By Lee Habeeb and Vince Benedetto
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Many educators and pundits today seem eager to cast aside America's founding document or diminish its importance. This desire is rooted in the claim that the men behind the creation of our nation had personal flaws so great that the product of their work must be flawed as well.
As we close in on America's 250th birthday, in 2026, it's worth revisiting President Calvin Coolidge's defense of the Declaration of Independence, and the men who wrote it, on our 150th. Coolidge, speaking in Philadelphia on July 5, 1926, began with these words, which were as true then as they are today:
We live in an age of science and of abounding accumulation of material things. These did not create our Declaration. Our Declaration created them. The things of the spirit come first. Unless we cling to that, all our material prosperity, overwhelming though it may appear, will turn to a barren scepter in our grasp.
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Coolidge understood our Founding Fathers weren't perfect men. But he knew that the Declaration's stated principles were the closest thing to a perfect statement on human freedom ever written. He also knew that with any grand plan or endeavor, a mission statement must come first. How could America live up to great principles without first defining what they are? Until the idea is developed and the plan made, how can there be action?
July 4, 1776, is the day the founders pledged their lives in writing the mission statement of America. They wrote it down for all to see and in plain language for all to understand. The founders, with no prior precedent in history, boldly proclaimed a new nation formed on "self-evident" truths that until that time no nation had ever dared declare. Coolidge continued:
It was not because it was proposed to establish a new nation, but because it was proposed to establish a nation on new principles, that July 4th, 1776, has come to be regarded as one of the greatest days in history.
Coolidge understood that while the Enlightenment era and its supporting philosophies influenced our founders, the Declaration of Independence was a profoundly and uniquely American document. He was also keenly aware of President Abraham Lincoln's defense of the declaration, as well as the dire consequences the nation would face if the principles of the nation's founding document were abandoned. Coolidge issued a similar warning:
It is a declaration not of material but of spiritual conceptions. Equality, liberty, popular sovereignty, the rights of man.... Unless the faith of the American people in these religious convictions is to endure, the principles of our Declaration will perish. We cannot continue to enjoy the result if we neglect and abandon the cause.... We are too prone to overlook another conclusion. Governments do not make ideals, but ideals make governments.... Of course, governments can help to sustain ideals...but their source... is in the people. The people have to bear their own responsibilities. There is no method by which that burden can be shifted to the government. It is not the enactment but the observance of laws that creates the character of a nation.
With those words, Coolidge echoed the sentiments of Benjamin Franklin, who warned, "Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need for masters."
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Then came the most consequential part of Coolidge's speech, reminding Americans that our current ways of thinking are not necessarily the wisest and that there's a timelessness to the founding principles enshrined in the declaration.
The words below may well have been the most enduring words of Coolidge's presidency, as well as the most enduring words ever spoken about our nation's birth certificate:
About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning cannot be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final.
No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction cannot lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern but more ancient than those of the Revolutionary fathers.
If America is to endure, Coolidge was saying, the importance of July Fourth must endure too. Independence Day is not foremost about the men who declared our independence, Coolidge explained, but about the ideals and principles they had the courage to declare. On July 4, 1776, imperfect men had the courage to declare perfect ideals. Such an astounding occurrence had not happened before or since.
Seventy-four years to the day before Coolidge's remarks, Frederick Douglass on July 5, 1852, proclaimed: "I have said that the Declaration of Independence is the ring-bolt to the chain of your nation's destiny; so, indeed, I regard it. The principles contained in that instrument are saving principles. Stand by those principles, be true to them on all occasions, in all places, against all foes, and at whatever cost."
Thirty years after Coolidge's remarks, a young pastor in Atlanta dedicated a part of his July 4, 1956, sermon at the Ebenezer Baptist Church to the Declaration, too. His name was Martin Luther King Jr., and he said this about our founding document: "Never before in the history of the world has a sociopolitical document expressed in such profound, eloquent and unequivocal language the dignity and the worth of human personality," King said. "The American dream reminds us—and we should think about it anew on this Independence Day—that every man is an heir of the legacy of dignity and worth."
Like the founders, Douglass, Lincoln and King, Coolidge well understood that the United States could make progress only by keeping faith with our Declaration. The mission statement comes first. We must be careful to assume that all progress is found by looking only forward. As Winston Churchill, a contemporary of Coolidge's, observed, "Do not let us too readily brush aside the grand, simple affirmations of the past. All wisdom is not new wisdom."
It remains the responsibility of all of us to remain true to our "ringbolt" and remember that the great truths embedded in our founding document are final, not flexible. These truths are worth not just remembering but celebrating and honoring. Otherwise, we risk losing our national inheritance. As Benjamin Rush, one of the signers of the Declaration, proclaimed when we won our independence: "The American War is over, but this is far from being the case with the American Revolution."
Vince Benedetto is the founder and president of Bold Gold Media Group. A graduate of the Air Force Academy, he is an avid historian and head of the Churchill Society of Pennsylvania.
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