The Power Line Show: ‘Divided Over the Declaration,’ with Bobb & Williams

My final conversation with authors of new books about the Declaration of Independence before this Saturday's formal observance features the co-authors of Divided Over the Declaration: How an Enduring Debate Sustains the Vision of America.

The authors of Divided Over the Declaration are David J. Bobb and Tony Williams, who are colleagues at the indispensable Bill of Rights Institute.

Bobb and Williams have hit upon a unique way to draw our attention to key aspects of the Declaration as it has affected our political history from the beginning. Rather than doing a chronological narrative or analytical account of the sources and ideas in the Declaration, Bobb and Williams highlight several important episodes—you can call them "Declaration moments"—where the Declaration became a central factor in a new debate.

For example, the first chapter takes as its starting point Frederick Douglass's famous speech "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?" in 1852. From there the book takes us through the place of the Declaration for the abolitionist movement, Lincoln and the Civil War, the suffragettes, the Progressive era, and of course the modern civil rights movement. The books ends with a story arc from its beginning, with Martin Luther King's use of the Declaration in his famous speech at the Lincoln memorial in 1963.

The book has a number of great turns of phrase, such as calling the Declaration "America's borth certificate," and noting among other paradoxes that the document is at once "unoriginal" btu still radical, and the center of a major breakthrough in the human story. It has a strong concluding chapter that ties the whole picture together with thoughts about the Declaration and our next 250 years.

Not to worry; this series will continue after this July 4.