Beyond Creed: American National Culture
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Beyond Creed: American National Culture Darren Staloff
Accepted: 16 August 2020 / # The National Association of Scholars 2020
America, from the time of its first settlement through its founding and right up to the present, has been a country formed of a vast variety of ethno-cultural and religious groups as well as distinct regions, states, and localities, a reality reflected in the motto E Pluribus Unum. It is natural to search for an underlying reality or principle that unites this diverse conglomeration of peoples and polities. A rich and venerable tradition has arisen of finding that unifying core in the self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal” and “are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights” such as “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” as well as the right to change or abolish any government that threatens those rights. In this account, both the American political tradition and its larger civic and public culture are oriented around our understanding and commitment to these ideals, a commitment that makes us a uniquely propositional nation. The lineage of this account is both long and distinguished. Thomas Jefferson, the principal author of that proposition, referred to it as the “common sense of the subject,” an entirely accurate statement based on the number of strikingly similar phrases found in various contemporary resolutions and constitutions. Abraham Lincoln referred to it as the “electric cord” that “links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together” and, drawing on Proverbs 25:11, compared it to an “apple of Gold” held within the constitutional “picture of silver.” Some sixty years ago the famed Lincoln scholar Harry V. Jaffa breathed new life and energy into this “propositional” tradition, a revival that has been advanced by a host of insightful scholars since, most notably
Darren Staloff is Professor of History at the City College of New York and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York; [email protected].
D. Staloff
in Michael Zuckert’s classic The Natural Rights Republic and C. Bradley Thompson’s most recent, and timely, America’s Revolutionary Mind. What these scholars stress is not only the Lockean and natural jurisprudential origins of this unifying creed, but its unique centrality to the moral orientation of American statesmanship and national mission in its two moments of greatest crisis. These were, of course, the bloody revolutionary struggle initiated at Lexington and Concord and the even bloodier deluge unleashed at Fort Sumter. Nor was this propositional ideal limited to these two moments. From the early feminists of Seneca Falls to the champions of the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and early 1960s, the propositional ideals of human equality and natural rights have served as a vital idiom for articulating movements of reformation and renewal. They have equally served as the guiding star of many of our articulated ideals of international order, from the Four Freedoms of Fran
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