From Chapter 1: Liberty

"The people met generally, with anxiety and alarm in their countenances, and the effect of the day, through the whole colony, was like a shock of electricity, arousing every man, and placing him erect and solidly on his centre."—Thomas Jefferson, The Autobiography of Thomas Jefferson

"I feel mad, vexed, sick and sorry. Never did I need the voice of a consoling friend more than now. . . . This is a most terrible event. Its consequences are justly to be dreaded."—Gen. Nathanael Greene, letter to Henry Knox, November 1776, after the surrender of Fort Washington

December 2004

Sensing an impending loss, you will be overtaken by many strong emotions. Various forms of torment, remorse, anger, a premature grief, and not the least among these, disquiet, will haunt you. A constant unsettledness, dull in the day, growing more intense at night, will riddle all your thoughts with anxiety.

But if you are fortunate, this storm will have an eye. A wide, even spacious period of calm, a time that seems to arrive as if by some mysterious grace, during which disquiet yields to a gentler state, while you recognize again the virtues, the pleasures, and above all, the astonishing beauty of what you might lose.

Such a realization is, of course, all the more remarkable when what you anticipate losing is so familiar to you that you have ceased to see it clearly. And when what you see again has been so profoundly embedded in your daily life that you cannot separate it from yourself, the way you live, and what you think and feel, this recognition is also a mirror. A glass, as they would have said in a former age, where you and that which you fear might vanish are pictured as one.

Well before I knew the meaning of the word, I knew what democracy was. An egalitarian sensibility shaped the first six years of my life, forming not only the way I thought of myself but who I became. What I could think, say, imagine, the nature of my inner life, what some would call my soul, were all marked by the presence of the angel of democracy.

I was born in 1943, my first years marked by the Second World War, a time of intense patriotism. Except that patriotism then was different from what we call by that name now. The crisis we faced at that time seemed to make people come together and tolerate differences, and to intensify rather than diminish a general faithfulness in the idea expressed by the Declaration of Independence, that by right of birth, everyone is entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Before I reached the age of reason, this concept would have meant very little to me. Still, though the word was not yet in my vocabulary, I had already had some exposure to democracy. My first understandings came to me almost by osmosis, through what I saw around me, in the way things were done, the way people spoke to one another, laughed, smiled, dressed, even walked, and probably most important in those early years, the way I was raised.

Though I was generally a well-behaved child, I did not fear my parents. They were not by any light progressive, or even liberals, yet, in very simple terms, my mother and father treated my sister and me with a certain measure of respect, as if, at least existentially, they thought of us as equal beings with certain rights of our own. This does not mean we were given free rein. Due to our mother’s drinking, my sister and I often suffered neglect, but our household was not overly permissive. Clear limitations were set; we had bedtimes; we were taught table manners; we were expected to behave with respect toward adults. Since my father was a fireman, he made a decent living, but we could afford few luxuries, and thus we were not overly indulged in this way either. The year I was born, 1943, was a time of scarce resources. Until 1946 food was still rationed, a practice that extended the frugal habits of the Great Depression.

Yet in another way entirely, the atmosphere of the postwar period was generous and expansive, a mood that, despite a growing animosity between our parents, infused our household. Dragons overseas had been laid to rest. Life was becoming easier. New houses were being built that working people could afford. We lived in one of them. The dicta of closed worlds and class distinctions had begun to seem old-fashioned.

December

But then the memory of what you have had all your life has another effect. Your mind is suddenly awakened from a certain lethargy. You feel you have been negligent. And now like a lover, seeing the beloved at the door, not only your love but your attention is aroused. As if your life depended on it, you have an urgent desire to know more intimately what threatens to disappear. Is this magical thinking? To describe, enumerate, study, as if this will prevent the loss?

In many households, this leveling spirit had begun to extend to children too. The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care by Dr. Benjamin Spock, first published in 1946, the year after the war had ended, was swiftly becoming the best-selling book in America. That stern parental voice which once loomed over childhood was being swept away. By the time I was born, in many households, including my own, the notion that children should not speak unless they were spoken to had become antiquated. I am over sixty now, yet I can recall a conversation I had with my father several months before my sixth birthday as clearly as if it had happened yesterday, an interchange that reveals the democratic manner in which I was raised.

