America's most powerful myth

With due respect to Heather Cox Richardson, America's best ideas aren't the radical declarations of equality from Jefferson and Lincoln.

This morning, my grandmother came into the kitchen to read us Heather Cox Richardon’s July 3rd post—because it’s such good writing, she said.

I cooked pancakes for the kids, my mom drank coffee, and my grandmother read us Richardson’s brief post about one of America’s fundamental founding myths: equality.

In a family of writers, at least this much we can all agree: powerful writing is a thing of beauty, but we can appreciate beautiful words while also disagreeing with their sentiment.

So, with due respect to Richardson (who has about a gazillion more subscribers than me), I think she’s kind of wrong about America. The “words to live by” in 2023 aren’t the ones about equality—they’re the ones about the American dream.

And since it’s 4th of July, I hope you’ll take a moment to indulge me as to why.

All men are created equal

Heather’s post quotes from two of America’s greatest wordsmiths in Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln.

It was Jefferson who gave us We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal… But it was Lincoln, who once noted that the aggregate of all his schooling on the Illinois frontier amounted to about a year of education, who wrote, in my mind, the even better stuff.

Here’s via Richardson:

The men who signed the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, pledged their “Lives, [their] Fortunes and [their] sacred Honor” to defend the idea of human equality. Ever since then, Americans have sacrificed their own fortunes, honor, and even their lives, for that principle. Lincoln reminded Civil War Americans of those sacrifices when he urged the people of his era to “take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

This last part is quoted from the Gettysburg Address. But I actually prefer Lincoln’s 2nd Innagural Address, which also took place in the midst of the U.S. Civil War. The entire text is only 701 words long, and for my money, it is a masterclass in great political speech.

Both the Inaugural and the Gettysburg Address are etched into the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C., making it my runaway favorite of all the D.C. monuments (did I mention I come from a family of writers?).

And yet I was super disheartened when I took my Canadian friend to visit it just two months ago. It was my last month in D.C., and he’d never been. So I took him to see the greatest hits all in a big loop around the National Mall. But though he appreciated the big statue of Lincoln seated in the chair, the words etched on the walls just didn’t mean much to him.

I tried to make the case, arguing something about the historical context, the phrasing, the man meeting the moment—yet it seemed my arguments were falling on deaf ears.

But then I had to remember that to outsiders, America’s Civil War is basically just about how the racists nearly got their way, just before getting their way in other ways for another hundred years.

And in fact: it was just one of the dozens of moments I’ve had in interactions with people around the world in my life where I am reminded that America’s most powerful idea—what I call our founding myth—is actually not about all men being created equal, or pontifications about government of, by, and for the people.

To most non-Americans, all our rah-rah about equality is just so much hypocrisy.

Individual freedom and enterprise

What actually resonates, and what I think is the best, most powerful idea we have in this country, is one that was also at the core of our founding documents: The American Dream.