This week, Joel L. Daniels, author of A Book About Things I Will Tell My Daughter, debates Ryan P. Williams, president of the Claremont Institute and publisher of the Claremont Review of Books, on a question currently gripping—and tearing asunder—a divided nation.
Josh Hammer, Newsweek opinion editor, is also a syndicated columnist and of counsel at First Liberty Institute.
Generally, the conversations surrounding who built America are based on theorized summations of it—the Lincolns, the Washingtons, the Roosevelts of the world whose names echo in textbooks and government buildings across the states. Their building and construction of America speaks to the mythology of law, order, democracy and power that surrounds how the country was founded. The idea of American fortitude, the ideal that rests on hard work and diligence; that these and these alone—not inherited wealth, stolen properties or gender and class and racial biases—will get you ahead in life, is very much the groundwork for modern racism as we see it. An attempt to depart from race and racism as one of the governing principles in which America was constructed is very much racist itself.
The 1776 Declaration of Independence marked America’s true political, moral and philosophical Founding. The British subjects residing in the many colonies united as “one people” in opposition to the despotic claims to rule offered by a distant king and Parliament in Great Britain. There were roughly 600,000 black slaves in the brand-new 13 United States, but as soon as the ink was dry on the Declaration’s parchment, the principles contained in that document made the existence of the American slave population an obvious and undeniable injustice. The Declaration’s drafters and signers knew that they had created a new nation with its foundation in anti-slavery principles.
