Many people are tweeting #fvckthefourth on this especially awkward 244th anniversary of American Independence, a turbulent time in 2020 after COVID-19 and the multiple killings of Black people, including Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd.
The 4th of July is no holiday for the enslaved or disenfranchised, Frederick Douglass was right to remind Americans. In his 1852 speech “What is the 4th of July to a Slave,” Douglass was also correct about the enduring validity of ideals like liberty, individual sovereignty, and equality and demanded them for all Americans. These ideals of the American Constitution and Declaration of Independence, are not, as Stanford professor emeritus Jack Rakove recently claimed, merely words of state power.
Pace Rakove, individual sovereignty and equality remain as intrinsic to the fabric of America as free speech and the First Amendment, though still imperfect in their manifestations and access to all Americans. The list of those who continue to suffer exclusion from the American ideal remains long today, just the list of inequities continues as it has every year since the Declaration of Independence.
This 4th of July, I find myself engaging in an oddly patriotic ritual, teaching Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter to high school students. From 10 until noon, I teach low-income high school students of color who have every reason to doubt their inclusion in America, and thereafter children of Chinese-American immigrants, who despite their many academic and cultural successes, also feel uncertain of their belonging.
The Scarlet Letter, a hurdle students must surmount in AP English to gain acceptance to elite universities, also captures for these students much of violence of their country: the founding of America in slavery, genocide of the natives, religious intolerance, and misogyny. Consider Chapter VII, “The Governor’s Hall,” where the publicly excoriated scarlet woman, Hester Prynne, awaits the Governor to plead for custody of her illegitimate daughter, Pearl. A highly burnished suit of armor hangs on the wall, recently made with the finest English steel, washed clean of the blood of the Pequots the Governor had slain. When Hester and Pearl peer at the armor, they see their faces reflected in distortion, disappearing behind the scarlet letter. They remain nevertheless resolute.
Hearing my students read this passage aloud, I’m struck but how much of America’s dark origins are captured in that steel armor, late of England, but soon the power of American industry in the lavish home of a “religionist” politician, who seeks to deny the mother custody of the child. Also truly American: the cowardly priest father of the child, Arthur Dimmesdale, whom the hapless woman requires as a defender. No feminist text, The Scarlet Letter, presents an alternatingly self-flagellating and wild, passionate, but ultimately opaque woman and her impish child, while spilling much more ink on the twisted interiors of the vengeful husband and guilty father, and the generations of frowny-faced, feckless government men at the dusty Custom House. America appears embodied in the “foul-tempered” federal eagle, a ferocious female who “has no great tenderness, even in her best of moods, and, sooner or later,—oftener soon than late,—is apt to fling off her nestlings, with a scratch of her claw, a dab of her beak, or a rankling wound from her barbed arrows.”
Amid all its violence and danger, The Scarlet Letter also gives Americans a feminine heroine, who lives by her own art, faith, and passions, whose free-spirited daughter grows up to be a powerful businesswoman. All that is good and bad about America can be seen in this novel. The eagle offers no protection. The armor distorts and diminishes the women’s image. But they decide to see themselves differently.
Truth lies in the novel. So too do America’s founding documents contain truths, of which Americans can feel proud and fight to realize. One can embrace equality on the Fourth of July, feel political attachment to the norms and values of a pluralistic liberal democratic constitution, which are no mere ideological slogans, but rather form the basis of America as it ought to be. Women, immigrants, the descendants of former slaves deserve a better, different, more fully realized America, one which Frederick Douglass embraced when he argued “as it ought to be interpreted, the Constitution is a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT.”