Pod Insights Throughline The story of July 4th is messier than you remember About this episode Devastating compromises. Midnight rides. A nailbiter vote. Statue toppling riots… and the very real possibility of death. This July 4th, we're taking you inside the making of the Declaration of Independence and how, against all odds, a single document introduced the world to a new kind of nation.
Guests:
Walter Isaacson, professor at Tulane University and author of The Greatest Sentence Ever Written.
Denise Kiernan, author of Signing Their Lives Away: The Fame and Misfortune of the Men Who Signed the Declaration and Obstinate Daughters: The Rebels, Writers, and Renegade Women Who Ignited the American Revolution.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 This message comes from the Southern Environmental Law Center. No one voted for dirty air and water. That's why S E L C is fighting back to defend the healthy environment everyone depends on. Because it's not political, it's fundamental. Learn more at S E L C dot org.
0:17 Rund Abdelfatah? June 1776.
0:24 Speaker 02 All these different things had been brewing to make a bad tea joke.
0:30 Rund Abdelfatah? One year into the Revolutionary War, things were not looking good for the newly-formed Continental Army. A guy named George Washington had been put in charge of it, and he was kind of on a losing streak.
0:43 Speaker 03 You have all these people fighting and dying.
0:46 Speaker 02 Things are beginning to come to a head.
0:50 Rund Abdelfatah? Washington was stationed in New York, where the British were closing in fast.
0:56 Speaker 02 Ships were coming in from England, and it was looking as though New York was going to fall.
1:07 Speaker 03 At a certain point, I suspect, they're sort of saying, "Okay, remind me again, what are we fighting for?"
1:13 Rund Abdelfatah? They needed a rally cry to commit people to see the fight through, come what may. So in the face of mounting odds and setbacks, some in the Continental Congress decided they needed a Declaration of Independence.
1:27 Speaker 02 This is who we are, this is a laundry list of what you've done, and I can't be in this relationship anymore.
1:33 Rund Abdelfatah? Over the next month, a declaration was drafted and then announced to the world.
1:39 Rund Abdelfatah? As John Hancock, the president of the Continental Congress, whose signature has become iconic, said at the signing.
1:46 Speaker 03 We must all hang together.
1:48 Rund Abdelfatah? Benjamin Franklin, who needs no introduction, responded.
1:52 Speaker 03 Yes, indeed, we must all hang together, because otherwise, most assuredly, we'll all hang separately.
2:01 Rund Abdelfatah? A dark joke, because the truth was, if the revolution failed, every single person who signed on could be tried and hanged for treason.
2:11 Speaker 03 I think at that point, you're saying, hey, we just reached the point of no return. It means you don't get to turn back, you gotta keep marching ahead.
2:22 Rund Abdelfatah? The Declaration begins...
2:24 Speaker 04 "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..."
2:42 Rund Abdelfatah? But it's the second sentence that everyone knows.
2:45 Speaker 03 The second sentence is a mission statement for our nation, a nation in which the governance comes not from the divine right of kings or the sword of conquerors, but by a social contract that's signaled in the very first word of the sentence: "we."
3:01 Speaker 04 "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."
3:15 Speaker 03 It's a sentence that actually sets a new type of nation on this planet.
3:21 Speaker 04 "That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."
3:29 Speaker 03 This is not the way the world worked 250 years ago, but more than half the nations on earth now are pretty much guided by the principles of that sentence.
3:40 Speaker 04 "That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to affect their safety and happiness."
4:05 Rund Abdelfatah? I'm Randa Abdel Fattah. And this July 4th, on Throughline from NPR, we're doing a kind of document exploder, looking at the story of the Declaration of Independence, the messy drama that surrounded it, and what it all can tell us about how to find our way forward as a country in 2026. Devastating compromises, midnight rides, a nail-biter vote, statue-toppling riots, that's all coming up.
4:41 Speaker 05 Hello, this is Lawrence calling from Zurich, Switzerland, and you're listening to Throughline from NPR.
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4:56 Speaker 06 The 2026 midterm elections are upon us. On November 3rd, voters will determine what the next two years of their local leadership and the balance of national government will look like. Listen to the NPR News Now podcast for all the updates you need ahead of and after November 3rd from NPR News.
