BN+ Podcast: Ted Widmer, "The Living Declaration"

[00:00:03]The commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence has now gone beyond the 4th of July.

[00:00:12]Many, many books have been published about the declarations during the first half of 2026.

[00:00:19]The question for Americans is have you read the Declaration in full?

[00:00:24]A recent study says only three in 10 US citizens have actually read the Declaration in its entirety.

[00:00:32]Author Ted Widmer has published through the Library of America a detailed history of how the Declaration came about.

[00:00:41]The book is called The Living Declaration, a biography of America's founding text.

[00:00:48]This is Ted Widmer's 12th book, which includes an introduction by the well-known historian Gordon S. Wood.

[00:00:55]Professor Wood died at age 92 just days before the publication of this book.

[00:01:07]Ted Widmer, in your introduction to this book, you have some really interesting facts, and I'm going to spit them out to you and let you reflect on them. I never knew that there were 39 steps in front of the archive.

[00:01:22]>> That came out to me in my research. I mean, I've I've climbed up them, and I'm sure you have, too, but I I just got curious about every detail. The Lincoln Memorial, I just found out, has a fourscore and seven steps. So, these architects were pretty smart.

[00:01:39]>> 27 offenses in the Declaration. What is an offense?

[00:01:46]>> Well, it's a kind of lawyerly part of the Declaration, which, you know, I've read it so carefully over these past 2 years. It has soaring language about human rights, but then there's a pretty angry middle section going into specifics about how the king has violated the fundamental rights and liberties of Americans. So, these are very specific charges. He has um interfered with the legislative process.

[00:02:13]He's asked legislatures to meet in distant places.

[00:02:19]He's interfered with legal processes um taking away fair trials, sending people uh to distant prisons.

[00:02:29]He's interfered with the economy, throwing up trade barriers between peoples.

[00:02:34]Um he's blocked immigration. And in all of these ways, they felt that they had no ability to represent their concerns.

[00:02:43]Uh Parliament wasn't listening. The king wasn't listening. So, hence the Declaration of Independence.

[00:02:49]>> You say there are 1,320 words.

[00:02:53]Does that seem to be bigger or smaller >> There are longer declarations, for sure.

[00:03:01]But I'd say it's about average. Um there are shorter ones as as well. But they had important work to be done. They needed to declare their causes uh to the to the world.

[00:03:14]And as I said a minute ago, they needed some human rights language to ennoble the cause. But then they needed this legal language to be very specific about why they felt they were living under a tyrant. The the the word is used. And um and then they needed to come out of all of that with some uplifting language at the end, which is they they they do with their mutual pledge of their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.

[00:03:43]So, there's a lot going on in a complicated document. And uh the fundamental premise of the book is that we don't know the Declaration as well as we should and we also don't know this tremendous literature throughout our 250 years about how later generations responded to it.

[00:04:04]>> You uh say that as the declaration goes on the verbs become more active and you list plundered ravaged, burnt, destroyed.

[00:04:15]>> Right. There's a real energy there. The the charges are becoming more serious and as you said the verbs become more active. So, Jefferson is bringing the reader along with a rising feeling of anger at all of these violations of our rights which will then justify in the final paragraph that the decision to become an independent nation.

[00:04:42]>> You also talk about adjectives, decent, self-evident, equal, and candid.

[00:04:49]>> Well, that is how I I feel about the declaration. I think they are stating the case with great candor. They're they're being clear to their adversaries, the English as well as to fellow Americans and um there were a lot of people who were not quite sure which way they were leaning. Um historians estimate about a third of the American people wanted to stay in the in the English Empire. So, they're they're writing to them too. And to the degree that they could state the case candidly, I I think they won over more readers for that kind of honesty. I think that was very much on the minds of the not only the five people who were on the drafting committee, but the Continental Congress as a whole which was very involved in the editing process to to Jefferson's great distress and they they removed some language that troubled Jefferson a great deal. It was a a denunciation of the king for the support he'd given to the slave trade. And it's a passage that's fascinating to historians because slavery has come up so much in the in the history profession as a topic over the last 50 years as as it should have.

[00:06:08]But in this very complicated passage that was removed, which we have in the book, I think candor was not really there. I think Jefferson was making a complicated argument that just didn't feel as honest as every paragraph needed to be in this great document. So, that's one of the reasons Congress removed it over Jefferson's objections because it was just a little bit unfair to blame the king of England for a slave trade that had been going on for centuries and when so many of the founders, including Jefferson, had financial ties to slavery. So, candor uh was really important in this document and the other members of Congress felt that this one paragraph didn't quite pass muster.

[00:06:58]>> What is your background as of today?

[00:07:00]Where are you living and what are you doing besides writing books?

[00:07:03]>> I'm in Rhode Island and uh I'm I would say I'm becoming an independent historian. I've worked at many universities. I've I've been pretty academic.

[00:07:13]And I just had a 7-year stint at the City University of New York, but that stint has ended. So, I'm I'm now independent and in Rhode Island and trying to write books more quickly.

[00:07:25]Um not teaching helps to accelerate the pace of writing. And this book was a real joy. It's um I would I would say I was both an author and an editor. There are selections by many people. We have 68 other the about the Declaration in the book, but I introduced all of them and wrote a pretty long introduction. So, it was a combination of my writing and then um selecting with along with editors at the Library of America what we thought were the most important texts and I was surprised to find that there isn't really a book like this. That as as important as the declaration is, almost all books about it are about the writing of it and not so much the reception of it over over all of our history. So, I hope this fills a a gap and that new readers come to study the declaration in in some new ways.