If the memory seems commonplace, it was. But that is its virtue. It was one of many similar conversations in which I was given the feeling that I had a right to express myself and to be heard. In this way I was to take in the essence of democracy almost every day. Not just the ideas of freedom and equality, but an intimate experience of both became part of my psyche, an aspect of the way I think and behave that has endured for all of my life.

The year was 1948. We were in the kitchen of our new house, a room filled with windows. It was a warm and sunny day. I remember the quality of light particularly well. I would describe it now as pellucid. Though those who live east of the Rockies do not believe California has seasons, it does. The light grows sharper in the early fall, commanding your eyes to study everything around you.

I had been looking all over the house and our small backyard for my sister. Six and a half years older than me, she was the love of my life then. I shadowed her every step, watched her closely, imitated her gestures, insinuated myself into her company whenever possible. Near noon, growing impatient with my failure to find her, using the name I had given to her when I was still an infant, I demanded of my father, “Where’s De De?”

He was sitting at a counter in our kitchen trying to fix some small appliance. “She’s with her friends.”

“Where?” I asked, excited that I finally had a clue regarding her location.

“I’m not sure,” he said. “She told me they might go into the orchard.”

We had recently moved from Los Angeles, where we shared a duplex with my mother’s parents, to one of many tract houses in the San Fernando Valley built just after the Second World War, and our house was on the corner where the tract ended, across the street from a grove of walnut trees.

I was already racing toward the back door when my father stopped me.

“Wait,” he said. “I don’t want you to go there.”

“Why?” I said, outraged by the idea. The world was safer for children then, and I had always been allowed to go into the orchard in the daytime, alone or with friends.

My father paused, no doubt to consider what to say for a minute.

But I kept repeating the word why, until he finally responded, as I knew he would. Whenever my sister or I asked why we were told to do or not do something, we were accustomed to being answered. Rarely were we given the response Because I said so.

Finally my father said, “She wants to be alone with her friends this afternoon.”

“She does not,” I said, expressing an imperious confidence, even though I had not really understood what he meant. As far as I was concerned, my father might as well have been speaking Urdu. Regarding my sister, alone with her friends was an entirely foreign concept. Solicitous and kind to me, she habitually included me in her activities, taking me with her where she went, often on the back of her bike, never even implying that I was unwelcome.

My petulance continued. Though he explained to me how it could be that sometimes an older child might need to live her own life apart from a much younger child, I remained furious with my father for the next hour, treating him as if he were an evil gatekeeper, thwarting my will out of pure spite. My only defense is that I was just on the periphery of the age of reason, only at its threshold. As with most children of that age, when I really wanted something, neither reason nor reality had any relevance at all.

And yet, looking back over nearly six decades, I realize my father was not wasting his efforts. It is as clear as the light of day to me now that through this conversation and many others like it, he was introducing me to reason. Though I was not yet capable of being reasonable, his attempts to explain the causes of a circumstance that led to a childish but intense grievance were helping me learn.

The blending of private and public life is manifold and endless in its forms. Political theory does not eventuate in legal documents alone but comes to dwell in all of us. And when it does not live there, it cannot survive at all. If by his manner my father was giving me self-respect and the ability to think for myself in granting me the right of free inquiry, he was also teaching me a skill that democracy requires of its citizens. As the Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote, “Reason is . . . the constant condition of all free actions.” Since those who cannot reason are dependent on the opinions of those who can, my father was giving me the lesson in reason that both independent thought and independence requires. He may not have been a wealthy man, but in this and many other ways, he handed down to me the rudiments of a great legacy, the inner life of democracy.

December 

I am following events with increasing urgency. Every day the news eats into me.

