The Declaration of Independence is treated in these excerpts not as a text to be read closely but as a standard against which later conduct, policy and argument are measured. Guests and host invoke it in four distinct settings: a dispute over Texas textbook content, a debate over immigration and national identity, a biography of the only physician to sign it, and an account of how Abraham Lincoln understood its principles in relation to slavery.
Excising Jefferson in Texas
Bob Zadek opened a “Best of” episode by describing what he called the insanity of history instruction, turning to a decision in Texas. According to Zadek, the conservative Texas textbook writing commission voted to excise Thomas Jefferson as a founding political philosopher — he was not to be listed as one. Zadek listed what he said Jefferson did: wrote the Declaration of Independence, wrote the Virginia Declaration of Religious Freedom, was a scholar of the revolutionary era, was the third president, and was the first Secretary of State. Best of: Changing the Face of History (2010)
Zadek gave the commission’s reason as Jefferson’s letter to a Baptist minister discussing the separation of church and state, in which he wrote the phrase “a wall of separation between church and state.” Zadek characterized that as Jefferson’s interpretation of the Bill of Rights, written in private correspondence, and said the commissioners decided Jefferson did not sufficiently embrace the church. He asked whether elected officials should decide what is history. Best of: Changing the Face of History (2010)
Signing On to the Declaration
In a closing exchange with Yoram Hazony, Zadek distinguished two kinds of diversity. The first, he said, comes from different backgrounds, perhaps racial, and is external. Where people who look different and speak different sign on to the American system of freedom, individual rights, personal property, doing no harm to others and being protected from harm — if they sign on to the Declaration of Independence, to be a bit simplistic — Zadek said that diversity is kind of irrelevant; they are in the program. Liberalism vs. Nationalism (2018)
Zadek said he is so pro-immigration that he does not fear a wave of immigration of people from anywhere in the world, because they simply want to participate in the principles in the Declaration of Independence, and asked whether he was being a bit naive. Hazony answered that he was, a bit, and compared it to going into Iraq and believing that 4,000 years of history, civilization and religion would evaporate because someone reads the Declaration of Independence or an advanced course in Lockean political philosophy. Hazony said that if some number of Iraqis came to the United States there is a good chance they would fit in, but that 100,000 is not the same as a million, nor a million as 10 million, nor 10 million as 100 million, because at a certain point one is picking up Iraq with everything good and evil about it and placing it within one’s borders. Liberalism vs. Nationalism (2018)
Zadek replied that there is one core difference: immigrants come voluntarily, whereas going there imposes it, the difference being coercion versus voluntariness. Hazony then gave the title of his book, The Virtues of Nationalism, and his website. Liberalism vs. Nationalism (2018)
The Only MD Signer
Harlo Unger, introduced by Zadek as a returning guest who had written Thugs and Gangsters: The Real Story of the Boston Tea Party and How Washington Invented the Presidency, discussed Benjamin Rush. Zadek described Rush as a medical doctor and, he believed, the only doctor who signed the Declaration of Independence. Unger confirmed that Rush was the only MD, saying five others called themselves doctor but had never studied medicine and were quacks. Unger called Rush America’s first and only great humanitarian at the time. Founding Healer (2019)
Unger said almost all the other signers were wealthy merchants, bankers and plantation owners, most with slaves, while Rush was a man of modest means who actually believed in the words of the preamble that all men were created equal and entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Rush, Unger said, became the champion of Americans the other founders forgot: women, slaves, indentured workers, laborers, prisoners, the poor, the indigent sick and the mentally ill. Unger said 90% of the population lived in that other America without money or education, barred from voting, and that neither the Declaration of Independence nor the Constitution gave women the right to vote, freed the slaves or gave rights to indentured laborers, and that in most states only property owners could vote. Both documents, he said, were written by the wealthy for the wealthy. Founding Healer (2019)
Zadek quoted the Declaration’s closing phrase — “And to these ends, we pledge our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor” — and said one cannot pledge much more. Unger said Jefferson, who wrote those words, fled to Monticello outside Charlottesville and never fired a shot against the British, risking neither life nor fortune during the Revolutionary War. Zadek observed that Unger is not a fan of Jefferson and called Jefferson complex and hypocritical between what he wrote and how he lived. Founding Healer (2019)
Unger said Rush could not be a politician because he owned no property, and that only property owners could involve themselves in politics. He described the plantations of the South covering most of the land, with their owners ruling and making political decisions, and in the North the major merchants and bankers, such as John Hancock, leading their communities. The rest of the population, he said, were mostly slaves in the South and mostly working people in the North, many indentured under contracts of usually six to eight years, with no rights and no vote. Under British rule, he said, they had absolutely no rights, governors being appointed by the British government, so there was no self-rule; after the Declaration and then the Constitution, governors were usually big bankers or merchants in the North or big plantation owners in the South, including Benjamin Harrison, Patrick Henry and eventually Jefferson, who Unger said resigned after a year because he was a terrible governor who failed to build defenses for Virginia against British troops. Founding Healer (2019)