5:19 Speaker 07 I'm Kevin Ruess. And I'm Casey Newton. And together, we've been tech journalists for decades. Now, we're your hosts of Machine Gods, a new podcast from NPR that makes sense of what AI means for your work, your life, and all of our futures. Twice a week, we'll be exploring the biggest moves in tech and give you unmatched access to the real titans of industry. Listen to Machine Gods from NPR on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.
5:44 Speaker 07 This week on Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, we talk with fashion designer Daniel Vasevic about why he is in charge of renovating his parents' house. I don't have an architecture degree. Yeah. I'm not an interior designer, but I'm gay. Right.
5:55 Speaker 06 Well, there you are. So how hard can it be? Don't miss our full conversation and the rest of our games. Listen to the Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me podcast in the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.
6:09 Rund Abdelfatah? Part one, The Committee of Five.
6:13 Speaker 03 The Continental Congress in June of 1776 finally decided they had to declare independence. And so they created a committee to explain and declare why they were doing it.
6:28 Rund Abdelfatah? This is Walter Isaacson, professor at Tulane University and author of The Greatest Sentence Ever Written.
6:35 Speaker 02 They were nominated by their fellow Congress.
6:38 Rund Abdelfatah? And this is Denise Kiernan. She's written several books about the Revolutionary Period. Her latest is called
6:44 Speaker 02 Obstinate Daughters: The Rebels, Writers, and Renegade Women Who Ignited the American Revolution.
6:52 Rund Abdelfatah? OK, so this committee that Congress put together consisted of five people.
6:56 Speaker 03 John Adams of Massachusetts.
6:58 Speaker 02 Robert Livingston of New York.
7:00 Speaker 03 You have one slave owner, Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, a working class runaway. Ben Franklin, who had started a print shop, even becomes the president of the Society in Pennsylvania for the abolition of slavery.
7:13 Rund Abdelfatah? And the last guy?
7:14 Speaker 02 Roger Sherman, who started life as a cobbler in Connecticut.
7:17 Speaker 03 And so you had a committee of diverse views and talents, even though they were all white men. But they shared a love of science and they were readers of history.
7:30 Rund Abdelfatah? They'd all read John Locke's Second Treatise on Government.
7:33 Speaker 03 People like John Locke come up with the notion of a social contract as the source of our rights, as the source of our governance.
7:41 Rund Abdelfatah? And Thomas Hobbes.
7:43 Speaker 03 They knew about the state of nature, nasty, brutish, and short.
7:47 Rund Abdelfatah? Jefferson kicks things off and starts writing a first draft.
7:51 Speaker 02 Jefferson basically locks himself away in a place he rented.
7:54 Speaker 03 He's rented a room on Market Street in Philadelphia. And Ben Franklin's house is closer to the river on Market Street. So he sends it by hand.
8:06 Rund Abdelfatah? Not his hand. He's not going to walk it over himself, but someone's hand.
8:11 Speaker 03 We can even imagine maybe Robert Hemings, the enslaved valet, has to bring it down two blocks to Franklin's home.
8:19 Rund Abdelfatah? Robert Hemings, by the way, is the older brother of Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman who is widely believed to have given birth to several of Jefferson's children, children who would also be enslaved by him.
8:33 Rund Abdelfatah? So the draft is delivered to Benjamin Franklin, and there's a note attached to it.
8:38 Speaker 03 Something along the lines, I'm paraphrasing, "Would the good Dr. Franklin, with his great wisdom, please do what he can to improve this draft, because he is much more familiar, etc.?"
8:51 Rund Abdelfatah? This first draft begins...
8:53 Speaker 03 "We hold these truths to be sacred." You go, "sacred?" But then you see the black printer's pen, Ben Franklin's printer's pens with backslashes, crossing out "sacred."
9:06 Rund Abdelfatah? And written in next to it...
9:07 Speaker 03 The word "self-evident." He's saying, "We're trying to create a new type of nation where our rights come from the rationality and from reason, not from the dictator dogma of a particular religion."
9:21 Rund Abdelfatah? Sacred does automatically take you to a religious connotation.