[00:08:18]>> When did you start working on this? And by the way, what is the Library of America?

[00:08:23]>> The Library of America is a wonderful non-profit based in New York City that brings out all of our most important canonical writings in in both literature and history in these beautiful volumes um often with a black dust jacket cover. They've been doing this since the '80s and they're really a national treasure and I urge Americans to not only to read their books, but to support the Library financially because they're not trying to make a profit, but they're they're doing us a great service and they do it without partisanship or ideology. They just bring out the texts as written by our our greatest authors and um I worked on this um with editors at the Library of America for about 2 years, but for me it came out of a a couple earlier sources. I in 2020, I wrote a book about Lincoln's train trip from Illinois to Washington.

[00:09:25]And during that trip, which lasted 13 days, he was in grave danger. There were assassination attempts before he even became president.

[00:09:33]And he really clung to the declaration.

[00:09:36]He was in political danger, too. How do you become president of a country that is suddenly missing seven states? And will there be a war? Nobody knew.

[00:09:45]And he found comfort in reading the declaration. I think he found comfort reading it to himself, but he read it to Americans who gathered to hear every word he he had to say. And he went to Independence Hall and gave one of his best speeches of that year saying, "I've never had a feeling politically that did not derive from the Declaration of Independence." So, I was aware of the great importance of the declaration to Lincoln.

[00:10:15]And because of my closeness to Lincoln, I just kept thinking about it and trying to isolate what was it in the declaration that he found so valuable.

[00:10:23]And it really seems to me like he reread it in a way that went beyond what the founders had even intended in 1776. And he gave it a stronger anti-slavery argument than it probably had when it was written.

[00:10:38]And so, that made me realize the way people reread the declaration has great political meaning.

[00:10:45]Martin Luther King, Jr. also gave us a great reading of the declaration in his I Have a Dream speech. And a lot of people did.

[00:10:53]A lot of uh women activists found comfort in the words of the declaration or rewrote it to include women more specifically.

[00:11:03]Labor leaders, immigrant activists, um and many conservatives have read the declaration in quite different ways. So, we wanted all of these readings to be available to Americans so they can think about a document that remains very much alive. That's the title of the book, The Living Dec- Declaration. And as we each reread it, we we breathe new life into it.

[00:11:27]>> Uh you mentioned the speech by Abraham Lincoln at Independence Hall on his way to Washington >> [clears throat] >> to become president. And there's one line that I want to read you that you have in [clears throat] his remarks that kind of stops you when you read it.

[00:11:43]I was about to say I would rather be assassinated on this spot than to surrender to it.

[00:11:50]>> Isn't that incredible, Brian? It's an amazing moment. And it's even more amazing when you understand that he'd just been told the night before that there was a very serious plot to take his life as the train went through Baltimore, Maryland on the way to Washington.

[00:12:08]And he didn't dodge it by that much. It was a very stressful uh time and he he he met he ended up going in the middle of the night uh not in disguise as the Southerners later accused him of putting on a woman's dress. He changed his hat and his coat so he looked a little different than usual when he went through at 4:00 in the morning, 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning.

[00:12:32]And he made it. And a lot of people in Washington were very surprised to see him because the knowledge of this plot was uh spread out pretty far, but he had just been warned the night before he said that. So, to have him talk about his own assassination, it was a very real thought in his mind at that moment.

[00:12:52]>> As you know, and I mentioned it in the introduction that there have been I don't know how many books, tons of books that have come out in and around the 4th of July celebration. And I also told the audience that we are past the July 4th uh celebration. And so, your book is still very relevant because um as you mentioned, 68 different items.

[00:13:15]Explain that. If somebody gets this book, what what kind of You mentioned some of the people I've got a mark cuz I want to read some of the stuff back to you and have you discuss it.

[00:13:26]But [clears throat] how did you decide on these 68 items and what are they?

[00:13:31]>> Well, they were all items we found relevant, important. We We didn't focus on the number 68. That's just what it ended up being, but we wanted to give context to the declaration in every sense. I mean, so important to our history, and this is our 250th anniversary.

[00:13:52]So, we wanted readers to get a sense of the tradition that gave us the declaration. And we have a first section on earlier documents that Americans were reading and that give ideas for the structure of the declaration, some of the language in the declaration.

[00:14:09]Uh the Founding Fathers were reading a lot of English writers, and they had a very strong sense of their English rights. They actually felt that the King of England, George the III, was depriving them of their ancient English liberties. It's kind of an interesting situation. So, we begin with a document called the Declaration of Right that was written in England um in the late 1680s at a time of a complex maneuver to get rid of one king and bring in another married king and queen.

[00:14:45]And as Parliament engineered this change, they wrote a document that uh established the limits on monarchical power. And the the Americans loved that because they believed in limits on power as well. Um we have a number of other documents written by the founders before the Declaration of Independence, and then we go quickly into the period right after the declaration, examining its impact.

[00:15:14]Um one of the first groups to see how important this document was going to be was uh African Americans. Many picked up on the right's language.

[00:15:25]Uh, we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. That sounds a lot like it can be applied to slavery, and it was. So, early on, there are African-American uh, readers and writers saying this has uh, important language for my situation. And in Boston, not many years after the Declaration was written, a group of black Bostonians successfully petitioned for their freedom, saying if our government is based on this language, then slavery is illegal. And that argument began to prevail in some northern courts, not not all of them, but um, and that's the tradition Lincoln was picking up on so powerfully when he used the Declaration to argue against slavery. So, we we have lots of uh, examples of people reading the Declaration for their own reasons and saying this will make my life better. If this language can be confirmed by a court, it will give me a deeper freedom than I currently have.

