With sincere apologies to Christmas, Thanksgiving, May Day and all the other days of note, I think that Independence Day is the most important of the American holidays.
It isn’t about the fireworks (we don’t have a local display anyway), or the flags, the patriotic music, or the hotdogs and apple pie. Hold on. Let’s keep the hotdogs and apple pie (NO ketchup on the dog and an unhealthy scoop of vanilla ice cream on the pie).
They say that holidays shouldn’t be about all the fun stuff. So, just like Christmas is supposed to be about the birth of Christ (for all the Christians), and Thanksgiving should include giving thanks and being charitable, and May Day all about the contributions of labor, Independence Day should include some reflection on the events of 1776, the Declaration of Independence, and what came before, and what’s happened since.
Sadly that’s a lot to ask of too many of my fellow citizens.
This year, we celebrate America’s 250th, still a babe in the international woods. To be more precise, July Fourth is the birthday of the Declaration of Independence. It was still far from being a nation. The colonists still had a war to fight against the most powerful army in the world, and after that they had a government to cobble together for it all to become really viable. And if we really want to split hairs, the birthday of the Declaration of Independence could actually fall on July 2nd, the day that Richard Henry Lee’s resolution to declare independence was approved.
The Declaration of Independence is best known for thirty-five words. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
While it all seems pretty straightforward, that sentence has been the subject of some bitter debate. Most of the controversy is over the fact that of the 56 signatories, 41 were slave owners, the most prominent being Thomas Jefferson, the man who wrote the document. Of the 15 who did not own slaves, the most prominent was John Adams, who would become the second U.S. President.
How could the proposition of equality be self-evident when the men who wrote and signed the document bought, sold and owned men and women as property?
That was the most asked question even as the ink on the parchment was drying.
Frederick Douglass’s Independence Day Speech, July 5, 1852
Seventy-six years after the signing, in a speech in front of the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society, at Corinthian Hall in Rochester, New York, abolitionist and orator Frederick Douglass, a Black man, asked that question – and rather forcefully.
Douglass opened the speech in celebration of the original Independence Day and of the Founding Fathers, congratulating his white audience for the good fortune of their freedom.
“On the 2d of July, 1776, the old Continental Congress, to the dismay of the lovers of ease, and the worshippers of property, clothed that dreadful idea with all the authority of national sanction. They did so in the form of a resolution; and as we seldom hit upon resolutions, drawn up in our day, whose transparency is at all equal to this, it may refresh your minds and help my story if I read it. Resolved, That these united colonies are, and of right, ought to be free and Independent States; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown; and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, dissolved.”
“Citizens, your fathers made good that resolution. They succeeded; and today you reap the fruits of their success. The freedom gained is yours; and you, therefore, may properly celebrate this anniversary. The 4th of July is the first great fact in your nation’s history—the very ring-bolt in the chain of your yet undeveloped destiny.”
“Pride and patriotism, not less than gratitude, prompt you to celebrate and to hold it in perpetual remembrance. I have said that the Declaration of Independence is the RINGBOLT to the chain of your nation’s destiny; so, indeed, I regard it. The principles contained in that instrument are saving principles. Stand by those principles, be true to them on all occasions, in all places, against all foes, and at whatever cost.’
“Of this fundamental work, this day is the anniversary. Our eyes are met with demonstrations of joyous enthusiasm. Banners and pennants wave exultingly on the breeze. The din of business, too, is hushed. Even mammon seems to have quitted his grasp on this day. The earpiercing fife and the stirring drum unite their accents with the ascending peal of a thousand church bells. Prayers are made, hymns are sung, and sermons are preached in honor of this day; while the quick martial tramp of a great and multitudinous nation, echoed back by all the hills, valleys and mountains of a vast continent, bespeak the occasion one of thrilling and universal interest—a nation’s jubilee.”
And then Douglass pivoted – hard,
“Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here today? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? And am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?”
“I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak today? If so, there is a parallel to your conduct.”
“What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy— a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.”
The audience at Corinthian Hall responded to Douglass with wild applause. It was later published in his newspaper, Frederick Douglass’ Paper, and then in pamphlet form. (Link to full speech, here)
J.D. Vance and the Claremont Speech, July 10, 2025
As America tries to celebrate its semiquincentennial it’s in a struggle with itself. A significant portion of Americans have hitched themselves to a movement, and are loyal to an administration, that in both words and deeds repudiates the spirit of the Declaration of Independence and those thirty-five words.
Two-hundred-forty-nine years and seven days after the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, Vice-President J.D. Vance renounced the spirit of that seminal document in a speech he delivered about statesmanship before a friendly audience at the right wing Claremont Institute.
That Vance would speak about statesmanship is a ridiculous proposition in itself, given, his want of any charm, and his history of political and social ineptitude.
