Declaration of Independence is alive and kicking, historians say

By GAIL SCHONTZLER Chronicle Staff Writer

It may be a musty 228 years old, but the Declaration of Independence is still an incredibly powerful document and worth celebrating, say three local historians.

The great thing it does is to lay out "All men are created equal" as America's official creed, said Billy Smith, Montana State University history professor.

"It epitomizes what people are fighting for in the Revolution," Smith said. "It's a great ideal to try to strive for."

And over the last two centuries, black people, women and other disenfranchised groups have turned to the Declaration, even more than to the Constitution, as they strived for equality, said Jim Bruggeman, Irving School principal and a director of two $1 million federal grants to improve teaching of U.S. history in local schools.

"It's the original document of freedom," Bruggeman said.

"In many ways, if you look at the course of American history, much of it can be seen as a working out of the implications in that one critical phrase."

Mary Bolhuis, who teaches American history and government at Bozeman High School, said every fall she tells her students, "That document is why we're sitting here.

The men who signed the Declaration meant the phrase "All men are created equal" in a narrow sense -- excluding blacks, Indians and women, Bolhuis said, but today, "We interpret it broadly.

"Those are powerful words," she said. "Thank God they're there. Martin Luther King said we're going to make you make good on your promises."

When women's rights activists met in Seneca Falls, N.Y., in 1848, they drafted their own declaration, grafting their aspirations onto the Declaration of Independence.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal," the women wrote, "that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. ..."

There were several reasons the Continental Congress drafted the Declaration in the summer of 1776, despite the reluctance of more conservative members, Smith said.

The common people had been stirred up by Thomas Payne's fiery pamphlet "Common Sense," which made the case for separating from England popular.

"It sold more copies than anything else except the Bible," Smith said.

Independence was the only way to gain assistance from the other European superpower, France, Smith said. And shots had already been fired in Massachusetts. Unless patriot soldiers belonged to an independent nation, they would be treated as rebel traitors and hanged.

Thomas Jefferson's draft wasn't original, but his writing was brilliant, Bruggeman said. There had already been about 90 declarations written by colonial towns, grand juries and militias. Jefferson incorporated their grievances into the long list of abuses and evils in the Declaration that explain why America has been forced to break free of England.

"In those grievances," Bruggeman said, "you hear the voice of the people."

"It's the backbone," Bolhuis said of the Declaration of Independence. "It's the reason we shoot off all those fireworks."

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