase another way. It now became a statement of individual equality that everyone and every member of a deprived group could claim for himself or herself. With each passing generation, our notion of who that statement covers has expanded. It is that promise of equality that has always defined our constitutional creed.”
The problem for Rakove with the word “equal” as central to our founding is the basic fraud that the word suggests given the nature of our society at our Founding. Naturally, one cannot begin to even mention this word without acknowledging our nation’s original sin of slavery. Professor Rakove ends his interview with this:
“No historical account of the origins of American slavery would ever satisfy our moral conscience today, but as I have repeatedly tried to explain to my Stanford students, the task of thinking historically is not about making moral judgments about people in the past. That’s not hard work if you want to do it, but your condemnation, however justified, will never explain why people in the past acted as they did. That’s our real challenge as historians.”
For me, there is another way to think about the word “equal” in the sense of an individual’s place within a society. And that is to think about equal, not as “same” but as a matter of aspiration, of potential, of opportunity.
The Founding Generation may be thought of as engaging in fraud if and only if you believe that they were trying to put one over on their generation. The problem is that Founders did not actually believe that ALL people were created equal. That is because they actually did not believe that all those who stood upright were “people.” Let’s be real. When the Founders said men, they meant men. They were not including women. When the Founders said men, they meant white men. There is simply no historical evidence to suggest otherwise. Theirs was not fraud, in the sense of mal-intent. Theirs was a belief in natural law, but muddied by ideas about human beings that had yet to be cast aside; ideas that have still not completely been cast aside.
But I believe the Founders did have a further understanding of “equality” as that word has meaning to the establishment of political bonds, of communities. And that understanding uses the word “equal” to refer to equality of opportunity, equal dignity, equal access, equality of the right to “aspire.” That the Founders did not think of such an equality as applicable to all does not mean they did not understand the concept.
To the extent that this latter concept of equality might have been recognizable to the Founders, it is a concept not entirely divorced from succeeding generations. For I do not believe that notions of freedom, liberty and dignity require a literal application in all settings of the word equal as meaning “same.”
If one looks up the definition of “equal” in the dictionary, one will find this:
“being the same in quantity, size, degree, or value;” “a person or thing considered to be the same as another in status or quality;” “be the same as in number or amount.”
The dictionary definitions seem dominated by the concept of “sameness.” But at least when we think of human beings, we can argue that humans are inherently NOT the same. As a strict matter of physicality, men and women are not the same. In the world of sports, despite the debates we continue to have about men’s and women’s sports, unequal salaries, etc., the fact is that the baseball men play in the major leagues is not, for most women, a sport they will ever play in the same way. After the recent college basketball playoffs, when the women drew better television ratings than the men, I said this to a group of friends. The women play basketball looking up; the men play basketball looking down. The women have proved that their version of basketball can be and is just as exciting as the game the men play. But they do not play the game the “SAME” way.
What else suggests that equal and same are not the same? I will never be the same when it comes to mathematics as the MIT graduate with a degree in mathematics. I will never have the same ability to hit a baseball as Freddie Freeman. A person whose education ended in the 6th grade will likely not have the same set of academic skills as a college graduate. In that sense, they are not the same. But are they “equal?”
And there lies the critical point about equality that on a number of levels is a cause for much of our polarization in America today. One of our United States Senators, Sherrod Brown, from Michigan, uses the phrase “the dignity of work” as his central governing theme. His thesis is that there is nothing more important to a person’s feeling of self worth than having a job. In that regard, his argument is for policies and practices that promote equality of opportunity and equal access to information and incentives designed to get people the jobs they seek or want.
The central problem with the “America First” crowd; the isolationists, the people who believe in The Great Replacement theory, the “Christian Nationalists” is that they do NOT believe in referring to “all men are created equal” in a way that others in modern American hear and use that phrase. The vast majority of progressive Americans hear this phrase and believe that all men and all women, no matter their particular station in life, are entitled to equal opportunity, equal dignity and an equal right to dream and aspire to that of which they are capable. The former Americans, dominant today in the MAGA Republican Party and not the Reagan Republican Party, most assuredly do not believe that all in America today and those who aspire to come to our shores should have such equality of opportunity.
Capable. I am reminded of that wonderful phrase from Coach John Wooden. I believe he would agree with me regarding the appropriate place for the word “equal” as a very close relative of the word “success:”
“Success is peace of mind that is the direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you did your best to become the best that you are capable of becoming.”
The “political” angle to Coach’s definition is this. Each person within a community has an obligation and responsibility to “do your best.” The flip side is that each community, through the government it relies upon, has an obligation to adopt and implement policies that say that when a person does his or her best, the corresponding opportunities, access and incentives exist so that the results will more likely than not spell “success.”