[00:16:27]So, that's I think the most important through line in the book. It's the the Declaration has continued to make us free. It made us free in 1776 in many senses, but it deepened the freedoms of Americans in in all later generations.

[00:16:45]>> Back to your introduction where you have some things I want to ask you about.

[00:16:50]I learned that Robert Livingston, who was a member of the Committee of Five, which you can please explain, didn't sign it.

[00:16:57]Why not?

[00:16:59]>> There are a lot of problems around the signatures. Um, I I don't know a short answer. I don't know why he wouldn't sign it when he's one of the co-writers, in a sense, although my own reading of this story leads me to think Thomas Jefferson was the lead author. He wrote most of it.

[00:17:22]Franklin and Adams gave him some ideas, supplied some word edits.

[00:17:29]Although I want to say to you now that there's a a kind of mistake in the air in my opinion.

[00:17:36]We're hearing more and more that Ben Franklin supplied the critical edit of we hold these truths to be self-evident and I do not believe that's true. I've never seen any evidence of it.

[00:17:46]And I've looked very carefully into the question and the edit to my eyes looks 99.9% like it's in the handwriting of Thomas Jefferson. And Franklin is he never used the phrase self-evident in his voluminous writings. So I'm trying to get us to refocus on that particular edit because I think there's a false rumor out there.

[00:18:10]Um the other two people on the committee to write it were Roger Sherman and Robert Livingston like you said. And there's very little evidence that they did much. They were on the committee.

[00:18:22]But I think it was mainly Jefferson with a little bit of help from Adams and Franklin. And why Livingston did not sign it is a mystery. But the signing this gets a little complicated. The signing took place, most historians believe on August 2nd. So a month later.

[00:18:43]And many of the people who voted for independence on July 2nd were no longer in Congress when it was time to sign the declaration. So the list of signers, although that became a very important um mark of of respect to say that you were a signer of the declaration later. But it's not really an accurate representation of who was in the Congress a month earlier when they voted for independence on July 2nd and then confirmed the Declaration of Independence on July 4th. So, it's we have a bit of a you know, misleading information in the list of of the signers.

[00:19:25]>> Please excuse us for interrupting.

[00:19:27]We'll continue our conversation in a minute.

[00:19:30]But you do bring a name into it that I I personally never heard before, Mary Katherine Goddard.

[00:19:37]>> That was a great find for me over the past 2 years. She's you know, it's great to expand the way we think about the founders and the signers and the framers. All those words are similar, but they're slightly different.

[00:19:51]And Mary Katherine Goddard was a very competent woman who was a printer and also a postmaster of Baltimore.

[00:20:01]And Congress moved to Baltimore from Philadelphia and in January of 1777, the president of the Congress, John Hancock, ordered a new printing.

[00:20:14]And most Americans, almost all Americans, got the news of the new country and of the declaration from paper printed declarations, not from the signed one that we all know in the National Archives.

[00:20:28]Uh there were a lot of printers in America. They were very good at their craft and they the first printer to print it was a an Irish immigrant named John Dunlap in Philadelphia.

[00:20:39]But that supply was quickly exhausted, so Hancock wanted more copies and he turned to a female printer, Mary Katherine Goddard, in Baltimore, who was uh she had grown up in a printing family.

[00:20:53]Her mother was also a printer. So, two generations of female printers.

[00:20:58]And she printed a beautiful one, the second printing of the declaration from 1777.

[00:21:04]And it was the first printing to list all the signers names. So, it added some really important information. Up until then, no one knew who the signers uh who who had signed the document. Most Americans couldn't see the the fancy one that we call the engrossed declaration, which is on animal skin. That's the one in the National Archives, but that was just in a clerk's um sack or or or some kind of office space, and most Americans couldn't couldn't see it. So, the Mary Katherine Goddard printing is really important for its own reasons, and it's even better that it was done by this remarkable woman.

[00:21:46]>> Berryville, Virginia.

[00:21:50]>> You picked up on another great detail, Brian. So, in my research, I read a a lot about the preservation of the document. It's suffered a lot of wear and tear over the years, and I read many scientific articles about how do you preserve something this old with the ink so badly fading, and there's some beetle damage over the years. And so, in one of these articles, there was a bit of extra writing about what would happen to the Declaration of Independence if we were in a nuclear war. Not a topic anyone really likes to contemplate, but there are government plans. Um there's a big underground facility in Berryville, Virginia, where a lot of our most important documents and many of our most important political leaders would all gather in case Washington was under nuclear attack. So, I thought that was fascinating, and in in some of this writing, they indicate that the Declaration is the most valuable artifact we have, even more so than the Constitution. Although, they're you know, essentially at the same irreplaceable level of value to all Americans, but uh the people who think out these strategies think the Declaration is is the most important document we have. And I thought that was a nice fact to include.

[00:23:20]>> Where was it physically written?

[00:23:24]>> Uh the the Declaration was physically written in Philadelphia in Independence Well, let me back up. Jefferson rented an apartment uh a room in the house of a German-American bricklayer a few blocks away from Independence Hall on Market Street in Philadelphia.

[00:23:44]And in those rented rooms, he wrote out the Declaration in his handwriting on a wooden desk that is uh typically Jeffersonian. It's a brilliant um design. I mean, he's as talented an architect as a writer.

[00:24:02]And that desk can still be seen in the Smithsonian or or online.

