The Declaration of Independence: an enduring message of equality and citizenship

As friends and family gather to celebrate Independence Day we ought to pause for a moment to reflect on its history and meaning.

It was on July 4, 1776 that members of the Second Continental Congress, meeting in Philadelphia, adopted the final draft of the Declaration of Independence.

Four days later the first public readings of the Declaration were held in Philadelphia's Independence Square to the ringing of bells and band music. It was soon read in other cities. Everywhere the colonists heard it they erupted in cheers and celebration

A year later, on July 4, 1777, Philadelphia marked Independence Day by adjourning Congress and celebrating with bonfires, bells and fireworks. However, while the Revolutionary War raged, July 4 celebrations were modest at best.

When the war ended in 1783, July 4 became a holiday in some places. In Boston, it replaced the date of the Boston Massacre, March 5, as the major patriotic holiday.

The custom eventually spread to other towns, both large and small, where the day was marked with processions, speeches, picnics, contests, games, military displays and fireworks. Observations throughout the nation became even more common at the end of the War of 1812 with Great Britain.

But it was only in 1941 that Congress declared July 4 a federal holiday.

The Declaration of Independence is a revolutionary document. Not only did it declare the 13 colonies independence from the British Monarchy, but it challenged the accepted structures of inequality that had previously governed the affairs of mankind.

For centuries human beings had lived in highly structured, hierarchical societies. Economic and political power were the inherited birthright of a privileged few. Most people were subjects, slaves, indentured servants, and peasants, whose role was to serve their superiors, the lord, the monarch, and the priest.

Structured inequality was the natural order of things, political liberty non-existent. As Aristotle wrote: “Some men are born to rule and some to be ruled.”

The Declaration of Independence challenged the idea that all men were created unequally by asserting the opposite: “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 was nothing less than a revolutionary assault on the old order. Men and women, according to the Declaration, were not SUBJECTS who lived to serve a higher power. Rather they were CITIZENS with inalienable rights including the freedom to organize a government whose legitamcy was entirely determined by the citizens who created it. As the Declaration states: “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

This document authored by Thomas Jefferson, the Virginia statesman and slave owner, who became the nation’s first Secretary of State and 3rd President, turned man’s understanding of the world upside down and laid the basis for an expansive democracy.

The defeat of the British led to the establishment of a new government that restricted citizenship to white male property owners. But the Declaration inspired labor republicans, country democrats, abolitionists, suffragettes and civil rights activists who used the words and inspiration of the patriots to extend the rights of citizenship more broadly.

The Declaration lists a series of grievances against King George, the British monarch who ruled the thirteen colonies. While it is well know that the patriots opposed taxation without representation, being forced to house and feed the occupying British troops, and British monopoly control of trade and production, it is rarely mentioned that restrictive immigration policies were another important Patriot grievance. Yet the document declares: "He (King George) has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither…”

So as we celebrate this weekend with barbeques and fireworks, with family reunions, brats and beer in our backyards, at our cabins, parks, and lakes, take a moment to remember that two hundred and thirty three years ago thirteen sparsely populated Atlantic outposts of farmers, servants, and slaves declared that all men were created equal with inalienable rights. Since that day freedom loving people from Selma, Alabama to Warsaw, Poland from Tienanmen to Iran have been inspired by the patriots’ declaration of and fight for political liberty.

In the Twenty-First Century, undocumented workers who do our hardest and dirtiest work have picked up where the Patriots and their descendants left off asserting that they too are human beings with rights denied.

On June 24, 1826, Thomas Jefferson sent a letter to Roger C. Weightman, declining an invitation to come to Washington, D.C., to help celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. It was the last letter that Jefferson, who was gravely ill, ever wrote. In it, he wrote of the document:

"May it be to the world, what I believe it will be ... the signal of arousing men to burst the chains ... and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. That form, which we have substituted, restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. ... For ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them."

Scott Walker's corporate funded motorcycle tour

An urbane and curious President!

Maureen Dowd writes:

What a relief to have an urbane, cultivated, curious president who’s out and about, engaged in the world. Not dangerously detached, as W. was, or darkly stewing like Cheney. Not hanging with the Rat Pack like J.F.K. or getting bored and up to mischief like Bill Clinton.

It's insightful and funny and linked right here.

A tale of two technical colleges

Ten days ago, the the faculty and staff at Milwaukee Area Technical College (MATC), members of the American Federation of Teachers Local 212 (AFT 212), voted to forgo their 2009-2010 raise to ensure that the college would continue to serve all of its students.

The college's two other unions quickly passed similar resolutions.

MATC's enrollment has spiked as unemployment has soared in Southeastern Wisconsin. Yet revenues have fallen at the property tax dependent institution as home values have plummeted in Milwaukee and state aid has been cut by more than 50% since 1990.

Because of the unions' voluntary $5 million investment, MATC will not eliminate any sections or programs and will enroll all qualified applicants. (Full disclosure: I am the president of AFT Local 212 and have taught economics at MATC for 22 years.)

This is a fairly remarkable event in the history of the MATC board and the unions,” MATC Board Chair Lauren Baker said. "We tried to do everything we could to keep programming for students in tact." Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett issued a statement supporting the move.
"I applaud the MATC Board, Administration and the American Federation of Teachers Local 212 for the very reasonable settlement achieved today," the statement reads. "It’s clear they put services for the students at the forefront.”

