We the People Are the Heroes : All That We Celebrate Was the Work of Unsung Americans

Too frequently Americans are exposed to only a heroic and simplistic version of the events surrounding the writing of the Constitution in Philadelphia 200 summers ago. We hear mostly of the brave men who during the Revolutionary War had stood unswervingly by their principles, fought against British oppression with the tenacity of pit-bull terriers and then--in the 1780s, recognizing grave weaknesses in the functioning of government under the Articles of Confederation--summoned up a dazzling display of original political thinking to fabricate a constitutional document that not only has lasted two centuries but also is pronounced the model for freedom-loving people all over the world.

Self-congratulatory celebrations of the Founding Fathers represent a peculiarly undemocratic way for a democratic people to celebrate their origins. They feed the tendency, which is well developed in most history books, to believe that history is made by wise and heroic leaders. The “great men” theory of history is essentially elitist, undemocratic and wrong. It reduces the ordinary individual to insignificance; today, especially, it spreads the feeling among young Americans that voting is useless and that keeping informed about current events is a waste of time because all of the big decisions are made by those who are holding the strings of power under which the puppet masses dance at their command.

The “great men” theory of history also nurtures the notion that our past is an unbroken string of accomplishments. In fact, we are legatees of a complicated, achievement-filled and problem-strewn past. It is one of the advantages of a democracy that its citizens can get beyond flag-waving to understand the tragic parts of its history, and can therefore deal more effectively with contemporary issues and problems.

The only history befitting a democratic society is one that inspires a frank and searching dialogue with the past. It stresses the role of the people as active agents in the making of their own history--for good and for bad. To understand this is to be empowered by history, for it is to perceive that the ordinary individual does count.

All the truly major changes in our history--the Great Awakening, the American Revolution, the abolitionist and the women’s-suffrage movements of the 19th Century and the civil-rights movement of the mid-20th Century, to take a few examples--would have failed miserably without the participation of thousands of historically anonymous individuals who put themselves onto the line of fire. Black history, women’s history, Chicano history and labor history have gathered many avid practitioners and followers in recent years because they have recaptured a part of our past that informs people in these groups that they, too, have a history; that this history has involved people who have struggled for rights denied, justice obstructed, interests trampled on and beliefs belittled, and that in the process of struggling for their rights these groups have changed the course of American history.

The appropriate way for those who believe in democracy to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the Constitution involves a double rethinking of our past. First, we need to recognize that the Constitution represented compromises, some of which have worked brilliantly in the succeeding two centuries, like the small-state/large-state compromise, and some of which have left enormous burdens on the generations that followed to do what the 55 delegates could not or would not do, like the compromise on slavery, which in 1787 left 600,000 Americans and all their unborn progeny in perpetual bondage.

We also need to understand how the liberty, equality and social justice that were theoretically guaranteed by the Constitution actually had to be gained through agitation, protest and struggle on the part of many groups, working year by year and generation by generation--groups whose rights and interests were sacrificed at the Constitutional Convention in the name of political expediency. These freedom fighters, who risked more than those with powdered wigs at Philadelphia, deserve our recognition as much as do the authors of the parchment that we are venerating this year.