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America's Endangered Heritage A PUBLICATION OF THE CALVIN COOLIDGE PRESIDENTIAL FOUNDATION COOLIDGE DECEMBER 2019 • VOLUME 3 • ISSUE 2 AMERICA’S ENDANGERED HERITAGE: THE EROSION OF THE CONSTITUTION’S METAPHYSICAL FOUNDATIONS BY JUDGE JANICE ROGERS BROWN Americans love their Constitu- longest serving members of the Supreme tion. At least they tell pollsters they do. Court sneers at the paltry “negative” The founding documents are the sacred rights of the Constitution. During an writ of freedom. Abraham Lincoln de- interview with Al Hayat TV in Egypt, scribed the Declaration of Indepen- Ruth Bader Ginsburg told the audience: dence – our first and foremost founding “I would not look to the U.S. Constitu- document – as the “immortal emblem” tion if I were drafting a constitution in of man’s humanity and the father of all the year 2012.” The justice named several moral principle.1 Today the Declaration is she liked better, including South Africa’s, treated more as a rhetorical flourish than Canada’s, and the European Convention a standard, but Americans claim to “know on Human Rights, praising those docu- their rights.” Unless you ask them to cite ments for being more generous in pro- actual passages of the Bill of Rights. Then tecting “human rights.” Justice Ginsburg’s you are more likely to get riffs from the comments raised little concern in intellec- Communist Manifesto. And perhaps tual circles in this country because most of that is not surprising when one of the the enlightened elite agreed with her. John Trumbull’s famous portrait depicting the delegates responsible for the Declaration of Independence. (Image courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of International Business Machines Corporation.) CALVIN COOLIDGE PRESIDENTIAL FOUNDATION • COOLIDGEFOUNDATION.ORG • 802-672-3389 COOLIDGE QUARTERLY THE ROAD TO THE PRESENT cording to Leszek Kolakowski, “probably the most famous single sentence ever It was not always so. Indeed, the written in the Western Hemisphere: ‘We American Constitution was greeted with hold these truths to be self-evident, that approbation by most of the civilized all men are created equal, that they are world. The Declaration’s stirring words endowed by their Creator with certain that “all men are created equal” and that unalienable rights, that among these are the only just government was “govern- Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Hap- ment by consent” was heralded around piness.’”2 But, as Kolakowski goes on to the world. The Founders themselves say, “what seemed self-evident [at the were enormously proud of their achieve- Founding] would appear either patently ment. John Adams said he always con- false or meaningless and superstitious to sidered “the settlement of America with most of the great men who keep shaping reverence and wonder as the opening of our political imagination.”3 a grand scene and design in providence for the illumination of the ignorant and DECLARING THEIR VALUES the emancipation of the slavish part of Jefferson described the Declaration mankind all over the earth.” of Independence as reflecting “the har- How did the founding documents go monizing sentiments of the day, whether from being the very expressed in con- exemplar of freedom versation, in letters, to being viewed as “TO LIVE UNDER printed essays, or in the threadbare re- THE AMERICAN [the writings of ] Ar- pository of a wholly istotle, Cicero, Locke” inadequate set of po- CONSTITUTION IS and other thinkers litical rights? What THE GREATEST within the Aristote- 4 changed? Philoso- POLITICAL PRIVLEGE lian tradition. The phy. Samuel Taylor THAT WAS EVER Declaration was not Coleridge, in “Essays designed to “find out on His Own Times,” ACCORDED TO THE new principles, or theorizes that the HUMAN RACE.” new arguments . “spirit of the age” [or] say things which (the philosophy of President Calvin Coolidge, at the had never been said any particular time) White House, December 12, 1924 before; but to place invariably shapes before mankind the the legislation, the common sense of the morals, even the religion of the era. And subject, in terms so plain and firm as to that is true even if the majority of people command their assent.”5 In other words, have no very clear idea of that govern- the laws of nature rendered God-given ing philosophy. In Coleridge’s words: rights and consent-based government “Nor is this the less true, because the “self-evident” truths. great majority of men live like bats, but in Alexander Hamilton explains this twilight, and know and feel the philoso- beautifully, saying “the sacred rights of phy of their age only by its reflections and mankind are not to be rummaged for, refractions.” among old parchments, or musty records. The American founding involved an They are written, as with a sunbeam, in explicit attempt to implement a