The agreement between AFT Local 212 and MATC also received national attention when it was featured in Inside Higher Education.

In Florida, on the other hand, Miami Dade, one of the nation's largest two-year colleges, announced it would be forced to eliminate hundreds of class sections, and that as many as 5,000 students would be unable to enroll. Additionally 30,000 students may be unable to get the classes they need.

Miami Dade, in instituting the equivalent of an enrollment cap, announced that state budget cuts had also forced it to cancel upcoming open houses because it would not be able to admit students who had not already enrolled for the fall.

Interest in hands-on education soars in Wisconsin

Nearly one thousand more students transferred from Wisconsin's public universities and colleges to its technical colleges (3,850) than the other way (2,903) according to the most recent data.

It turns out that the Wisconsin Technical College System (WTCS) is the state's largest graduate school.

Students are voting with their feet for a more focused and practical education despite a major push by University and elected officials to increase Wisconsin's percentage of baccalaureate degree holders.

Students are transferring to the WTCS because its diploma and associate degree programs provide students with hands-on education and marketable skills utilizing a pedagogy that integrates thinking and doing. These one and two-year programs enable students to secure family supporting employment and provide employers with the skilled workers and technicians they need.

It also doesn't hurt, especially in this depressed economy, that technical college tuition is lower than UW's.

The appeal of hands-on education is not limited to the WTCS. It also helps explain the extraordinary success of the Milwaukee Public Schools Project Lead the Way. MPS currently has more students of color participating in STEM (science, technology and math education) that any school system in the country.

Project Lead the Way students get exposed to cutting-edge technology, science and math through integrated, hands-on learning. But there's one more benefit that trumps all the rest, according to Lauren Baker, coordinator for career and technical education at MPS, "They learn these incredible problem-solving skills - the kids learn how to think," Baker said.

A recent New York Times article by Matthew B. Crawford makes the same point when he writes:

If the goal is to earn a living, then, maybe it isn’t really true that 18-year-olds need to be imparted with a sense of panic about getting into college (though they certainly need to learn). Some people are hustled off to college, then to the cubicle, against their own inclinations and natural bents, when they would rather be learning to build things or fix things. One shop teacher suggested to me that “in schools, we create artificial learning environments for our children that they know to be contrived and undeserving of their full attention and engagement. Without the opportunity to learn through the hands, the world remains abstract and distant, and the passions for learning will not be engaged.”

The trades suffer from low prestige, and I believe this is based on a simple mistake. Because the work is dirty, many people assume it is also stupid. This is not my experience. I have a small business as a motorcycle mechanic in Richmond, Va., which I started in 2002. I work on Japanese and European motorcycles, mostly older bikes with some “vintage” cachet that makes people willing to spend money on them. I have found the satisfactions of the work to be very much bound up with the intellectual challenges it presents. And yet my decision to go into this line of work is a choice that seems to perplex many people...

For me at least there is more real thinking going on in the bike shop than there was in the think tank.

The article is linked.

Republican opposition to Supreme Court nominee reeks of hypocrisy!

Republican opposition to President Obama's Supreme Court Nominee, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, is hypocritical, based on the very racial divisiveness it claims to oppose.

Charles Blow nails it:

Someone pinch me. I must be dreaming.

Some of the same Republicans who have wielded the hot blade of racial divisiveness for years, are now calling Sonia Sotomayor, the Supreme Court nominee, a racist. Oh, the hypocrisy!

The same Newt Gingrich who once said that bilingual education was like teaching “the language of living in a ghetto” tweeted that Sotomayor is a “Latina woman racist.” The same Rush Limbaugh who once told a black caller to “take that bone out of your nose and call me back” called Sotomayor a “reverse racist.” The same Tom Tancredo, a former congressman, who once called Miami, which has a mostly Hispanic population, “a third world country” said that Sotomayor “appears to be a racist.”

This is rich.

The column is linked.

Miwaukee suburbs protect their citizens from paid sick days

Last week the New York Times noted that 60 million American workers, almost half of all private sector workers, do not have paid sick leave. This made it virtually impossible for them to stay home, as the President had advised, if they experienced flu like symptoms last week.

The Times wrote:

...more than 160 countries ensure that all their citizens receive paid sick leave and more than 110 of them guarantee paid leave from the first day of illness.

If President Obama is serious about responsible action to control infectious disease threats, he should back legislation to grant Americans at least seven paid sick days a year — long enough to stay home until an influenza infection subsides. Then virtually all Americans could heed his advice, and we would all be safer.

In November Milwaukee voters voted overwhelmingly (69% to 31%) that all Milwaukee employers should provide their employees with paid sick leave benefits.

The Metropolitan Milwaukee Chamber of Commerce (MMAC) has opposed the measure and used the courts to delay its implementation. It argued that providing employees with paid sick day benefits would be bad for business. An MMAC spokesman even called the law "a sort of terrorism."

Several Milwaukee suburbs, genuflecting to the laissez faire gods, have legislated away their citizens right to pass such laws.

Presumably the free market will protect these communities from future pandemics just as their city councils have protected the free market from one more onerous regulation.

Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Thomas Cooper will rule on the referendum's legality later today.

The New York Times editorial is linked.