9:25 Speaker 03 Yeah, it takes a religious connotation, but they were deists. They did not believe in a particular dogma or a particular religion. They left it so that everybody could worship even the notion of creation, if you didn't want to believe in a creator.
9:40 Rund Abdelfatah? Over the next couple of weeks, they made a bunch of these kinds of edits.
9:43 Speaker 02 There were lots of different versions that went back and forth.
9:48 Rund Abdelfatah? And while the first part of the Declaration reads like a mission statement,
9:51 Speaker 04 "We hold these truths to be self-evident..."
9:53 Rund Abdelfatah? The rest of it is basically a list of everything the king has done wrong.
9:57 Speaker 04 "He has refused his assent to laws..." "He has forbidden..." "He has dissolved representatives..."
10:02 Speaker 02 He has refused, he has forbidden...
10:03 Speaker 04 "He has obstructed..."
10:04 Speaker 02 He's obstructed...
10:06 Speaker 04 "Cutting off our trade with all parts of the world..."
10:08 Speaker 02 He has endeavored to prevent...
10:10 Speaker 04 "For imposing taxes on us without our consent..."
10:12 Speaker 02 Taking away charters.
10:14 Speaker 04 "He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us."
10:17 Speaker 02 One of the ones that we hear often.
10:19 Speaker 04 "He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts..."
10:22 Speaker 02 "Burned our towns and destroyed the lives of our people."
10:28 Rund Abdelfatah? I'm curious who their audience was. Were they writing this so that King George III would read it? Were they writing it for all the, you know, people they were representing in the colonies to sort of feel like they were unifying as a country?
10:41 Speaker 03 Yeah, there were three or four audiences.
10:44 Rund Abdelfatah? The people in the American colonies.
10:46 Speaker 03 You have to remember, at the beginning of 1776, most Americans did not want to break from England. They wanted representation, but they were not trying to overthrow the control of the king.
11:01 Rund Abdelfatah? England's enemies.
11:02 Speaker 03 Our revolution against England was actually a part of a much larger war, which was a war basically between France and England. Then we're going to make it part of this larger war, and France will support us.
11:16 Rund Abdelfatah? And their colleagues in Congress.
11:18 Speaker 02 This would have to go on to be approved by Congress itself, right?
11:24 Rund Abdelfatah? They need votes from representatives from the 13 colonies, north to south. By early July, their draft was ready, and they took it to Congress. But before the language could be finalized, a vote was set for July 2, 1776.
11:40 Speaker 02 The vote on July 2 is, "Are we going to declare independence from England?"
11:46 Rund Abdelfatah? If the answer was no, the Declaration of Independence would be stopped in its tracks.
11:51 Speaker 02 There was incredible amount of debate.
11:53 Rund Abdelfatah? The evening before the vote, they took an informal poll, and...
11:57 Speaker 02 It did not appear it was going to pass.
12:04 Rund Abdelfatah? Coming up, the midnight ride that saves the Declaration of Independence.
12:18 Speaker 07 Hi there. This is Francesca Vjulic Kennedy. I'm calling in from Brooklyn, New York. You're listening to Throughline from NPR.
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13:47 Rund Abdelfatah? Part two, The Midnight Ride.
13:54 Rund Abdelfatah? On the night of July 1, 1776, Caesar Rodney received an urgent message.
14:00 Speaker 02 You have to get up here.
14:02 Rund Abdelfatah? He was in Delaware, his home state, overseeing some military plans. The message said a vote was set to happen in Congress the following day in Philadelphia to decide whether they would declare independence from England. And at that moment, the two other Delaware delegates were divided on that question, one for, one against. Without Caesar Rodney's vote, Delaware would be counted as a stalemate, and the vote might fail.
14:30 Speaker 02 And Rodney was not a physically particularly well man.
14:34 Rund Abdelfatah? He was described as, quote, "the oddest looking man in the world." Tall, thin, and slender as a reed, pale. His face is not bigger than a large apple. Severe asthma and a long battle with facial cancer had left him disfigured and frail. But he rides through the night, 80 miles on horseback. Thunder echoing above him.
15:00 Rund Abdelfatah? Rain pouring down on him.