[00:24:07]So, he's writing it out on pieces of paper on his handmade desk, often called a laptop desk like the laptops we all we all use.

[00:24:18]And then carrying it over into Independence Hall where some version of it and there's something called a fair copy. That's when a writer writes out an exact copy uh and gives it to other people to look at. So, there was some kind of fair copy out on the table in Independence Hall, so all the founders could look at it.

[00:24:40]There there is a theory, too, I should add that an early version was printed and given to each founder to read carefully. But, no one knows with certainty if that's true or not. Um it it it could have happened because it was so important a document. But, we we don't know with certainty.

[00:25:00]Um and then I would imagine that the other founders were marking up this fair copy as they're making changes, and no copy of of that fair copy with the markings from the other founders has ever been seen. So, it's still a great mystery.

[00:25:18]Um but Jefferson did make a few copies for friends. Uh John John Adams had a copy that's in the Massachusetts Historical Society, and I think there are seven in all of the Declaration written out in Thomas Jefferson's handwriting.

[00:25:33]But, the night of July 4th, it changes in an important way. They take something, one of these fair copies, to the print shop of John Dunlap, and he prints up about 200 printed copies, and Hancock orders them sent around the country to the capitals of what are now states, not colonies. They That changes overnight, and they send one to George Washington to be read to the troops in New York City, and it's um it's that Dunlap printing, or we call it the Dunlap broadside, that really gets the news out around the 13 former colonies, now now states.

[00:26:14]>> This is a technical question, but how would Dunlap been able to have printed up that copy that shows Jefferson's handwriting? Because there weren't there weren't cameras back then that could capture it and put it in some kind of a type situation.

[00:26:31]>> Right.

[00:26:32]Well, printers were very talented, and you can see a colonial printer at work at Colonial Williamsburg if you go there, or there are other old printing presses uh not far from where I live in Newport, Rhode Island. There's the printing press that belonged to Franklin's older brother, James Franklin.

[00:26:51]It's the press Benjamin Franklin learned to set type on. So, it's really interesting to see.

[00:26:57]And they could work fast. You know, you find little pieces of metal for each letter and you set them in a kind of a wooden frame and clamp it tight and run a few test copies of paper, make sure the ink looks good and then if if it isn't you you fix a few things, but these guys were very talented at their craft.

[00:27:18]And Franklin, of course, is a great printer. So, I like to imagine that on the night of July 4th, as these found you know, the the founders most involved with the writing, Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, and John Adams, maybe the other two in the committee, too, um walk over a couple blocks to the Dunlap printing office and supervise him as he's setting the type. And cuz Franklin knew exactly what he was doing. For Franklin was a little bit ill at the time. However, he had gout. So, he may not have been there. We don't We don't know who exactly was there at all, but somehow these printings got done very soon after the declaration and were sent around the country quickly.

[00:28:05]And I just love the detail that Dunlap is an immigrant. You know, it's it makes the the there are lines in the declaration about immigration. The lines are in favor of it. They're mad at the king for suppressing immigration because they know for the country to grow it needs more people.

[00:28:22]And immigrants have been contributing in very important ways to the country including in the war effort to that point. And there are foreign-born members of the Continental Congress. So, it's just a nice detail that John Dunlap came from what is now Northern Ireland.

[00:28:41]>> You list in the book the signers. I went down the list, recognized only about a third of them, but wanted to ask you, what's the number that signed it, and who determined who those people were?

[00:28:55]>> 56 people signed it. That's what we now believe, although there are some interesting questions here here and there. Um one signer named uh Thomas McKean from Delaware signed it long after the others, possibly many even We don't quite know when he signed it.

[00:29:17]Um but maybe 5 years after, possibly. Um and I found a speech recently of Abraham Lincoln's in which he talks about the 55 signers, not the 56. And I wondered what exactly he meant by that, and if maybe he knew something about Thomas McKean signing late. But anyway, you know, most historians think there were 56, and they were the people available in early August. So, actually a month later. And as I said earlier, some of the actual representatives in the Congress had changed They'd been changed out from who was there in early July. So, there were people who voted for independence and did not sign.

[00:30:01]And there were people who signed and did not vote. It's not quite an accurate list. There's even one person, George Read of Delaware, who voted against independence, but then signed it a month later, which is I think a kind of a funny thing to know.

[00:30:19]>> Now, it's easy to pick any one of the 68 [clears throat] items, and I did. I picked one that I want to ask you about. I'm going to start reading it and see when you re- if you can remember who it is, cuz this got my attention when I saw this.

[00:30:35]All men are created equal.

[00:30:37]They are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable [clears throat] rights, among them are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

[00:30:47]This immortal statement appeared in the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America in 1776.

[00:30:54]In a broader sense it means all the peoples on Earth are equal from birth. All the people have a right to live and to be happy and free.

[00:31:04]Have you figured it out yet?

[00:31:06]>> I'm so sorry, Brian. I haven't. It sounds >> No, it's okay.

[00:31:09]>> great.

[00:31:10]>> And it [clears throat] There's more here because I think it uh you know, if you're going to study this thing that these kind of things are important. The Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen made at the time of the French Revolution in in 1791 also states all men are born free and with equal rights and must always remain free and have equal rights.

[00:31:31]They are undeniable truths. You get there yet?

[00:31:36]>> It's It's lovely language, but it sounds so similar to so many other pieces in the book. I'm having trouble picking.

[00:31:43]>> Okay, the date is September the 2nd, 1945.

[00:31:46]And it was Ho Chi Minh.

[00:31:48]>> Oh, there you go. That's That's one of my favorite pieces in the book, I must say.

