Walter Isaacson: The Greatest Sentence Ever Written

I wrote this book partly because I remember the bicentennial, and we'd gone through a really bad period that in some ways seemed almost as horrendous as what we're going through now: Watergate, Vietnam, the urban riots, the assassinations of Kennedys and King, the resignation of a president. And then for the bicentennial, Gerald Ford rang a Liberty Bell, and the tall ships came through the Golden Gate, came up the Mississippi. We all celebrated and we calmed down and basically put aside some of our poison. I thought that the 250th could be another moment like that. And so a group of us wrote books celebrating 1776 and the basic values. Ken Burns did his documentary, Meacham did American Struggle, quite a few of them. It is humbling to historians to know how little impact we can have, because it did not make for America 250 or Freedom 250 or whatever to be a unifying event. Good to be back here.

Thank you.

Great to be here. Great to be. And my second favorite city.

As Tennessee Williams said, the only two cities are New Orleans and San Francisco. The rest are Cleveland.

Sure. It's 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.'

Well, yeah. You heard me pause. Jefferson writes unalienable. On the Jefferson Memorial, it's unalienable. But John Adams, when he transcribes it, puts inalienable. Actually, yeah, I like inalienable slightly better. So I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what's the difference. And there was no difference. It was a typo. You know? Transcription, I should say.

Well, you know, it's certainly not just the 56 white guys in that room in Philadelphia. The question that they're addressing is what we call the social contract theory, which is up until then all rights of a governing body had been derived either from the divine right of kings or the sort of conquerors. And we were doing something fundamentally new on Earth, which was saying, no, the rights derive from a compact, a social contract made by the consent of the governed, springing from mainly John Locke, who was the favorite philosopher of Jefferson, Franklin, and Adams, the three principal drafters of the Declaration.

Well, first of all, they don't begin by saying self-evident. Those of us who are editors love to see the different drafts and how they were changed. And the very first draft, which is in the basement of the Library of Congress, you can see Jefferson's handwriting, and you'll get the book afterwards. I've signed the book. Let me borrow it for a second. And if you look inside, you'll see that the flyleaf is Jefferson's first draft. And he writes, 'We hold these truths to be sacred.' Now, wait a minute. That doesn't sound right. And there's Benjamin Franklin's printer's pen, the dark backslashes changing it to self-evident. He's saying we're trying to create a new type of nation in which our rights and the rights of the government come from the consent of the governed. Rationality, reason, the Enlightenment, not the dictates of religion. The sentence goes on, though, to say they're endowed with certain unalienable rights. And then John Adams writes in 'by their Creator.' And so you see, even in the editing of half a sentence over five drafts, the balance of the role of divine providence, gracing the nation with its power and rights, and the role of the Enlightenment, rationality, and reason.

Middle-aged editor, yeah.

Yeah. You know, it's nice to see the role that Franklin plays and the relationship between Jefferson and Franklin when it comes to saying, you know, 'work with my draft.' Exactly. In fact, Jefferson sends a wonderful letter to Doctor Franklin after he writes the first draft. Jefferson is on Market Street on the second floor of rented rooms, which is where they were meeting. And Franklin is a block away on Market Street. So Jefferson sends the first draft and says, with the good Doctor Franklin, with his great wisdom, please look at this draft and do whatever his, you know, broader views of the subject. And I'm thinking, boy, people are much nicer to editors back then than when I was in that. But Jefferson and Franklin had a particular bond. Franklin is much older, a generation older. They also, like any people who have a great bond, it was partly because of who they didn't like. And they didn't like John Adams, both of them. But they put up with him. And so there's a wonderful notion of Jefferson and Franklin bonding over the writing, which is particularly interesting because both of them are scientists. We think of Franklin as a doddering dude flying a kite in the rain, you know? But those electricity experiments were the most important experimental science of that era, right after Newton, and it informs the Declaration and the Constitution, because Newtonian balance is this ability to have contending forces and bring them into equilibrium, or to have plus and minus and whatever it may be, as a way to sort of show how forces could be correlated. That's what the scientists understood. And even the scientific method, which is you look at evidence, and from that evidence you revise your theory, something that we've forgotten how to do today.