In tracing the legacy I inherited, my mind settles on 1776, the year that the American colonies officially declared for their independence from Great Britain. Because it is the inner life I have chosen to explore, instead of armies and battles, it is in fact the Declaration of Independence that draws me. I cannot say when I first heard the words that Thomas Jefferson wrote, nor do I know when exactly I came to understand what they meant. I only know that certain passages are so deeply embedded in my memory that, in the way that time becomes flexible in the mind, they have fused inextricably with who I am.

Thinking of my own nascent democratic consciousness, I realize that it was not only Jefferson’s words but the idea that he or anyone wrote them that impressed me. I have a distinct memory of seeing an image, a reproduction of a popular painting that depicted Jefferson sitting at his desk, a candle casting a potent, almost magical, glow across his face, his hands, the parchment on which he had placed his pen. It was a very sentimental glow, yet now it intrigues me, giving me, in a sense, a guideline for my own writing. I want to avoid sentimentality, pierce the glow, and see something more real. And at the same time, that glow itself represents something real in the interior life of democracy, a promise—not just the hope for the private improvements in the conditions of each life that come from freedom and equality, but something more general and less visible. The possibility, perhaps, of achieving the state of mind that can come from living in a world shaped by reciprocity. And from this mutuality, the sense of being kindred with others.

It is not a history I write, nor even an exposition of democracy. I am aiming at neither a definition nor a catalog of qualities. It is the inner states that generate and are generated by democracy that interest me, and the purpose lies in the journey itself too. At this pivotal moment, the idea of navigating my own life as an American citizen seems to satisfy a longing whose meaning I cannot quite fully articulate yet. And at the same time, I am eager to review the history of American democracy that I learned as a child, viewing this with older eyes now, uncovering backstories, motives, moods, psychologies, as well as ambiguities and contradictory grains. All of which are parts of myself too in a sense, since in the mysterious alchemy through which we are all created, we are shaped by histories that we do not know, as much as by those we do.

I was astonished to learn that by most accounts, Jefferson wrote his first draft of the main body of the declaration in roughly two days. I find the details fascinating, as if somewhere in the welter of them I might uncover a clue to how this remarkable document came into being. Aside from errands and brief meetings with colleagues who visited him, Jefferson was sequestered in two rooms while he wrote. He rented these from a bricklayer in Philadelphia. The building was on the south side of Market Street, a stretch of land that had few houses in that period. Originally Jefferson had wanted to stay farther toward the countryside, in a suburb rather than the city. He sought the quiet around him he was used to when he worked at home. Would he pause in his writing, go to the window, look out on a field or a cluster of trees nearby? Or, when he needed to think for a moment, would he just sit and stare nowhere in particular? In any case, the task he was performing would have had little outward manifestation. The greater part of the drama took place in his mind.

Not far away from this deceptively quiet scene, in a more populated area of the city, at the Philadelphia State House on Chestnut Street, delegates to the Second Continental Congress discussed the resolution to dissolve the bonds between the colonies and England that Richard Henry Lee had introduced on June 7. Like Jefferson, Lee was a delegate from Virginia, a colony from which many Revolutionary leaders came. Virginians, including George Mason, had produced crucial bills, legislation, and literature, including Jefferson’s eloquent essay A Summary View of the Rights of British America, and Mason’s Virginia Declaration of Rights, all of which widened the boundaries of the public imagination, bringing what had once seemed reckless and improbable into the realm of reasonable action.

Though there were amendments and compromises to be made to Lee’s resolution, everyone knew it would soon be adopted. A severance from Britain was already under way. The first shots had been fired over a year earlier. Colonial armies were being organized. Welcomed by drum rolls, George Washington had just marched his troops into New York City. King George had hired German mercenaries, who were on their way to America. Though no nation existed yet, foreign relations, especially with France, would be crucial to the Revolution. The world had to be told what the American colonists were doing and why.

This was why, three days later, on June 10, the Second Continental Congress appointed a committee to write a document formally declaring the separation of the American colonies from Britain. When, a day later, the committee of seven men, among them Benjamin Franklin and John Adams, convened to discuss what the declaration should say, they made Jefferson their chairman and then, sometime later in the course of the day, asked him to write the document.