“If you think about it, identifying America just with agreeing with the principles, let’s say, of the Declaration of Independence, that’s a definition that is way over-inclusive and under-inclusive at the same time. What do I mean by that? Well, first of all, it would include hundreds of millions, maybe billions of foreign citizens who agree with the principles of the Declaration of Independence. Must we admit all of them tomorrow? If you follow that logic of America as a purely creedal nation, America purely as an idea, that is where it would lead you.”
Two and a half centuries after a group of brave men decided to split from the most powerful nation on Earth, and to go to war with its army in order to establish a new nation, the sitting vice-president rejected the idea of America as a creedal nation. Where does that leave America? A “blood and soil” nation is all that’s left.
Vance wasn’t done. “But at the same time, that answer would also reject a lot of people that the ADL (Anti-Defamation League) would label as domestic extremists. Even those very Americans had their ancestors fight in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. And I happen to think that it’s absurd, and the modern left seems dedicated to doing this, to saying, you don’t belong in America unless you agree with progressive liberalism in 2025. I think the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don’t belong.”
Just who would the ADL reject? The answer is, your garden variety Nazis and white nationalists, of course. Dog whistle decoded, Vance proposes that Nazis and Confederates have a greater claim to America than the “Johnny come latelies” in the ADL who denounce Nazism.
I imagine that Vance could have pulled any date out of thin air but he chose the Civil War, knowing full well that over one million of those ancestors rejected the Declaration of Independence, rejected the Constitution and took up arms to protect the right to own human beings. (Link to full speech, here)
The last most notable Independence Day was the bicentennial – 1976.
Gerald Ford was the president in 1976. Middling at best, as presidents go (He seemed to realize his limitations as, after he was sworn in as president, he quipped, “I am a Ford, not a Lincoln.”), Ford was the only president ever to serve without being elected to either the presidency or the vice-presidency. He gained that historic, and ignominious (more for the events surrounding it than Ford himself) distinction by being named to the vice-presidency under the terms of the 25th Amendment when Vice President Spiro Agnew was compelled to resign after pleading no contest to tax evasion, and then nine months later for assuming the presidency after Richard Nixon resigned over Watergate.
Best known for his pardoning of Nixon and being tied to a would-be assassin with the unlikely name, “Squeaky,” Ford presided over the collapse of South Vietnam, and an economy that was, at the time, the worst since the Great Depression. Four months after the bicentennial a nation weary of Republican scandals elected Jimmy Carter to the presidency.
The Bicentennial was rife with speeches, and given the relative quality of many, probably overly rife. Ford delivered a speech at the National Archives. It was the usual July Fourth paean to the Declaration and to the Founders. But for one paragraph, an admonition actually, Ford’s oratory was nothing exceptionally profound.
“In grade school we were taught to memorize the first and last parts of the Declaration. Nowadays, even many scholars skip over the long recitation of alleged abuses by King George III and his misguided ministers. But occasionally we ought to read them, because the injuries and invasions of individual rights listed there are the very excesses of government power which the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and subsequent amendments were designed to prevent.” (Link to full speech, here)
It’s important that, every now and then, Americans go past the famous, flowery thirty-five words of the Declaration and read what Ford called in his speech – the boring parts. We should remind ourselves why a group of outgunned colonists took up arms against King George.
Please, this July Fourth, read the Declaration, but by all means skip down to the list of grievances (shown in part below) and ask yourself if they seem familiar and particularly relevant in 2026:
He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither . . .
He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences
He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us . . .
(Link to full text of Declaration of Independence, here)
Where has America drifted?
It’s estimated that at the start of the American Revolution, approximately 20 percent of the colonists were loyal to the crown.
Two hundred and fifty years later, approximately 20 percent of American voters identify as MAGA loyalists.
Two hundred and fifty years after a group of colonists published their list of grievances, the same grievances have pertinence.
Seventy five years after Gerald Ford admonished Americans to read the revolutionaries list of grievances and be vigilant, Americans have become inured to government excess and abuse.
After recent Supreme Court decisions, and the political bent and machinations of the Republican Party, Frederick Douglass’s speech of 1852 is no less relevant now than it was 174 years ago.
Two hundred and forty nine years after the Founders established a creedal nation, an American vice-president repudiated that notion.
Two hundred and fifty years after brave men and women published their grievances and resisted an authoritarian king, Americans seem to have lost the will to resist.
For the past decade, the Fourth of July has been personally conflicting. This year it’s even more so. I want to be proud of my country but given the events of the past decade (and escalated a hundred fold over the past 18 months), that’s a hard ask.
Two-hundred and fifty should be special. It could’ve been, and it should’ve been. But because of a conflict between celebration commissions, one partisan and one bipartisan, the notion of a people’s celebration was cast aside, collateral damage in an ideological war.
Hell, maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe it’s a good thing for us to declare our own independence.
Pour yourself your favorite beverage, get together with a few friends and family and heed that mediocre president’s advice. Read the Declaration of Independence.
Even the boring parts.
Especially the boring parts.
The Life in My Years 