We Hold These Truths

Friends,

As a student of rhetoric and a regular writer of value statements (and occasional declarations), I’ve long been fascinated by the Declaration of Independence. My daughters will tell you I’m one of those weird people who can quote its opening paragraphs from memory.

Guilty as charged. And for good reason, I’d argue.

Jefferson’s declaration launched the American experiment and helped revolutionize the world. Its appeal for equality, human rights, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—all listed as “self-evident” truths—has echoed down the centuries.

But I want to focus here on the handful of words that precede Jefferson’s famous list: “We hold these truths.”

It’s a phrase that typically gets short shrift, but it shouldn’t. In fact, the grand experiment of American democracy has depended at least as much on the “we” and the “holding” as on the “self-evident” truths themselves.

How so? Consider three telling points:

As many readers have noted from the start, the men who signed the Declaration didn’t actually treat all men—much less all people—as equal. And hardly anyone has managed this seemingly straightforward feat since.
If we are endowed by our Creator with certain rights, history strongly suggests that we are at least as good at alienating them as following them.
History also teaches that “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” can be redefined in practice a thousand different ways—and even twisted to justify all manner of evils.

So what actually holds the American democratic experiment together? Not the self-evidence of the truths we intone but the effort to make them real.

In fact, at the risk of overstating the power of rhetoric, I’d argue that our collective willingness to keep insisting on these truths undergirds the project of American democracy. These aren’t just pretty words; these are the closest thing we have to core values.

The historical record speaks clearly on this point.

In 1848, the women who gathered at Seneca Falls borrowed Jefferson’s cadence and added two crucial words the founders had left out, declaring that “all men and women are created equal.”

In 1852, Frederick Douglass stood before an Independence Day crowd and asked, with devastating clarity, what the holiday could possibly mean to a man still in chains—holding the nation fast to the creed it claimed to celebrate.

Abraham Lincoln did something similar in the Gettysburg address, measuring his contemporaries against a proposition that was then “four score and seven years” old. The proposition in question: equality.

A century later, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. harkened back to the same core values while standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The Declaration was a promise America had written, King argued, but had not yet kept. He had a dream that we would one day keep it.

Notice the common thread: Each of these leaders was holding to the purportedly “self-evident” truths while expanding the “we” they applied to. Each insisted that the country could realize its mission only by keeping its words.

That, I would offer, is the underlying project of American democracy in a nutshell. And the project is never finished.

Jefferson and the signers of the Declaration of Independence insisted that we, the people, had the right to write a nation into being. They didn’t look to anyone else for authority. They made themselves the holders of the truths. They asserted a set of foundational human rights—to speak such truths, to institute governments and laws, to undertake the project of building and being a nation together—in the name of none other than “we, the people.”

They also opened a centuries-long argument about what the word “we” means in this context—about who all is covered by Jefferson’s self-evident but often-ignored truths.

From the start, our history has proven that these truths do not hold themselves. Either we hold them together—by holding ourselves and each other to them—or they do not hold at all.

We hold these truths.

This overlooked four-word phrase carries within it a call to the unfinished work of democracy. Declared in Philadelphia in 1776. Restated at Seneca Falls, Gettysburg, the March on Washington, and a thousand points between. Now ringing again on the eve of America’s 250th birthday.

Equality. Justice. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Either we, the people, hold these truths together or we let them disappear.