[00:31:53]>> Well, I mean let me just read it one more paragraph. I don't want to go on like that. Nevertheless, for more than 80 years the French imperialists abusing the standard of liberty, equality, and fraternity have violated our fatherland and oppressed our fellow citizens. They have acted contrary to the ideals of humanity and justice. And as you know, there's a lot more where he stings the French just like we stung the British.

[00:32:19]>> Absolutely right. I think I would have finally gotten there with the attack on French imperialism.

[00:32:26]But um yeah, it's a classic moment I I would say of um a poor reading of our history by us that we failed to respond correctly to this sincere overture from Ho Chi Minh who was leading Viet- Vietnam's independence movement.

[00:32:48]They had come through centuries of pretty rough treatment at the hands of the French as as as you the words you read indicated. And then they'd also been occupied by the Japanese in World War II. So, they really wanted to be a country of their own and and who doesn't? And so, looking around all of human history, Ho Chi Minh landed on the Declaration of Independence as the as the blueprint for what he wanted and he sent a note to us asking for help.

[00:33:18]And we didn't get the memo. We not only failed to support Ho Chi Minh, but as everyone knows, we spent decades and um billions of dollars and you know, sadly we lost over 50,000 um of our service members in a conflict that we couldn't possibly win and we acted a lot more like the British did in the American Revolution than than like the Americans did. We were trying to hold on to power in a distant place and not really understanding how the locals felt. And while Ho Chi Minh later became communist, he was really a nationalist. He really just wanted to lead his people to be independent and if we'd understood that a little more clearly, just think how much we might have saved in in blood and treasure from the the 20th century.

[00:34:18]>> In the introduction, I quoted from something I found online.

[00:34:23]>> [clears throat] >> You you'll probably know a better answer, but it says that only three out of 10 Americans have read the Declaration from start to finish. Now, others have read it partially and all that. What does that say to you?

[00:34:39]>> Well, that's a mistake that we can easily fix by returning to the simple act of reading. It doesn't take that long to read. It's available in hundreds of places online for free.

[00:34:53]It has been beamed to the moon's surface and and back. It's It's out there and uh it's true some of the language is a little old-fashioned, but not as much as many 18th century documents. I still find it pretty pretty alive to go back to the the phrase the living declaration. And if we don't look into our own history and defend our own freedoms, I don't know who's going to do it for us. So, I really hope this book stimulates active reading of the great declaration.

[00:35:26]We include a lot of different kinds of writers. Um Women were not included at the very beginning, but they they they were later in our history. African-Americans used this document to enlarge their civic freedom.

[00:35:42]And over and over again, it has it has um expanded a sense of what it means to be a citizen of the United States of America. And I think it still can do that. It It identifies our freedoms very clearly. It also identifies threats to our freedom very clearly. So, for both I think it's indispensable.

[00:36:04]>> I'm not concentrating uh when I'm reading some of this stuff to the obvious. People that are interested in the obvious can get your book. And it's in there. You've mentioned a whole bunch of from Ronald Reagan to Calvin Coolidge to Martin Luther King. But this is one that really stopped me.

[00:36:24]John Perry Barlow a declaration of the independence of cyberspace. Let me just Let me just do the first paragraph here. It kind of It's a 1996 item.

[00:36:38]Uh you get the gist almost right away.

[00:36:41]Government of the industrial world you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from cyberspace, the new home of mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

[00:37:01]Who in the world is John Perry Barlow and why did he make it into your book?

[00:37:07]>> Great question again and I I just found that so interesting. Um we wanted to take it pretty near to the present, so that's not too many decades away from where we are now. He was um a kind of early advocate for a free internet for all. Uh there was a time in the early years of the internet, the middle years of the 1990s when we understood that it was going to be very important. I don't think any very few of us understood just how dominant a system of communication and commerce it would become.

[00:37:46]But in the you know somewhat naive early years, there were utopian thinkers like him who wanted the heavy hand of government to stay away from this beautiful new system of human beings communicating to each other.

[00:38:01]A lot of early internet thought comes out of utopian thinking of the 1960s.

[00:38:09]Uh the whole Earth Catalog and Stewart Brand and um So that passage was being was written in a similar vein. We do not want government to regulate the internet to spy on people using the internet who are sending messages to each other. We just want the internet to be a kind of innocent domain for peace and self-improvement and love, all these sort of 1960s comments. And it it quickly became apparent, including within government, that this thing was going to become so powerful in all of our lives that in fact we need regulation, that there are of course internet predators and scammers all over the place. We need governments to protect people from them.

[00:39:00]But I thought it was charming that he went back to the Declaration of Independence to write this screed about the perfect internet with no government involvement that he hoped would exist.

[00:39:13]He's also [clears throat] a He's also a songwriter and lyricist for the Grateful Dead, among other things.

[00:39:20]>> Please excuse us for interrupting.

[00:39:22]We'll continue our conversation in a minute.

[00:39:25]Here's one of my favorite footnotes or source notes. It's number 176.

[00:39:31]I will read it. You can put it into context.

[00:39:34]From Abigail Adams' famous "Remember the Ladies" letter, March 31st, 1776 to her husband John Adams, then serving in the Continental Congress, quote, "Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands.

[00:39:51]Remember all men would be tyrants if they could.

[00:39:55]If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation."

[00:40:09]Abigail Adams. I've heard about the letter for years, but never knew it was that strong.

[00:40:14]It's really strong. I mean, I think it's written with tongue in cheek and she and her husband had a beautiful love and a very long and happy successful marriage.

