The history of online books is intertwined with the history of Independence Day. It was on July 4, 1971 that Michael Hart, the founder of Project Gutenberg, was inspired to enter into a computer a copy of the Declaration of Independence. Here are some of the words he typed:
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. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
195 years after the first publication of these words heralded the birth of a new nation, Michael Hart quoted them in what’s often considered the birth of the ebook. These words have staying power not just because the United States still exists as one of the world’s most powerful nations, and not just because they inspired people to fight for independence in the 18th century. They have staying power because they inspired people to establish and protect human dignity, equality, and empowerment in many other times and places. Consider, for instance, the Seneca Falls Declaration, echoing and reworking these words 72 years later to proclaim “all men and women are created equal”, and to launch efforts to secure American women’s rights to vote that would take another 72 years to win. Consider also the many declarations around the world that, as David Armitage notes, have drawn on this Declaration’s words for inspiration.
It’s often easy for July 4 to be an occasion for Americans to glibly congratulate ourselves. But even if the Declaration proclaims the truths above “self-evident”, the fulfillment of their promise has been anything but self-evident. Those who wrote and signed the Declaration knew they would be at risk for losing “our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor” for years afterwards, until those who fought and supported the American Revolution made Great Britain agree to a treaty recognizing the new nation. The writers of the Declaration themselves also failed to consistently live up to the ideals stated in it. Many of them, including the Declaration’s main drafter, continued to enslave other people for all of their lives. Indeed, the conflict between the principle that “all men are created equal” and the desire to keep some human beings subjugated to others eventually led to a war much bloodier than the American Revolution. During that war, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address again invoked the Declaration’s founding principle of equality, and called the Civil War a test of whether “any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure.”
Our nation has endured many such tests in our 248 years, some of them resulting in victories, some of them resulting in setbacks. Sometimes the power of words alone has not been enough to guarantee people’s “unalienable Rights”. In the wake of the Civil War, three constitutional amendments were passed that seemed to guarantee the right to vote regardless of race, the equal protection of the laws, and the end of slavery. But less than a decade later, a bitterly fought close election led to a compromise that undid those guarantees. African Americans soon effectively lost their right to vote in much of the United States, until the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Exploitation of convict labor in tandem with a dramatic rise in imprisonment, often under flimsy pretexts, led to what Douglas A. Blackmon and others have called “slavery by another name“. In Plessy v. Ferguson, John Marshall Harlan insisted in his dissent that the Fourteenth Amendment “placed our free institutions upon the broad and sure foundation of the equality of all men before the law”. But he could not override the ruling of seven other Supreme Court justices in that case, who accepted a claim that enforced racial segregation could in practice be “separate but equal”.
These setbacks and others remind us that while “the People” can institute governments that respect our rights, “the people” can also let us down. We are people, after all: human beings who have unalienable rights and dignity, but who also have flaws, vices, weaknesses, and vulnerabilities. Any given institution, from a neighborhood association to the Supreme Court, can let us down too. They are also made of people, after all, ultimately doing what the people involved in them decide to do.
I know a number of people who are discouraged this July 4 in particular, as we’ve seen our Supreme Court once again let us down. They have issued rulings whose implications extend to “altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments”, as the Declaration writers complained of King George. Particularly alarming among them is the ruling of six of the justices giving presidents immunity from prosecution so broad as to enable the kind of “despotism” the Declaration writers denounced in George III. Justices Sotomayor and Jackson noted this in their dissents, and other writers like Mark Joseph Stern have amply argued the case as well. The Supreme Court by itself cannot kill American democracy, but figuratively speaking, it’s placed a gun on the mantelpiece that a leading presidential candidate has demonstrated a willingness to fire upon regaining power. If we thought we could rely on the Supreme Court or any other institution unquestioningly, or assume that saying the right words to it would make it honor those words as we thought they should, we’ve been gravely disillusioned.
What our words can do, though, is help us keep working for what we know is right, until we overcome the setbacks with victories. In our libraries, we can bring these words together, and ensure that people continue to have access to them, for as long as that takes. We have all kinds of words that are needed for those struggles. We have words that inspire, words that persuade, and words that tell the stories of what has been, and what could be. We have words that tell us how democracies have formed, how they’ve failed, and how they’ve been restored. We have the words of all kinds of people that help us more easily see and treat those people as our equals, and deserving of the same unalienable rights that we have ourselves. We have words that illuminate the grievances behind long-standing conflicts, expose the atrocities of those conflicts, and show us how some of those conflicts have been resolved justly, even when few could imagine that outcome. We have words that help us pursue our happiness, and enable others to pursue their happiness as well.
Brought together, and freely shared, words have a lot of power. Authoritarians know this– that’s why so many of them try to ban books or coercively manipulate the way people communicate with each other. It’s why librarians raise the alarm when they see book bans on the rise, on whatever pretext. And it’s also a reason for us to hope that as we communicate with each other, organize with each other, and take action with each other, we can make real the promises of the words we treasure.
That’s why on this July 4, I celebrate the words of the Declaration of Independence that Michael Hart typed out and that I repeated at the top of this post. I’ll continue to organize and seek out more words that can be used to protect life, promote liberty, and pursue happiness. I resolve to do what I can, particularly between now and November, to work towards a society and government that honors the fundamental equality of all human beings, and the free consent of the governed. And I remember those who have engaged in similar struggles before me, including those Lincoln honored for fighting in another July long past, so that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
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