Becoming American
  America: the essential questions

Thomas Lindsay, chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, discusses what it means to be an American:

First, what is the meaning of human equality as articulated in the Declarations assertion that ғall men are created equal? Equal in what respects? What view of human nature does this presuppose? Does the Declaration mean to include African-Americans, as Abraham Lincoln, along with Frederick Douglass and the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., insisted?

Second, what does the Declaration mean by asserting that we possess rights that are not ԓalienable? Who or what, precisely, cannot alienate our rights? Are all rights deemed inalienable, or only some? And why?

Third, why does the Founding generation consider government just only when it is instituted by the consent of the governed? Is justice for the Founders merely consent-based? If not, what might trump consent?

Fourth, why did the Founders opt for representative democracy over the ԓpure version of democracy practiced in ancient Athens? What did The Federalist (penned by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay) assert was the inadequacy of ancient democracy?

Fifth, how does the Constitution seek to reconcile democracy, which means rule by the majority, with the rights of minorities? Stated differently, how do we do justice both to the equality of all and to the liberty of each?

Sixth, and finally, what economic conditions make American democracy possible? Why does the Constitution protect property rights? Why do its critics, such as Marx, believe private property to be the root of injustice? How would Madison and Hamilton have responded to MarxԒs and his followers critique?

Implicit in these questions are at least ten fundamental documents and major speeches that every American citizen should study. The questions regarding the meaning of human equality, inalienable rights, popular consent, and the right of revolution clearly require an examination of the Declaration, along with Frederick DouglassҒs The Meaning of the Fourth of July to the Negro,Ӕ and Chief Justice Taneys infamous opinion for the majority in the Dred Scott case (where Taney denies that African-Americans have any rights that whites are bound to respect). Against Taney, Frederick DouglassҒs and Lincolns scathing critiques of the Dred Scott opinion need to be taught.

The Declaration needs also to be scrutinized in its relation to the pro-womanҒs-suffrage, 1848 Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments and ResolutionsӔ and the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.s ғI Have a Dream speech, delivered on the National Mall in 1963. Why did Elizabeth Cady Stanton look to the form and substance of the Declaration of Independence in crafting the Seneca Falls Declaration? What did the Reverend King mean by asserting that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution constituted a ԓpromissory note to which every American was to fall heir?

The Constitution, of course, must be taught to our students. As both critics and admirers of the Constitution agree, there is no more authoritative commentary on that document than The Federalist, the series of 85 newspaper essays defending and explaining the Constitution, written during the period that the states were debating its ratification. Specifically, the questions regarding representation, minority rights, and the economics of democracy require examination of the Constitution and The Federalist, along with Theodore and Franklin RooseveltԒs writings and speeches on economic democracy.

Finally, for reasons already articulated, all students need to be introduced both to Tocquevilles defense of democratic equality and to his concerns over the intellectual conformism to which American democracy lies exposed.