15:03 Rund Abdelfatah? Mud everywhere.
15:05 Speaker 02 And he makes it just in the nick of time to vote on July 2.
15:11 Rund Abdelfatah? Still in his riding clothes, Rodney arrives, a scarf wrapped around his scarred face. And he casts the deciding vote for independence. Legend has it, he said, quote, "As I believe the voice of my constituents and of all sensible and honest men is in favor of independence, and my own judgment concurs with them, I vote for independence."
15:39 Rund Abdelfatah? So then, if the vote happened on July 2, why do we commemorate July 4? What's the big deal about July 4?
15:46 Speaker 02 So basically, between the 2nd and the 4th, now you have, Congress has to approve this language that the Committee of Five came up with.
15:54 Rund Abdelfatah? The vote on the 2nd established, yes, they are declaring independence. But they needed to have the language in that declaration approved by Congress, which wouldn't happen until the 4th, after more tweaking. And in some cases, a lot more than tweaking.
16:10 Speaker 02 A lot of the language around slavery was, was taken out.
16:15 Rund Abdelfatah? The Committee of Five's version had a whole section condemning the king for his role in the slave trade.
16:23 Speaker 02 He 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, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain, determined to keep open a market where men should be bought and sold. He has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce, referencing a promise of freedom that was made to enslaved individuals
17:06 Speaker 02 if they were willing to leave their enslavers and join up with the British, which did have a very significant impact on how the war played out in certain parts of the colonies.
17:17 Rund Abdelfatah? That whole thing was...
17:18 Speaker 02 Did not make it.
17:20 Rund Abdelfatah? They were not mincing words. But many Americans in the colonies were profiting from the slave trade and the industry it propped up. So before the Declaration could be approved by enough members of Congress, that passage was cut.
17:35 Speaker 03 Now, everybody can debate whether or not you should have made those compromises. You can have historians say, "That was evil." In some ways, it was. You could also have historians say, "If you didn't do it, you would never have the colonies creating a union."
17:56 Rund Abdelfatah? Jefferson himself was a slave owner. They knew that the gap between the words that they were writing and the reality that they were living and that the country was going to be living for the foreseeable future were going to be at odds.
18:13 Speaker 03 Jefferson himself wrote that sentence while he's enslaving people.
18:18 Rund Abdelfatah? Around this time, Jefferson was enslaving close to 200 people.
18:22 Speaker 03 So yeah, you've got a lot of contradictions in there. It's an incredibly important moral issue. But it wasn't the main issue that they had to contend with. Probably the main issue was, were we a federation of states or were we one nation? Should Congress have equal votes per state? Should it be proportional representation?
18:44 Rund Abdelfatah? A lot of the thorniest questions remained unanswered, a problem for another day. But on that day, July 4, 1776, a revised version of the Committee of Five's Declaration of Independence was approved. Now they needed to let the world know about it.
19:02 Speaker 02 So July 4, it goes to printer John Dunlap, who prints up 200 copies. And this is not-- one of the things about the Declaration of Independence is we think there's that one really pretty copy with the great handwriting that everybody signed. That's not the case. Not all the pretty-- nothing fancy. Straight up typeset.
19:24 Speaker 03 The day they write the Declaration, parchment copies go out and they ride from Philadelphia to the southern tip of Manhattan in New York.
19:33 Speaker 02 Continental Army Headquarters is in New York City at this time.
19:38 Speaker 03 That's where George Washington and his troops are.
19:40 Speaker 02 George Washington says, "I want the Declaration of Independence to be read aloud to the troops."
19:48 Speaker 03 They're still trying to convince people in the colonies.
19:50 Rund Abdelfatah? Estimates range, but it's believed that at no time did more than 45% of colonists support the war. And around a third of colonists fought for the British.
20:01 Speaker 03 So you gotta unify the country. You gotta get Europe on our side. And maybe you have to explain to yourselves, this isn't just about taxes on tea, or a Boston Tea Party, or a problem we're having with parliament over stamp acts or something. We now are on a larger mission. We're creating a new type of nation.
20:22 Rund Abdelfatah? And this document is telling the troops and the world what that new nation is going to be.
