David Sumner: All men are created equal too powerful to be thwarted

##David Sumner

About the writer: David Sumner is the longtime holder of a professorship in English and environmental studies at Linfield. His scholarly pursuits include American nature tradition, nature writing, environmental ethics and the novels of environmental activist Edward Abbey. In addition to Linfield, he has taught on a Fulbright fellowship at Germany’s University of Bayreuth and with Semester at Sea while circumnavigating the globe aboard the MS Explorer. In his free time, he enjoys backpacking, flyfishing and playing bluegrass with the Bootleg Jam.

Part of my teaching assignment at Linfield is “American Dreaming,” a course that tells the American story, from first contact to ChatGPT, through literature.

I’ve taught “American Dreaming” in some form half-a-dozen times. The goal is to help students develop their own narrative of America through reading Rowlandson, Wheatly, Jefferson, Paine, Red Jacket, Tecumseh, Emerson, Thoreau, Stowe, Fuller, Douglass, Truth, Twain, Crane, De Bois, Hughes, Stein, Elison, O’Connor, Morrison, Anzaldua ... you get the idea.

But this year, for the first time, rather than just moving through the different texts, historical contexts and literary periods, I taught “American Dreaming” with a thesis. Because this year we are celebrating 250 years of the five most powerful words ever written: “All men are created equal.”

These five words, five words written by a rich man who owned other human beings, ignited a firestorm around the world that continues to burn. And these five words have formed the foundation for the American story, the foundation for American dreaming.

Beginning in 1776, the power of these words spread to the Caribbean, to Europe, and eventually to Africa and Asia. They proved bigger than the small-mindedness and myopia of the man who wrote them, and of the men who pledged their lives, fortunes and sacred honor to make them real.

In our country, the struggle to make these words real has been difficult and bloody, and is ongoing.

We fought a war over these words with 1.5 million casualties, all American. These words inspired the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments and the post-war hope of reconstruction.

Even after President Rutherford B. Hayes withdrew northern troops from the South in 1877, and the hopes of emancipation were crushed under the jackboot of sharecropping and Jim Crow, these words still rang in the ears of the children of the enslaved.

They fled north in the great migration, filling factories in Chicago and Detroit and Cleveland for better, if still not quite fair, wages. They thrived for a time on Black Wall Street in Tulsa, gathered in Harlem to create art and music and dance, and hoped to see the promise of the founding idea fulfilled.

These words inspired Susan B. Anthony, Elizebeth Cady Stanton and the others who fought for women’s suffrage. With the passing of the 19th Amendment, they had to be revised to “all people are created equal.”

These words inspired Martin Luther King Jr. and Dolores Huerta and Lenord Peltier. They inspired the “Civil Rights Act” and the “Voting Rights Act.” And even with our current fractiousness, our current disagreements over what these words even mean, the words themselves continue to be more powerful than our parochial current moment.

The power of these words means that we are not a country founded on an ethnicity, on a religion, on blood and soil, but a country founded on an idea.

Anyone can be an American. I could move to Germany, but I’d never be German. I could move to Japan, but I’d never be Japanese. Yet, once you take the oath of citizenship — whether you’re from Cambodia or The Congo, from Iraq or India, from Mexico or Morocco — you are as American as someone tracing ancestral lineage to the Mayflower.

So, what was my thesis?

Two-hundred-and-fifty years ago, a man who owned other human beings wrote the most powerful words in the English language, “All men are created equal.” For all of that time, the narrowness and bigotry of some has been unable to permanently thwart the power of these words.

But even powerful ideas need tending. So, if you believe in this founding idea, if you believe that all people are created equal, what are you going to do to make these words a reality today?