by Conrad Black
The United States is fully justified in the great celebrations over the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. All substantial countries have a mythos, and none has been trumpeted more loudly in the world than that of the U.S.
The essence of it is that the American Revolution was the dawn of respect for human rights and the founding of a great nation based on equality of opportunity and status for all citizens, where there was no limit to what law-abiding hard work could accomplish. Of course, this completely ignored the status of the slaves, who, even after they were emancipated 90 years later, after a terrible civil war in which 750,000 Americans died in a population of 31 million, African-Americans continue to be largely discriminated against in a segregated and unequal system for another century. (The author of the Declaration, Thomas Jefferson, had six children with one of his slaves.)
The conventional wisdom overlooks a few other things as well. Americans had practically no greater rights after the revolution than before, only a government of their own in their own country. And they had no greater rights than did the British, Swiss, Dutch, and most of the Scandinavians. But they did have a vast centre of a continent that was chronically underpopulated and which they were effectively free to settle and develop.
This was the genius of American growth. Instead of going overseas, where they were not wanted, to impose themselves on others, as the British and French and others did, they attracted scores of millions of people to America as striving loyalists. Their empire would be the voluntary attraction for foreigners, not the colonization of them. (Canada and Australia emulated this.) They had a patrician class, but no aristocracy, and a much more egalitarian and meritocratic view of society than any other significant nationality.
The Americans effectively set themselves up as a “world nation”: up until then the countries of the world were essentially defined by their languages—the English spoke English, the French spoke French, and the Dutch spoke Dutch and so on. The U.S. was only the second English-speaking country, but it did not define itself on a cultural basis, rather on the respect for individual rights, democratic rule, and almost unfettered opportunity. And they were Americans: from the very beginning, they possessed the genius of showmanship. The Declaration of Independence itself presaged great extravaganzas from Hollywood to the Super Bowl.
It is appropriate that this 250th Fourth of July weekend will also see the wedding of popstar Taylor Swift and football player Travis Kelce in Madison Square Garden in a program to extend 10 hours, five times as long as the installation of a pope. The United States has always been a spectacular country, like no other, and the eyes of the world have been on it since it was founded.
In fact, the American Revolution was a somewhat grubby dispute about taxes. Benjamin Franklin, representing Pennsylvania and several other colonies in London, helped persuade the British prime minister, William Pitt the Elder, to expel the French from Canada in the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763), which approximately doubled Britain’s national debt. Much of this was spent in Europe and India, but a good deal of it was spent to remove the French from the American border. Given that Americans were, at the time, the wealthiest British subjects and the British were already paying a stamp tax, it was not unreasonable for the British to ask that the Americans pay some of the cost for having got rid of the French for them.
At this point, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and others confected the pious humbug about “No taxation without representation.” If the British had asked for the American commitment to the tax before they came up the St. Lawrence and ascended the cliffs beside the Plains of Abraham, the Americans would have been happy to pay it.
One of the great diplomatic feats of all history was Benjamin Franklin, after successfully lobbying Pitt for the war in North America, 15 years later, persuaded the French to go to war for the causes of Republican democracy and imperial secession, both of which the French monarchy abhorred. This action helped produce the economic strain that led to the French Revolution and the fall of the French monarchy 10 years later.
The magnificently written beginning and end of the Declaration of Independence are much better remembered than its contents, which consisted of a scurrilous attack upon King George III in strictures as severe as the indictments of Nuremberg after the Second World War. Farmer George did not deserve this; he was even accused of trying to import Roman Catholicism into the United States, where, in fact, all he did was agree with the French Canadians that the practice of their religion and use of their language and of the French Civil Code would be unhindered if they were loyal to the British Crown.
Both sides upheld their side of the bargain, and that was instrumental in the repulse of Benjamin Franklin and the then loyal revolutionary Benedict Arnold when they came to Montréal in 1776 to try to persuade Canada to secede with the Americans. Jefferson also included a few acerbities about the native people in his Declaration; they did, after all, have some grievance with the activities of colonists.
Despite some of the flimflam around the founding of America, the American Revolution was one of the most important events in history. There has never been anything remotely like the rise in just two long lifetimes from the Siege of Yorktown to the end of the Second World War of a couple of million colonists and their slaves to the immense power and influence of the United States of America.
In 1945 it had half the economic product of a war-ravaged world, a monopoly on atomic energy, was the headquarters of the most ambitious attempt at any sort of world association of countries and peoples (disappointing though the United Nations has been). It had led the Allies to victory, and the American leadership of Presidents Roosevelt and Truman and the military commanders, Generals Marshall, MacArthur, and Eisenhower, and Admiral Nimitz, produced an unsurpassable standard of leadership at the very moment when the U.S. was of greatest importance to the world, and the future of Western civilization was at stake.
It was a long time coming, but no country has ever made so great and so successful an effort as the U.S. has done to raise up a formerly forcibly servile minority to complete equality with the descendants of their former owners. No country’s promotion of democracy and human rights in the world or of the generalized prosperity that market economics alone can produce has approached that of the U.S. More than any other country, it has ensured that the world has enjoyed 80 years in which the great powers have not been at war with each other and democratic government has extended to hundreds of millions of people on all continents, and the percentage of humans afflicted by poverty has declined to approximately 10 percent.
The United States is, it must be said, by Canadian and some other standards, in many ways a vulgar and a corrupt and a violent society. But it is also by far the greatest and most successful country in the history of the world, and it is a democracy. And like all democracies, it can govern itself however it wishes. Unlike the early days of American preeminence, that country no longer has the slightest interest in whatever others think of it. Nor should it.
The whole world should congratulate this incomparable and overwhelmingly positive force in modern history, the United States of America, on this signal anniversary. May God bless America.