[00:40:24]So, she's not calling him a tyrant, but she's making a serious point. I mean, they they made serious points to each other all all the time.

[00:40:33]And they had daughters as well as sons, and she just wanted her children to grow up in a world in which both daughters and sons could enjoy a measure of civic freedom.

[00:40:45]And so, I I think that's a very important letter. I I actually just saw it on display at the Massachusetts Historical Society. It was laid out alongside the um the fair copies I was talking about earlier of um Jefferson and Adams had handwritten versions of the Declaration.

[00:41:02]And I think her letter belongs right there with them cuz it's another kind of cry for for freedom.

[00:41:10]>> Give us some more background on how you put this together.

[00:41:13]Um what where did you do it?

[00:41:16]Did you have help from others and researchers? And how long did it take you to find the 68 items that you needed for the book?

[00:41:26]>> Took about 2 years. I would say a little under 2 years, which is actually fast for a book of this length and complexity.

[00:41:34]Um the editors of the Library of America are just great. One in particular, named Brian McCarthy, was really my co-editor on this book, and he has a very deep knowledge of history. But, I had no help. I don't have any research assistants. I did it all my myself.

[00:41:52]I love going into libraries, and I I bet you do, too, Brian, and I don't really want other people. I mean, the whole point of this book is to get other people, other Americans, but and and and non-Americans to reread the Declaration and to read all these responses to it. So, I felt I had to roll up my sleeves and get in there, too, and I I did. I'm in rural Southern Rhode Island right now, and this is where I I did almost all of the the the work in a house that's even older than than the Declaration. And it was just a joy. I read a lot of secondary writings about the Declaration. I combed through the footnotes in those books.

[00:42:34]Um I read a lot of academic journal articles about the Declaration.

[00:42:39]I had had access to uh great university libraries at Brown and Harvard. Um so, that that helped me a lot.

[00:42:47]But, um it was just so slow, painstaking work. I think I had an advantage in a way because I had studied Lincoln very carefully in that book I did 6 years ago.

[00:42:58]And he's kind of a pivot point in our in our history. His reading changes the Declaration and brings on the Civil War.

[00:43:07]And so, I was strong on that particular moment. And I got stronger on the founding. That took some doing, but we have wonderful historians, including my friend uh the late historian Gordon Wood, who only died a few weeks ago, and he wrote a beautiful forward to this book that I'm very grateful for.

[00:43:27]Um but then it was really a joy to go into the 20th century and the 21st and to think about much more recent takes on the Declaration. And um as you know, I mean, we've seen each other in Washington. I was a speech writer in a White House once. So, I'm pretty focused on how presidents have talked about our history.

[00:43:49]And I wanted it to be bipartisan. So, we you mentioned a couple Republican presidents, Coolidge and Reagan.

[00:43:57]And there are others, Theodore Roosevelt, and of course, Lincoln is a Republican.

[00:44:02]But, we have Woodrow Wilson, we have Franklin Roosevelt, Truman, John F. Kennedy. The last text in the book is from Barack Obama, 2015. So, I tried very hard to be bipartisan and also to include people who were maybe on the fringes of our politics and not exactly Democrats or Republicans at all.

[00:44:25]So, we have um a document from the Tea Party.

[00:44:30]They're pretty Republican, but some I think might even be to the right of the conventional [clears throat] Republican Party. And we have a Black Panther document from the '60s who were arguably to the left of the Democratic Party. So, we really tried to have um a an interesting array of very different texts.

[00:44:49]>> What's your background in your teaching?

[00:44:52]You How many different places have you taught?

[00:44:55]>> Um I have taught at about four, I think.

[00:44:59]Uh Harvard, a small college in Maryland, Washington College, Brown University, and the City University of New York. And I I loved all of them. They're very different. A small liberal arts college is such a joy.

[00:45:14]What CUNY does for the um the the working families of New York City is is beautiful and a miracle.

[00:45:24]And of course Brown and Harvard, you you have incredible resources beginning with the libraries that I love to go into.

[00:45:32]Um and so they they all deepen me as a historian. And I've more than most, I've I've moved around from period to period. I was a 19th-century guy for a long time.

[00:45:44]But this doc this book brought me back into the founding moment, and I'm so grateful for that immersion. And I've spent a fair amount of time in the 20th century, too, and I'm certain to go back there. So, I feel lucky. Um Gordon Wood, who was in many ways my mentor, wrote almost uniquely about the American Revolution and and did not stray into other periods very much and that was just who he was. But I'm not like that.

[00:46:12]I I I love to wander the landscape and I think it it strengthens my my writing.

[00:46:18]It doesn't weaken it.

[00:46:21]>> I've been fortunate to interview Gordon Wood on several occasions over the years. I I should probably shouldn't bring this up but I just I I have to.

[00:46:29]Maybe you know something.

[00:46:31]When I read that he was killed by a car in a parking lot of a grocery store, I just couldn't understand how that happened. Is there some background information on this?

[00:46:43]>> I don't know a lot more than that. I I know where the supermarket was because I'm I'm also in Rhode Island and by the way, he and I were about to have lunch to celebrate this book before the terrible accident.

[00:46:56]And I'd seen him only a few months ago and he was in great mental shape all although 92, but in great mental and physical shape.

[00:47:04]And I don't know the details. Um I I believe that he was I I I really shouldn't say anything I don't know, but I I have heard that he was probably taken to the supermarket. He lives in a retirement facility. He lived in a retirement facility and they would take the the seniors over to a supermarket in a van.

