The Charters of Freedom
June 30, 2005
Our national founding documents.. or as they are dramatically called at the National Archives, “The Charters of Freedom”.. seem strangely faded when viewed through thick protective glass. It might also have something to do with the odd light they use to illumine the documents in their shrine-like room. The room is dusky and it takes a few minutes for your eyes to adjust. In the center of the room, one after another, there is the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights.
There is a limitation on the number of people who are let in at one time, but nevertheless a small throng is bunched together trying to catch a glimpse of the documents.. and not only catch a glimpse, but get a photograph of them. Turn off your flash, but take as many photos of the strangely glowing documents as you like. One man had a large camera, and went around painstakingly getting several photos of each document, most others (myself included) used their small digital cameras to get a snapshot.
Even if one had the leisure, these are not readable copies. It is exceedingly hard to make out the neat cursive script on the large elephant folio-size sheets of paper. The Archive setting does not offer a chance to read something new.. it offers instead a chance to see the originals of something that is well known.. to look at that John Hancock and know that it came from his pen.
The setting transforms the documents into quasi-religious relics. One gets the feeling that this is the sanctum sanctorum of our democracy. The paintings on the walls portray Washington in his clean white uniform at the end of the revolution, and then on the other side the signing of the Constitution. The architectural motifs, as with so many buildings in our capital, is consistently classical, accompanied, of course, by federal eagles.
In the gift shop the book on the “Charters of Freedom” had the subtitle: “A New World Is at Hand”, but I wonder if we have collectively forgotten about the “world” part. I suspect that some would quibble that those were the words of the rhetorically flighty Thomas Paine, and that it would be more accurate to simply say a “new nation” was at hand. But to limit the import of these words solely to our nation seems a sad pruning of our ideals. The leaven of democracy should be allowed to influence the way we conduct ourselves on the international stage.. which is not simply to say we should work to build other self-contained democratic nations, but to say that we should conduct ourselves not as a tyrant among other nations, but as a nation which works for transparency and fairness in all affairs.. and above all democracy.. which endeavors to carry these principles to the international level.
There is always a tension between federalists and anti-federalists.. between those who want to build a larger unity and those who want to maintain the sovereignty and advantages of a single state. The federalists won over the course of our history as a nation.. but sadly we are currently anti-federalists when it comes to the world.