20:28 Speaker 02 Everybody has to show up.
20:34 Rund Abdelfatah? As Washington's colonels begin reading the Declaration out loud, the soldiers are taking it in calmly.
20:39 Speaker 02 And then it starts getting into, hey, we're really mad about X, Y, and Z.
20:45 Rund Abdelfatah? Which really riles them up.
20:46 Speaker 02 A massive riot erupts in Lower Manhattan, what is now Lower Manhattan.
20:58 Speaker 02 That becomes very focused on this huge statue of King George III in Bowling Green. This little tiny park in lower Manhattan. They've got ropes. People managed to topple it and tear it down. It was gilt over lead, so it wasn't solid gold. And in those days, people were interested in the lead because that was used to make ammunition. One of the eventual signers of the Declaration of Independence, Oliver Walcott of Connecticut, who was also serving in the military as an officer.
21:42 Speaker 02 He's like, we need to get this to Connecticut. So they get as many chunks of the statue as they can. They get it out of Manhattan. They get it across the sound. They get it overland in Connecticut to his backyard in Litchfield. And behind Walcott's house, Walcott's wife Laura and his daughter Mary Ann and people they gathered from the community begin melting down King George's statue into bullets.
22:12 Rund Abdelfatah? Wow.
22:13 Speaker 02 And Oliver Walcott keeps meticulous records of who did what. And in the end, there were more than 40,000 bullets made from this statue that was toppled in Bowling Green because George Washington said, we need to read this document aloud to the troops and to, and to the people. A chunk of those bullets ended up being used. And they later referred to those bullets as melted majesty because they had melted down King George.
22:50 Rund Abdelfatah? I mean, talk about, talk about heavy-handed symbolism, right? The Declaration of Independence leads to this statue being melted down into bullets that would return back to the king's army.
23:00 Speaker 02 Yeah.
23:01 Rund Abdelfatah? It's interesting because it gets at something, right? That the Declaration, even then, even, you know, within a couple of weeks of it being drafted and approved by Congress, begins to take on a life of its own.
23:15 Speaker 02 And have an impact. I mean, we were already fighting, right? We already had a standing army. There had already been battles. There had already been death.
23:22 Rund Abdelfatah? Yeah.
23:23 Speaker 02 We'd already had naval ships from Britain ravaging our seacoast, as they say. It is something else to put in writing, hey, this is who we are. This is what we stand for, and this is what we're not going to stand for anymore.
23:36 Rund Abdelfatah? By the end of 1776, the tide was slowly beginning to turn. Washington and his troops were having more luck on the battlefield. But most people in the colonies still had no real sense of who had signed on to this declaration. The copies that had been passed around were unsigned. And in some ways, the anonymity was an obstacle to unity. Because how could a farmer in South Carolina or a cobbler in Massachusetts know for sure if their colony was a part of this vision of a new nation? Coming up, Congress decides to let their constituents and the British Crown know exactly who is behind those words.
24:27 Rund Abdelfatah? Hi, this is Rob from Arlington, Virginia.
24:30 Speaker 00 You're listening to Throughline from NPR.
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25:32 Speaker 05 Pelosi, whether you love her,
25:34 Speaker 03 one of the best speakers, the House of Representatives I've ever had,
25:38 Speaker 05 or hate her.
25:39 Speaker 03 That crazy Nancy, she is crazy.
25:42 Speaker 05 She's a force to be reckoned with. We're not letting anything stand in our way. From KQED, part of the NPR network, The Speaker, How Nancy Pelosi Changed the Face of Power. Find it wherever you get your podcasts.
25:58 Rund Abdelfatah? Part three, the commons.
26:03 Rund Abdelfatah? In January 1777, a printer in Baltimore named Mary Catherine Goddard was tasked with printing a new version of the Declaration.
26:12 Speaker 02 That features individual colonies and the names of the people who signed on.
26:20 Rund Abdelfatah? 55 names in total. Well, 56 if you include Mary's name at the bottom.
26:26 Speaker 02 The first female postmaster of the United Colonies and the only woman to have her name on the Declaration of Independence, Mary Catherine Goddard.