[00:47:30]And I have a feeling it was in that moment when they were all getting out of the van and probably someone was driving too fast, but I don't know any details and he just was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

[00:47:41]But it's a terrible tragedy. He was we we had many more articles to come from Gordon Wood. Fortunately, we have the ones he he wrote, but we I feel like we needed him. He corrected extremist statements on the left as well as the right. He was a very moderate person.

[00:48:00]And he had read so deeply in the founders that it was almost as if he were talking to the founders when you spoke with him. He would channel their language and he was a beautiful clear writer. He he deliberately wrote for a non-academic audience, which I tried to do also.

[00:48:19]And he just was a balanced person telling us the real story of how our country was defined at the very beginning and we still need that. We still make mistakes on the left and the right and I I I worry about us without the careful moderating influence of of Gordon. And I must say Brian, you play that role, too. We're very lucky to have you at C-SPAN presenting this wonderful factual history without ideology. You make us a better country.

[00:48:52]So, thank you.

[00:48:55]>> Where did you go to get your own education and your PhD?

[00:49:00]>> I grew up in Rhode Island, where I am now. I went to a Quaker high school and then I went to Harvard undergrad and grad school and that was a long time put together.

[00:49:12]But I was lucky in many ways. I feel like I got the best of old-fashioned history.

[00:49:17]I got to work with professors like Bernard Bailyn, David Donald, Alan Heimert. Um but I was also learning some of the new approaches to history that were coming in vogue into vogue in the '80s and '90s.

[00:49:32]So, I was open to that and you know, the great excitement of learning about African-American history better. I was at Harvard when Henry Louis Gates Jr.

[00:49:41]arrived and he and I became very good friends and I still learn from him all the all the time. So, um but you know, also I I the great value of teaching yourself.

[00:49:54]Harvard is the kind of an indifferent place in a lot of ways, and I think that's actually a strength because it forces you to teach yourself. You're not going to be fed very much information um uh from a a caring babysitter kind of teacher.

[00:50:15]You're You're going to be informed of uh about through lectures from fairly distant professors, and then to understand it better, you've got to just roll up your sleeves and go into the library and do some reading. And so, I've always been that kind of a person, and I um I hope other readers of this book will draw similar inspiration and just read more. If one of these 68 texts excites you, just go into the bibliography of this book and read read other books. And that's not only an act of self-education, but I think it's an act of um civic improvement, too. It makes us a better country.

[00:50:53]>> Back to the book and one of the 68 items. This was July 4th, 1829. Let me read a little bit. Um I'm ashamed of my country.

[00:51:05]I'm sick of our unmeaning declarations in praise of liberty and equality, of our hypocritical can't about the un- unalienable rights of man. I could not for my right for my right hand stand before a European assembly and exalt that I am an American citizen and denounce the use usurpations of a kingly government as wicked and and and unjust. Or should I make the attempt of recollection of my country's barbarity and deposition uh des- despotism. Sorry. This is I'm not doing a very good job. Would blister my lips and cover my cheeks with burning blushes of shame. Who was that?

[00:51:51]Remember?

[00:51:52]>> That sounds like the working man's declaration. Is that right? Um >> No.

[00:51:56]It's William Lloyd Garrison.

[00:51:58]>> Oh, I should have known that.

[00:52:00]>> I don't expect you to It's not fair to ask you that. I'm not trying to surprise you, but that seemed to be so strong.

[00:52:06]And who was Who was William Lloyd Garrison and why was he that bitter?

[00:52:10]>> He's a fascinating reformer, um a young man still in 1829. And I I'm really mad at myself. I absolutely knew that, and that was one I I I went to some trouble to find. But there are a few different people in the 1820s, and I thought it was another another one.

[00:52:27]Um He grows up in Newburyport, Massachusetts, the son of Canadian immigrants.

[00:52:34]And he's just um a troublemaker in the best sense of the word. John Lewis talked about making good trouble, and that's what William Lloyd Garrison did.

[00:52:43]And he advocates for a lot of changes. He's a temperance advocate first, tries to get liquor out of American society.

[00:52:52]And then he discovers anti-slavery, and he becomes a very important crusader against slavery throughout the 1830s, '40s, '50s, a friend of Frederick Douglass.

[00:53:04]Um really raised awareness in Massachusetts especially. A newspaper editor, creates an anti-slavery newspaper. And um just, you know, one of those people who did not want to be patient. There were a lot of compromisers who wanted the South and the North to get along.

[00:53:25]And there were reasons for that. I mean, civil war is a terrible thing, but then there were all these highly moral crusaders who just could not accept that we were a country premised on equal rights, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and could tolerate a labor system, slavery, that denied life, denied liberty, and denied happiness. So, Garrison helped us to become a more honest nation.

[00:53:56]>> What was your favorite?

[00:54:01]>> You mentioned the Ho Chi Minh letter, and that is absolutely one of my favorites. Um around the 1820s, where we just were, there's a speech from a woman, another immigrant, named Frances Wright, that I like very much.

[00:54:18]And she likens the declaration to the book of nature. She talks about how it gives us permission to change and become a better society. It's not static, the way many founders and and many readers of our history want everything to stay the same as it was in 1776, and then many others say, "No, the declaration is a fluid and flexible instrument, permitting change and really demanding change." And she is one of those who said, "We need this document to help us to keep getting better and to grow the way flowers and trees grow in in the book of nature." So, I like hers very much. Um you know, it's hard to do better than Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech, which I think threads a very important needle.

[00:55:11]Uh throughout this book, we have angry denunciations of the declaration.

