Read the Declaration Aloud | American Enterprise Institute

For our nation’s semiquincentennial, my son and I headed down to Colonial Williamsburg from New York City to hear the Declaration of Independence read from the old state Capitol—the very same place the document was read aloud 250 years ago.

Having spent considerable time visiting Williamsburg during the COVID-19 lockdowns, we wanted to revisit one of our special places on such a momentous occasion.

When we arrived at nine-thirty in the morning, the thermometer was already pushing one hundred. Despite the heat, we stayed, and my son and I were euphoric when the fifes, drums, and men in tricorn hats walked up Duke of Gloucester Street and the reading began from the balcony.

While my son took in the crowd, I listened to the words being proclaimed and realized I was hearing a document I have taught for years as if I had never encountered it before.

As a professor who has taught American politics for close to two decades, I assign the Declaration as a text in many of my courses. My students and I work through natural rights, consent, equality, and the long list of grievances against George III.

Before July 4th, I would have told you that I knew the document cold. What I understood standing in that crowd, however, is that I only knew the Declaration as a text. Jefferson, the colonists, and the Congress knew it as an event, ideas to be proclaimed to assembled publics in town squares and army camps, not something a person reads silently and alone.

Hearing the Declaration radically changes the document: it’s architecture becomes audible.

The Declaration begins somewhere unexpected. Before it speaks about the colonies, it speaks about humanity and only later explains why governments should not be overthrown for “light and transient causes.” A new nation announces its birth by appealing to principles meant for all people, which is why the words have never been confined to 1776. This is why Frederick Douglass appealed to it, why Abraham Lincoln built the country’s moral self-understanding on it, why Elizabeth Cady Stanton lifted its cadence for Seneca Falls, and why Martin Luther King read its promises back to a nation that had not kept them. Each figure treated the Declaration’s ideas as a standard by which the nation could be judged.

To read the document publicly does not mean that we have to ignore America’s troubled history and contradictions either. We as a nation that declared all men are created equal also tolerated slavery, and millions of Americans have been denied the very rights being proclaimed from that balcony. Yet those failures do not diminish the power of the ideas in the Declaration; they actually made the ideas indispensable. Each generation of reformers returned to it not to excuse America’s shortcomings, but to expose them and establish the standard by which America should be judged.

After the reading, as my son and I walked through the streets of Williamsburg with our tri-cornered hats, I kept wondering why we don’t read the Declaration publicly more often. It is one of the few documents that still has the power to gather strangers around a common set of ideas and in today’s polarized climate, we ought to hear it more often.

Schools or libraries could stage public readings on Constitution Day or in the week before Thanksgiving. Town halls, veterans’ posts, civic clubs, congregations, and state capitols should as well. The whole document, not the greatest hits. It costs nothing, requires no permission, and needs no committee. Children should hear its ideas directly before anyone hands them a summary. Adults should to hear it in a civic setting like Williamsburg and move beyond purely partisan environs.

When my son and I started the drive home and we began to cool down, I realized that I had the chance to hear the Declaration as it was meant to be heard. Read aloud, it ceases to be a familiar text and becomes a challenge. It reminds us that the nation which proclaimed equality did not immediately practice it, yet it never escaped the power of the promises it had made. Two hundred fifty years later, we should keep reading them aloud—not because America has always lived up to them, but because we still need reminding of who we said we would become