26:33 Rund Abdelfatah? It's heightened risk for everyone, including her, right? Anyone whose name is public at that point suddenly has potentially a target on their backs if the war goes wrong.
26:43 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah. Yeah, if it goes terribly wrong, that's not a name you would want out in the public.
26:53 Rund Abdelfatah? When you're talking about unity as a concept, like if I'm someone sitting in South Carolina or in Virginia, and I'm just like a regular person, seeing my representative there is different than a kind of vague, like, we're all unified now.
27:10 Speaker 02 Absolutely.
27:10 Rund Abdelfatah? So that does seem really significant in terms of selling the idea to the people that we are actually one united.
27:18 Speaker 02 That's right. Absolutely. 100%. It's not just a handful of guys in Philadelphia who are making this decision. It is representatives from throughout all 13 colonies, including Georgia, including South Carolina. They can look and say, oh, Edward Rutledge is on board with this, you know? Or, you know, Richard Henry Lee or George Walton from Georgia, you know, who's off fighting and gets, you know, injured in the Battle of Savannah. These were guys out there leading troops and representing their colonies. Melting bullets in their backyard. I mean, they had a real stake in what was going on. They had a personal stake.
27:58 Speaker 02 They were not detached from the ills and the struggles of what was happening.
28:06 Rund Abdelfatah? The Revolutionary War would continue for another six years. There were countless battles and moments before and after the Declaration was announced that helped shape the course of the country. And yet, it was July 4th that stood out as the pivotal moment when the nation became a nation.
28:24 Speaker 03 We celebrate July 4th. And we started celebrating it pretty soon after the founding. Within 10, 15 years, the 4th becomes a holiday.
28:36 Speaker 02 It's a touchstone for what the signers aspired for America to be, in a sense.
28:44 Speaker 03 I'm really not particularly fans of people who say, "We were totally conceived in evil and demonizing all the founders." Or people who are sugarcoating and canonizing the founders. We were humans when we started this country, and we are humans now. We can decry the founders for making a compromise that allows South Carolina to sign the Declaration. But we can also say, as Franklin did, you know, when we were young tradesmen in Philadelphia, we had a joint that didn't hold together. You'd take from one side and take from the other. And you had a joint that would hold together in centuries. And so too, we here must each part with some of our demands. And his point was that compromises may not make great heroes,
29:29 Speaker 03 but they do make great democracies.
29:33 Rund Abdelfatah? It feels like we live in a time where compromise is a lost...
29:38 Speaker 03 Art. It's a lost art and it's partly due to people like you and me in the media. I'm not throwing NPR under the bus here. But once you get cable news networks where people have to demonize or canonize somebody in a quick soundbite or a 140-character post, you're not encouraging people to say, "Oh, I kind of see their point and I'm going to change my opinion a little bit." And you just get tagged as a waffler or somebody who changes their minds. And we're not good at compromise. We're not good at humility.
30:14 Rund Abdelfatah? But Walter says throughout American history, people have returned to the Declaration of Independence and the second sentence in particular to find a way through the problems of their time. "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."
30:42 Speaker 03 People die on battlefield in Gettysburg fighting to get closer to a country in which all men, all people, are equal.
30:51 Speaker 05 Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation.
31:00 Speaker 03 And as Lincoln will say when he's consecrating their graves, they died trying to make that sentence a little bit more true.
31:07 Rund Abdelfatah? "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal."
31:14 Speaker 03 Whether it's Seneca Falls Declaration of Women in which they invoke the sentence to say it really should be all men and women are created equal.
31:24 Speaker 05 This nation will rise up, live out the true meaning of its creed.
31:31 Speaker 03 Whether it's Dr. Martin Luther King invoking that sentence in his speeches.
31:35 Speaker 05 We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.
31:46 Speaker 05 At times, history and fate meet at a single time, in a single place, to shape a turning point in man's unending search for freedom.
32:02 Speaker 03 Whether it's Lyndon Johnson invoking the sentence when he signs a civil rights bill.
32:07 Speaker 05 So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama.