Yeah. Self-evident. Well, clearly, and we'll get to this fact, all men being created equal is not self-evident when one fifth of the colonies is enslaved and most of the people in Philadelphia owned slaves. But what they're looking for when they say self-evident is there were two types of truth back then, coming out of David Hume, the great philosopher, a close friend of Benjamin Franklin. Franklin had spent the year 1774 and 1775 up in Scotland, spending a lot of time with Hume, who had just written about the fact that truth could be divided into two categories: truths based on facts and evidence, such as London is bigger than Philadelphia, and if you want to find out if that's true, you have to know how many people are in London. And then truths that are self-evident, almost by definition, like all bachelors are unmarried. If you want to know if that's true, you don't have to go around surveying bachelors and saying, do you have a spouse or do you have a wife? And I'm sorry to go on about that, but the reason that's important is when they're talking about a social contract being the source of their rights, if it comes from the social contract, then it is self-evident that anybody who is subscribed or is part of this social contract, it's self-evident that they have equal rights under this contract. So, and it's interesting because I went back to read Jeremy Bentham's response to the Declaration of Independence, and another philosopher who quite took an acid pen, I would say. Well, here's the most fundamental of disagreements, where you have a Bentham or a Mill who are utilitarians, and they tend to believe that you define the morality of an act by does it do the greatest good for the greatest number? That's a valid test. It is also not the test of John Locke, Jefferson, or Franklin. They are saying that individuals have certain autonomy and certain rights, and you can imagine situations where, for the good of the whole community, of the most people, you'd sacrifice a few people or you'd illegally incarcerate them. If you have a pure utilitarian view, it's not based on individual autonomy and liberty, which is the great dispute between John Locke and his crowd, including, I'd say, Voltaire, and the utilitarians, which are Mill and Bentham.

Right. Well, I think he was somewhat supportive of the Crown, though, right? Yeah. Well, that taints your view of things. You know, if you don't want them to break from the Crown. Yeah. I can't quite get the moral foundation of Bentham other than utilitarianism. And they believed in order that the Crown was something to be preserved.

Yeah. Well, as I say, it's self-evident if they're all part of this contract. But when I talk about Jefferson, Franklin, and Adams in that room, second-floor room on Market Street, upstairs, there's actually a third person in the room named Robert Hemings, a 19-year-old valet, enslaved, Black valet of Jefferson, very close to Jefferson, very complicated relationship. Every morning he shaves Jefferson, you know, they spend it. And Jefferson, of course, has, as you know, children by Robert Hemings' younger sister Sally, also enslaved by Jefferson. So you go, whoa, what are these people talking about? And all men are created equal. And it's, of course, the brutal contradiction at the heart of this sentence and at the heart of the founding of America, is that we do this and we create a nation based on individual rights and equality, and yet we compromise, or they compromise, we compromise, however you want to say it, on the issue of slavery. One of the things when you write history or teach history, and you do it too, is people in this day and age, and probably most days in age, especially now in the era of X, and, you know, they want to declare everybody's a hero or a villain in 140 characters. And Jefferson is a complicated person, you know, do we take down the monuments to Jefferson? Is a question. If you try to write history, you should start probably from the premise of, I'm going to tell it correctly the way it was. I'm not, you know, I'm not going to sugarcoat it. I'm not going to, you know, I'm not going to change what actually happened. And so you have to wrestle with Franklin had owned two slaves when he was a young printer. He realizes it's abhorrent. And he writes brutal attacks on the institution of slavery. And eventually, at age 80, and that was considered old back then, becomes the president of the Society for the Abolition of Slavery. So in some ways, Franklin's personal trajectory mirrors the narrative of the American trajectory. This sentence is not a sentence that describes America in 1776. It's an aspirational sentence of what we should try to be, and it becomes a forcing mechanism. Fourscore and seven years afterwards, Lincoln quotes it at Gettysburg, saying, 'A nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.' He's not doing that just to do a beautiful Gettysburg Address we all had to memorize. He's burying 7,058 young people in that cemetery who died to make the sentence more true. Dr. King invokes it in his last speech. LBJ, when he signed the Civil Rights Bill. So you can, if you want, have a huge moral revulsion at Jefferson and this sentence. But one reason I write about this sentence is each new generation has to do what it can to make it more true. Jefferson actually did write about slavery in his initial draft of the Declaration. But this is why Jefferson is so complex: he denounces slavery in the bills of particulars against the King. 'Well, he did this, he did that. You know, he subjected us to the brutal forms of slavery and the slave trade.' And the delegates at the end say, 'Take that out.' And of course, you say, 'Well, how could Jefferson be writing about that when he owned slaves?' Well, yeah, I think he knew how abhorrent it was, and he knew that he was not living up to what he should be doing. He was guided by many things that are not all that admirable. Meaning he was very land-rich and slave-rich, but very, very poor in cash, in debt most of his life. And he felt if he had freed all of his slaves and, you know, he would... That doesn't excuse him, but it's interesting to look at Adams, a pure abolitionist; Jefferson, who knows it's abhorrent but still enslaves people; and Franklin, who as a young man, you know, just had two in a print shop who were indentured. And then he let them go and becomes a real strong advocate for abolishing slavery. So I like this sentence because it's crafted by three people with different views.