very par- the whole volume of human nature.” As ticular political theory. That theory was a practical matter this meant no man was grounded on an understanding of natural fit to rule others against their will; no rights that supported a strictly limited man was destined to be a slave; liberty is government and emphasized free men, a condition of human happiness and thus free markets, and freedom of conscience a right; and any legitimate government is in the classical liberal tradition. Thus, obliged to secure to its citizens the title to the Declaration contained what was, ac- property they have earned through their 2 CALVIN COOLIDGE PRESIDENTIAL FOUNDATION • COOLIDGEFOUNDATION.ORG • 802-672-3389 AMERICA’S ENDANGERED HERITAGE labor. Equality for the founding genera- THE FOUNDERS TO COOLIDGE tion meant equality of natural rights. As Thomas West explains, there was “no It is possible to go on and on quoting room in the founders’ political theory for the Constitution’s framers in this vein. an ‘organic’ society whose authority takes Indeed, the Constitution’s commitment the place of the free choice of individu- to natural rights and natural law was als.” Indeed, the “rights of society begin forthrightly acknowledged for more than from, and are guided and limited by, the 150 years. On the eve of the Civil War, rights of individuals.” when President Lincoln lamented that we might “nobly save, or meanly lose, the last The Founding explicitly affirmed not best hope of earth,” he was speaking of the only the existence of objective truth, but American notion of human liberty. But, the legitimacy of its pursuit through all why would this be so? In Lincoln’s view, the scientific disciplines. George Wash- constitutional principles — “conceived in ington’s June 1783 Circular Letter to the liberty, and dedicated to the proposition States expresses his gratitude that that all men are created equal” — were a “the foundation of our Empire sacrosanct inheritance we were obligated 7 was not laid in the gloomy Age to preserve. of ignorance and superstition, Calvin Coolidge echoed those sen- but at an Epocha when the rights timents in a wonderful speech given in of Mankind were better under- 1926 to celebrate the 150th anniversary stood and more clearly defined... of the Declaration of Independence. He [and] may be happily applied in lamented that most of those who clamor the establishment of our forms of for reform are sincere but ill-informed. Government [because]...the pure Were they more knowledgeable, Coolidge and benign light of Revelation believed Americans would realize Ameri- [has] had a meliorating influence ca’s foundation was spiritual, not material, on Mankind and [i]ncreased the 6 and the founders were people influ- blessings of Society. ” enced by “a great spiritual development” who acquired “a great moral power.”8 To Coolidge, only the exercise of God’s prov- idence seemed adequate to explain the Declaration of Independence. He con- cludes: “It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new ex- periences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to [the Declara- tion]. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just power from the consent of the governed, that is final. No The first page of George Washington’s Circular Letter to the States lauding the founders, June 1783. (Image advance, no progress can be made courtesy of the Library of Congress.) beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth CALVIN COOLIDGE PRESIDENTIAL FOUNDATION • COOLIDGEFOUNDATION.ORG • 802-672-3389 3 COOLIDGE QUARTERLY A crowd gathered at the Soldiers National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania listens to President Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. The president is visible in the photo, facing the crowd, not wear- ing his signature stove-pipe hat, in the left of the frame. (Image courtesy of the Library of Congress.) and their soundness, the only di- Harold McKinnon identified a central rection in which he can proceed problem with the socialist mystique. He historically is not forward, but understood the threat of the essentially backward toward the time when antidemocratic and totalitarian political there was no equality, no rights and legal philosophies gaining ground in of the individual, no rule of American universities. Such teachings, the people. Those who wish to McKinnon believed, denied the essential proceed in that direction can not elements of a regime devoted to the pres- lay claim to progress. They are re- ervation of natural rights. 9 actionary. ” “[This teaching] denies that there Today Coolidge’s insight seems is a moral law which is inherent counterintuitive. Less than a decade after in human nature and which is Coolidge uttered these stirring words, therefore immutable and to which they seemed to have been forgotten.
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