Tuesday, January 28, 2025
Today, I’m sharing with you the words of others rather than my own. Recently I’ve taken part in more than a few discussions about the American Dream. Is it alive, is it well, is it out of reach? The following question and answer, as shared recently on the Advisory Opinions podcast*, I think sums it up as well as it can be summed. Enjoy.
Question from Listener: “I’m writing to you because I need some guidance to help a student with her end-of-year baccalaureate project. She has chosen to look at how and if the Supreme Court has upheld the original ideas of the American Dream as defined by the Declaration of Independence, and later by James Truslow.”
Host: ”So, for those who are not familiar with James Truslow, born in 1878, died in 1949, American writer and historian, and he popularized the phrase American Dream in his 1931 book, the Epic of America.”
Answer by Judge Don Willett of the Fifth Circuit: “First off, kudos to your sharp student. She’s 100 percent correct to define the American Dream through the lens of the Declaration of Independence. America’s birth certificate, the Declaration, (aka the greatest breakup letter of all time) turns 250 years old next year. And I fervently hope as the celebration ramps up that all Americans get reacquainted with this magnificent document.
“When your student talks about the American Dream, one familiar name comes to mind, George Washington. He was the indispensable man at the Birth of America. But I’ve always thought that Benjamin Franklin was the nation’s renaissance man. Franklin rose from penniless runaway to one of the world’s most admired figures. He was truly the first embodiment of the American Dream. His achievements in science, politics, letters, were unrivaled. He was a protean polymath and the most illustrious figure in early America. As the New York Times put it back in 1856, Franklin was “the incarnation of the true American character.”
“When Franklin famously quipped outside Independence Hall that we had a republic, if we could keep it, he was on the one hand, heartening. A republic. No more royal absolutism. But he was also, on the other hand, foreboding. If you can keep it. The fate of this new nation is on us. He said, it’s ours to keep and ours to lose.
“The Willett family is one generation from grinding poverty. My mom was a widow truck stop waitress who never finished high school. She waited tables for 55 years, shoving quarter tips in her pocket and barely eking out $15,000 a year. She probably poured enough truck stop coffee to flood the Rio Grande. My mom couldn’t help me with calculus, but she had a PhD in hard work. She embodied the sort of grit that America celebrates; and her heroic sacrifices made it possible for her son to dream big. I can’t overstate how tickled she was knowing that the countryfied son she raised in a drafty double wide trailer in a town of 32 people interviewed for the U.S. Supreme Court not long before she passed away.
“America rejoices in aspiration and the Declaration is big-time aspirational, laying out soaring, enduring ideals and declaring a singular bold purpose for the government to secure our God-given rights. The Declaration debuted a uniquely American theory of government. It was the first time in history that a nation came into being asserting the inborn individual natural rights and equality of every human being. As Margaret Thatcher put it, America is sui generis because unlike European countries, it was built upon an idea: the idea of liberty. America’s founders were aiming for something transcendent. Not to enshrine a process (democracy) but to enshrine a promise (liberty) individual freedom, the essential condition of human flourishing.
“Americans generally have a pretty abysmal civics IQ. It’s truly dispiriting. But I think the reason that so many Americans don’t know the how of our republic is because they don’t know the why of our republic. And it’s a short trip from ignorance of our founding ideals to erasure of them. Thomas Jefferson called the Declaration “an expression of the American mind.” The Declaration is declarative. There’s no hemming or hawing. The framers didn’t pledge their lives fortunes and sacred honors to fiddle around the edges. They upended things, the ideals unveiled, and the Declaration flipped the script. And those ideals are timeless even if America hasn’t always lived up to them. My favorite piece of art in my chamber is an oil painting of Frederick Douglass. Douglass said that the Declaration’s promises of liberty and equality are eternal, even if America’s original sin of slavery broke those promises.
“And those founding ideals have laid the foundation for righting wrongs, including the new birth of freedom, wrought by our Second Founding and the Civil War Amendments that belong at the center of America’s constitutional story. The challenge for us today is not to tear down America’s heritage as some want to do, but to live up to it. As Dr. King said at the March on Washington, our founding documents should not be changed to fit new ideals. Rather our government should be changed to fit the timeless and enduring ideals of our founding documents, which he called a Promissory Note to which every American was to fall heir.
“To answer your student’s question, the Supreme Court has sometimes shamefully dishonored the original ideas of the American Dream as described in the Declaration. Think Dred Scott, Plessy, and the civil rights cases of the late 1800s.
“In fact, our family dog Amicus, has the middle name Harlan to honor the courageous Justice Harlan, the Great Dissenter who dissented from many of those appalling decisions. But at other times the court has honored and upheld the Declaration’s ideas as in Brown vs. Board of Education.
“The quest to live up to America’s founding ideals is never ending. It requires constant striving, and judges are front and center. The Declaration provides the aspiration and the Constitution provides the architecture. The Constitution’s first three words, supersized on the script for all the world to see, are iconic.
“We The People, not we the government, or we the judges, or we the subjects. American citizenship is not a spectator sport. And the secret sauce is a sleeves-rolled-up citizenry. An informed citizenry is flat out indispensable to capable self-government. The Constitution that I swore to preserve, protect, and defend is an exquisite charter of freedom. But freedom requires patriots not passersby. It demands fierce defenders, not feeble bystanders.
“Self-government isn’t self-perpetuating, and the habits of strong citizenship aren’t hardwired into our DNA as Americans. Those habits have to be taught and learned anew by each generation. And I believe that civics education is a core component of judicial service.
“America boasts the oldest written national constitution on earth. That’s such an extravagant blessing. But preserving that inheritance requires a culture of liberty and public-spirited virtue. And that includes always honoring the noblest ideals set forth in the Declaration; ideals that remain absolutely essential, if America is to remain the world’s oldest constitutional republic.”
I’ve never heard it said better.
Until Next Time,
Mary Schuster
Chief Knowledge Officer
October Research, LLC
*As transcribed, from the Jan. 23, 2025, episode of the Advisory Opinions podcast. Some emphasis added, and transcription errors corrected.