32:20 Speaker 03 In the late 1960s, you had the assassinations of Kennedys and Kings. And then you had the Vietnam War. You had Watergate. You had the urban riots. You had the resignation of a president. For our 200th anniversary, we rang the Liberty Bell. The tall ships came into our ports. We put aside some of our differences. And we kind of healed during the bicentennial. We all watched the same fireworks. We all ate soggy hot dogs. This is not happening this time around, which is a shame. Because I started writing this book a year ago.
33:03 Speaker 03 And John Meacham started writing American Struggle. And Ken Burns was doing his documentary. Rick Atkins. We're all doing books that maybe if they come out the year of our 250th, will cause people to rally together.
33:19 Rund Abdelfatah? I appreciate the spirit of what you're saying, right? But when you think about the wars that the US is waging, directly in the case of Iran, in the case of Gaza indirectly with weapons. When you think about the state of the economy and the fact that so many people are struggling. When you think about all these layers of very real issues. What some might say is a kind of imperial identity that the US has taken on. Is it enough to heal through something like the Declaration?
33:53 Speaker 03 But do you think our challenges now are that much worse than the late 60s? I think things are very bad now. I'm just saying we've been through this before. We went through it in the McCarthy era. We certainly went through it in the Civil War. We went through it in the late 60s. Can America come together and heal is a good question. But as a historian, you say, well, we've certainly done it before. I'm somewhat optimistic that at some point, a group of political leaders is going to emerge, who are going to run on the idea that we're not a red nation or a blue nation, that we
34:38 Speaker 03 share more values than we disagree on, and that we should all heal and come together.
34:45 Rund Abdelfatah? Heal and come together feels like a far cry from where we are right now as a nation. And it's hard not to ask a different question. What would the founders think of the system in place today, where corporations are king, and where many feel a sense of injustice about how they fit into that equation?
35:04 Speaker 03 We've hollowed out a middle class in America. So it's not just the extremes of the politics. It's also people got left behind by an era of globalization. And so we have to be sensitive of why are they picking up their pitchforks? Why are they voting for everybody from Donald Trump to Mom Donnie? Well, because they're feeling the system didn't work very well, and they have some truth to that.
35:30 Rund Abdelfatah? When should you choose to create a new system versus try to reform the old one? How do you compromise on matters of life and death? There's no easy answers. But Walter says, for starters, we have to find more ways to connect with each other.
35:45 Speaker 03 So one of the things that has held our country together is a notion of common ground, and that's physical at times. You build Boston Common so people who don't have land, there's a place where they can graze their herds and bury their dead and plant their gardens. And John Locke in The Second Treatise teaches us, and he's a big supporter of private property, he says, you only can do that if enough is left in common for others.
36:15 Speaker 03 You have to rebuild a common ground where everybody feels they've become part of the process and that their kids will do better than they did.
36:31 Speaker 03 We all go to different entrances in the stadiums now. We have VIP entrances. We have divided ourselves far too much. And as John Hancock would tell us, let's see if we can try to hang together instead.
37:00 Rund Abdelfatah? And that's it for this week's show. I'm Randa Del Fatah. Throughline was created by me and Ramtin Arablouei. This episode was produced by me and
37:09 Speaker 04 Casey Minor. Devin Katayama.
37:11 Speaker 00 Sarah Wyman. Amy Padula. Kiana Mulholland. Julia Redpath. Skylar Swenson.
37:17 Speaker 04 Leanna Semstrom. Irene Noguchi. Jasmine Romero.
37:22 Rund Abdelfatah? Thank you to Johannes Sturgie, Matthew Pollak, Cheyenne Butler, Yolanda Sangueni, and Tommy Evans. Thanks also to Dan O'Neil for his voiceover work. Fact checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel. This episode was mixed by Maggie Luthar. Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes
37:43 Speaker 07 Marvy. Show Fujiwara.
37:45 Speaker 00 Anya Mizani.
37:47 Rund Abdelfatah? And finally, if you have an idea or liked something you heard on the show, please write us at [email protected] . And if you're open to us giving you a call back, leave your number, too. We might feature your idea in an upcoming episode. Also, make sure to follow us on Apple, Spotify, or the NPR app. That way, you'll never miss an episode. And while you're there, feel free to leave us a review. Thanks for listening.
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