Oh, yeah. He was furious, Jefferson was. And Franklin has to calm him down because, you know, he's being edited not just by Franklin and Adams, but now the 57 or 58 people who are sitting around that room in July. And Franklin tells him a story about when Franklin was a printer and was supposed to make a sign for John Cummings, who was a hat maker in Philadelphia, and the sign said, 'John Cummings, hat maker, makes and sells hats, ready cash in front.' And somebody certainly said, 'Well, if he's a hat maker, you don't need to say makes hats. And for cash, you don't need to say that.' And soon they had been... And finally the hat maker says, 'Just make me a picture of a hat.' And it's a pretty good tale. But Franklin tells it to Jefferson on the floor of the Continental Congress to calm him down.

Well, John Locke, as many of you know, pretty much uses that phrase quite a few times in the Second Treatise of Government and other places, and he calls it life, liberty, and property. So does George Mason, I think Jefferson's best friend, really, who's in charge of the Virginia Declaration of Rights in June of 1776, says life, liberty, and property. Jefferson changes that to the pursuit of happiness. We don't know exactly why. First of all, as a writer, I suspect he knew it was a much more felicitous phrase: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Secondly, he believed that even though John Locke said property was crucial to allowing individuals to have rights, that was too narrow for Jefferson. Jefferson wanted each person to be able to pursue their own goal in life, including serving God, serving the community, making money, creating property. He wanted to make it aspirational, and it becomes, in some ways, a definition of the American dream, which is you get to define what your pursuit of happiness is. But you live in a society that makes it possible for each new generation to pursue the American dream. And then you get to the Constitution, and property comes back in, in that place.

That's the important thing. And that's what Jefferson and Hamilton get into, their great disagreement. And as much as you dislike Jefferson, perhaps Hamilton did not deserve the musical. It should have been Franklin, because Hamilton believes the purposes of an economy are to create wealth, and a corollary, to create growth. Well, yeah. And we've had economies that do that throughout my childhood. We had globalization, free trade, free movement, and it created great wealth. What it did not create was a great opportunity for those who didn't fully share in the wealth, or the ability for each new generation to have an equal shot at pursuing the American dream. And so that's why I think Jefferson is trying to have a broader view of why do we have an economy? Is it, you know, is it just so economists can tell us if you have total free trade and you have automation and you have immigration and you have free movement of capital, all these things that I kind of believe in or believed in? I mean, during the 1990s, I was part of the Time magazine, Aspen, Davos consensus, and it did create a lot of wealth. But it suddenly occurred to me at a certain point that people were picking up pitchforks and having a populist, nationalist rebellion because people like me didn't fully get it, which is we believed that the purpose of the economy was to create wealth as opposed to nurture the American dream.

Yeah. You know, to say, yeah, commercialized the steam engine, right? And what was most important, the commercialized the steam engine, which created the Industrial Revolution, basically Adam Smith, which creates the spirit of capitalism, and the Declaration of Independence. When I teach at Tulane, I say great innovation, creativity does not involve just one leap. It usually involves two, three, four, or five things that happen at the same time in a simple way. The 1990s was an amazing period. But you had to have the invention of the automobile at the same time by Ford. And down there at the same time, John Rockefeller created the extraction of oil and the refining of oil and electricity. And when you have many things come together, you get this great leap. And in 1776, basically from July until October, you have three things that set the world on the path for a system. It takes many adjectives to describe it, that's based on individual rights, democracy, consent of the governed, free markets, free markets driven by technology. And an industrial revolution in which people feared that the machines would put people out of work. But what happens is you have an explosion of new jobs. So I try to tell my students, when you look at 1776, the reason it's a hinge point in history is at least those three things. I mean, you can probably name some others.