Unger described Rush’s medical education at the University of Edinburgh, then the finest medical school in the world, his patronage by Benjamin Franklin in London, and his travels to France, where the royal government had taken measures for the poor and for orphaned children left at the Hotel Dieu and put up for adoption. Rush returned to America without a penny, stayed with an older brother in Philadelphia, and went into the poorest sections of Philadelphia with his instruments, knocking on doors asking whether anyone needed a doctor. Founding Healer (2019)
Unger said Rush befriended John Adams and Samuel Adams when the second Congress came to Philadelphia, inviting them to stay at the Rush home rather than in taverns, and was himself named to that Congress which signed the Declaration of Independence. Rather than going home as most signers did, Rush went to Trenton to the west bank of the Delaware River, where Washington’s troops had retreated after defeat at Brooklyn and the loss of Manhattan, and where the attack on Trenton was planned for Christmas Day. Rush treated wounded troops on the battlefield, which Unger said had never been done before — troops were fodder, left to die if they could not walk or crawl off the field. Rush demanded help from Washington, and after an argument Washington told an officer to commandeer a house on the edge of the battlefield, which Rush turned into the first field hospital in American military history. He treated wounded British troops at Brandywine and won safe passage through British and American lines, the first doctor to do so; Unger said safe passage for health workers is now part of international law in wartime, and that Rush planted the seeds of what became the Army Medical Corps. Founding Healer (2019)
On medicine, Unger said it was in the most primitive era, little changed from Galen’s view that all diseases came from the blood, so bleeding was still the common treatment. Anatomy was studied despite laws against using cadavers; there were no instruments, no stethoscope — Unger corrected himself, saying it had not been invented and would not be until around 1850 — and the tool was a lancet used to open a vein and take usually a pint of blood a day. Unger said George Washington died of shock from bleeding, not of his illness, which he described as basically laryngitis. Patent medicines, he said, were fruit syrups loaded with rum or alcohol that left people in a drunken stupor. Unger said doctors were a little more competent than laypeople because they cared more, and that there were no doctors in rural communities, only in major cities; Philadelphia, the largest and richest, measured about two miles by three miles, which let Rush treat the poor and return to better neighborhoods within half an hour. Founding Healer (2019)
Lincoln and the Promise
John Cribb addressed the criticism that the Founders talked a good game about equality and freedom while setting up a country that institutionalized racism and slavery. He said Lincoln argued the Founders knew slavery was wrong, including slaveholders like Jefferson, who in an early draft of the Declaration wrote that slavery is a “cruel war against human nature itself,” and Benjamin Franklin, who called it an “atrocious debasement of human nature.” America’s Second Founding (2021)
Cribb said Lincoln explained the Founders could not fight a war against one of the greatest military powers on earth, set up a brand new country, launch an experiment never tried before, hold 13 very different states together, and get rid of slavery all at the same time. Lincoln drew a metaphor, Cribb said: the Founders realized slavery was like a cancer in the body politic, but cutting it out all at once would make the patient bleed to death. What they could do, and did, was lay down principles in the Declaration of Independence that spelled the doom of slavery, on purpose — the statement that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Cribb said the declaration of those principles, when the vast majority of people on earth enjoyed little or no freedom, was a magnificent step forward, the first time a nation was created out of the idea that people should be free and govern themselves. America’s Second Founding (2021)
Cribb said those founding principles were a promise to future generations, and that the Civil War became, as Lincoln saw it, a fight to redeem that promise for millions of enslaved Americans — hence the “new birth of freedom” in the Gettysburg Address, a rededication to the ideals in the Declaration. He said Lincoln understood the founding as tragically flawed by slavery yet also as the glorious beginning of a long journey, sometimes very hard, that brought hope and freedom to millions both in America and around the world. America’s Second Founding (2021)
Across episodes: no development
The excerpts show the Declaration invoked in four episodes — a Texas textbook dispute, a debate with Yoram Hazony over immigration and national identity, Harlo Unger’s life of Benjamin Rush, and John Cribb on Lincoln — but they show no development of a single question from one episode to the next; each uses the document for a different argument.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts never quote the Declaration’s text at length beyond the preamble phrase and the closing pledge, and never discuss its drafting, adoption or date. No excerpt states what the document’s legal status is, what body adopted it, or how courts have construed it. The Texas commission’s membership, the identity of the Baptist minister, and the fate of the textbook vote are all left unstated.