[00:55:17]You just read one by um William Lloyd Garrison. Frederick Douglass denounced the declaration in a very harsh language with his speech, What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?

[00:55:30]But other African Americans have seen it as a vital document for their own political needs.

[00:55:39]Throughout our history, other African-Americans said, you know, this document widens the door through which we need to walk to gain our rights. And King is kind of in between. He calls the declaration a promissory note, which is a financial document you get from the bank. We It's like an IOU.

[00:56:02]But then, King says, whenever we try to cash this promissory note, the bank tells us insufficient funds, that we can't get the money. We the promise that has been made to us.

[00:56:16]But King obviously feels great reverence for the declaration and for Abraham Lincoln.

[00:56:22]He's giving the speech in front of the statue of Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial. So, I think he manages to make the point that we've had two tiers of promises to white and black Americans that the same, but he does it in a way that doesn't trash the declaration, either. He says, in the last speech he ever gave, very hauntingly, he said, "Be true to what you wrote on paper."

[00:56:51]Which is one of the shortest sentences and one of the best sentences ever written about the declaration. Just live up to your promises and we'll all be okay. Be true to what you said on paper.

[00:57:03]Um he gave that speech in Memphis the night before he was assassinated. So, um I I always feel very moved when I read King or even better hear hear him or watch him but on on video.

[00:57:17]But I hope every single one of these documents has some kernel of fresh meaning for a a new reader because we we worked hard to have different kinds of voices to represent every single generation since 1776 and to show the life still within a document. It's not static. It's still changing and it changes as we read it and again and again.

[00:57:44]>> By the way, I forgot to ask you earlier, who did you write speeches for in the in the White House?

[00:57:48]>> Uh Bill Clinton. I was a foreign policy speechwriter in the second term of of Bill Clinton.

[00:57:55]>> Time is about up, but this isn't something that you you led me to go to the uh the internet.

[00:58:04]I read the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by Eleanor Roosevelt that she was responsible for and I wanted to find out what the vote was.

[00:58:14]So I I you know in the at the UN.

[00:58:17]Which by the way, we owe $4 million to because this current president uh is not supporting it. Anyway, the vote was 48 to nothing. I don't know if you know this. 48 to nothing. But here was what was really interesting.

[00:58:30]Eight abstentions.

[00:58:33]And guess who they were?

[00:58:35]Russia and the Eastern Bloc countries by and large and I think South Africa.

[00:58:42]What was the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and why'd you put it in the book?

[00:58:48]>> That that's another one of my favorites, Brian. I'm so glad you mentioned it because, you know, as I developed this argument that the declaration is alive, it's a living declaration. It grew in power and relevance to the global community, not just our country, but to all countries in the middle of the 20th century because this tremendous World War had been fought, World War II, and the United States had shown immense military power, but also cultural power. We had shown a lot of peoples on Earth the power of our own democracy. They saw black and white soldiers fighting together and they admired that and they as they looked at their home countries, they realized they were often lacking um in basic civil rights and in many places the vote for example was not extended to people in vast stretches of the British and French empires and they were our allies.

[00:59:49]Um many places were even worse than than that. So the declaration begins to acquire all of this relevance to the world situation in the middle decade in the 40s and the 50s.

[01:00:02]Um the UN is created in 1945 largely by us, by Franklin Roosevelt. It's his idea and his Secretary of State Cordell Hull.

[01:00:12]He dies on the verge of the conference creating it but everyone knows it's what he wanted to have happened.

[01:00:18]And so his widow Eleanor Roosevelt is a person held in great respect by the planners of the new United Nations. And they all need that we need a document like the declaration to articulate the values we believe in.

[01:00:33]Just as the country of the United States needed a declaration to articulate its values. So the international organization of the United Nations needs a core document to state its values. So Eleanor chairs the drafting committee and uh as with the Declaration of Independence there several contributors but she's the chair of the process and it becomes a great global document that op- opposes um slavery, unfair labor conditions, uh promotes uh the right to vote, the right to fair wages for equal work, all these 20th century up- updates to the Declaration of Independence, um also uh peace and it it's as we cannot go to war against another nation.

[01:01:25]So, it's a very important statement of what we as a world believe in. And it doesn't surprise me that Russia and the Eastern Bloc opposed it because democracy is powerful stuff. And if you give Russians the vote and you mean it, they will vote out of office people like Joseph Stalin.

[01:01:46]So, Russia was very anxious around the ideas in the the Universal Declaration of of Human Rights and for decades those were countries that had very few human rights of any kind until uh, in the '70s, the Helsinki Accords produced a little bit of, um, wiggle room leading to some expansion of human rights, which arguably led to the, um, the fall of the Berlin Wall in in 1989 and the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. So, these ideas written out in our Declaration of Independence and in the world's Universal Declaration are still volatile, powerful ideas and, uh, largely very good ideas. If you care for democracy as as you and I do, then we need to be true to what we have promised on on paper, as Dr. King said.

[01:02:45]>> If you go into a bookstore looking for this book, do not look for a black cover.

[01:02:50]It's a red, white, and blue cover and the name of it is The Living Declaration, a biography of America's funding founding text. And our guest is Rhode Island-based Ted Widmer. Thank you very much, sir.

[01:03:04]>> Thank you, Brianly. Loved your questions. I appreciate the time.

[01:03:07]>> Thanks for tuning in to this week's Booknotes Plus podcast. If you have a moment, please consider rating and reviewing us wherever you listen to podcasts. Your feedback will will others discover the program. And don't forget to share this episode with friends and family. For the latest on new episodes, schedule updates, and more, follow us on X @cspanradio.