1776, that's a very good question. It went back and forth between the French and the Spanish in 1812. So actually, yeah, it's French because Franklin goes to Paris to negotiate the Treaty of Paris, which ends the war. And also before that, a year or two before, he negotiates with Vergennes, the French foreign minister, getting France in on our side in the war, which if we had not gotten France in on our side, we may have lost it. So that's Franklin when he's an envoy in 1776 and 1777, he gets the French, Lafayette and others, to come save us. And in return for that, he promises that the Louisiana Territory will always be free to the French. Navigation on the Mississippi will be, and up until Napoleon, which I guess is maybe 1814, you can look it up, does the Louisiana Purchase with Jefferson, who is still alive, and sells Louisiana to the US. And so, and meanwhile, here in San Francisco, the Spanish are founding the Presidio and Mission Dolores, and these are part of the American tapestry. But they're not being populated by heritage Americans at that point.

I mean, I try not to get too political, but the idea that heritage Americans are more American than, you know, especially since obviously all the founders came from somewhere else, I find that weird. And I also find the diversity of a city. The reason I love San Francisco and New Orleans has to do with the food and the architecture and the music and the people and the cultural life and the way of living. But all of that comes down to one thing, which is it's really diverse cities. New Orleans has, you know, from the French and then the Spanish and the Americans and the Italians and the Jews and the Irish. And it's a port to the Vietnamese. All come in. In the 1970s, San Francisco also has had a mixture of different people. That diversity adds to the creativity, in my opinion, of both New Orleans and more so of San Francisco.

Well, it should still be a forcing mechanism. I wrote this book partly because I remember the bicentennial, and we'd gone through a really bad period that in some ways seemed almost as horrendous as what we're going through now: Watergate, Vietnam, the urban riots, the assassinations of Kennedys and King, the resignation of a president. And then for the bicentennial, Gerald Ford rang a Liberty Bell, and the tall ships came through the Golden Gate, came up the Mississippi. We all celebrated and we calmed down and basically put aside some of our poison. I thought that the 250th could be another moment like that. And so a group of us wrote books celebrating 1776 and the basic values. Ken Burns did his documentary, Meacham did American Struggle, quite a few of them. It is humbling to historians to know how little impact we can have, because it did not make for America 250 or Freedom 250 or whatever to be a unifying event.

If everybody read that sentence, you'd pretty much agree with the sentiments that we have to respect people, that they each have certain rights, that the pursuit of happiness is a goal of America. And that is something each generation has to nourish or reinvigorate. And at the moment, we're backsliding on a lot of the concepts there. And I don't just mean equal rights. And but that's happening as well. I even mean the American dream. I mean the American dream. We've backslid on every generation of this country up until now. Each new generation was able to and knew they were going to be able to be somewhat better off than their parents. If you were born in the 50s like I was, you had an 80% chance of doing better than your parents. And I'm not just talking about income, I'm talking about owning a home when you were 30, which the majority of people in my generation did, being able to start a family, making more than your parents. Nowadays, the number of people born in the past 25 years who will make more than their parents is not 80%. It's less than 50%. For the first time, we've screwed up the American dream. And the number of... When I became 30 and I married Kathy and we got a house and started raising a family, I was typical. That was the median age for people doing that of my generation. Now, the number of people who can own a home, start a family, make do on a paycheck, and know that, or owning a home, let's just say it, 14%, not 15%. But if you're 30, so what will you know why people are being resentful? Yeah.

It's actually a two-part document, this beautiful beginning. And, you know, basically, 'when in the course of human events, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind, governments are instituted among men,' the philosophy, and then you get the bills of particulars against the king, which are the grievances.

Well, it was a huge break when they did the Declaration. And Franklin was against it up until about maybe January of '76, when Thomas Paine writes Common Sense. Up until then, they made the pretense, and probably believed it, that it wasn't the king and it wasn't the crown, the monarchy, that was the problem. He had bad ministers, and that the ministers of Parliament were subjecting us to unfair taxes, you know, the Sons of Liberty and the taxation without representation, all aimed at Parliament and the ministers. At a certain point, you couldn't say it was just the ministers misleading George III. And that's what's radical about the Declaration.