This is a guest post by Deborah Mutnick, Professor of English at Long Island University in Brooklyn, New York.
As Occupy Wall Street spread from lower Manhattan to over 100 U.S. cities, I have been teaching a course to college freshmen called “Pathways to Freedom” that explores African American history in Brooklyn. The parallels in the rhetoric are striking.
Like Thomas Jefferson’s contemporaries, my students and I are wrestling with the contradiction in 1776 between the rhetoric of equality and the reality of African enslavement -- not just in the South but right here in New York City. After rereading the Declaration of Independence, we turn to Jefferson’s “Notes on Virginia,” in which he compares black people to animals. In a deferent response, African American Benjamin Banneker entreats Jefferson to recall his insight “into the injustice of a State of Slavery.” We also examine David Walker’s more radical appeal to Americans “to see your Declaration...Hear your language proclaimed to the world!”
Decades later, in his brilliant 4th of July speech in 1852, Frederick Douglass rebukes America for its “bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy” in crimes that “would disgrace a nation of savages.” He asks: “To the American slave, what is your 4th of July?”
His contemporary, Cincinnati journalist David Christy, author of Cotton Is King (1855), found this interpretation of the country’s founding principle of equality dead wrong. The equality claimed by the founding fathers was equality with the English, Christy argues, and the freedom sought was from England and King George III’s tyranny.
These very different interpretations of the rhetoric of equality in the mid-19th century resonate with different readings of OWS. Are media comparisons of OWS to the Tea Party accurate? Or does OWS emerge from a different tradition in American history, closer to abolitionists like Douglass? Is the debate over the meaning of “equality for all” at the dawn of the country relevant for us today?
In an article in the second issue of the Occupy Wall Street Journal entitled “What Liberty Square Means: The Progress of Revolutions," Rebecca Manski joins the debate from Zuccotti Park, renamed Liberty Square. Manski argues:
Liberty Square is the twenty-first century Liberty Tree. If you want to understand what is happening there, imagine: Under the Liberty Tree that stood in Boston Common, early in the first American Revolution, any and all could come to air their grievances and hammer out solutions collectively, and it was there the promise of American democracy first took root. We are reclaiming a democratic practice in Liberty Square.
Since 2008, national unemployment rates have remained above 9% with much higher rates for African Americans and youth—16% and 24.6% respectively. An estimated 10.4 million mortgages could default this year. Income inequality, with concentrated wealth at the top and flat incomes or impoverishment for the vast majority of the country’s population, has increased precipitously since the 1960s. The well known facts are worth reciting again: the top one percent of the country owns 34.6% of the wealth in total net worth; the next 19% owns 50.5%; the bottom 80% owns 15%.
In financial wealth, the figures are even more startling: 42.7%, 50.3%, and 7.0% respectively. And these statistics from UC-Santa Barbara Sociology Professor G. William Domhoff are from 2007, the most recent complete data available for analysis. Domhoff cites economist Edward Wolff, who concludes that the Great Recession has meant a whopping drop of 36.1% in median household wealth as compared to 11.1% for the top one percent, further widening the gulf between the obscenely rich and the rest of us—the 99%.
One lesson I hope my students are learning is that documents like the Declaration of Independence are not immutable. Though the words remain unchanged, the meanings of those words have been subjected to heated debates that persist into our own times: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights... [and] that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
The OWS protests give us pause to rethink the meaning of these words once again. While the OWS protesters have been criticized for their lack of demands and focus, their success in rallying tens of thousands of people in cities across the country and abroad demonstrates not only their broad appeal but also the clarity of their message. Like the American colonists who rose up as a people against the tyranny of King George III, they have galvanized a new protest movement for the 21st century. Just as Thomas Jefferson enumerated the colonists’ grievances against their mother country, the 99% is giving voice to grievances against neoliberal policies and corporate greed that reverberate in this country and overseas.
From its inception in mid-September, OWS has identified with the “revolutionary Arab Spring” in a spirit of internationalism that sees the struggle of working people everywhere against the ravages of recessionary economies governed by deregulation, privatization, and austerity measures. These policies have meant foreclosures, unemployment, downsizing, and a generally lower quality of life for most of us while the very rich enjoy a prosperity not seen since the Gilded Age.
Those spreading the message "We are the 99%" echo the Founding Fathers’ insistence on the colonists’ right “to provide new guards for future security” when faced with “a long train of abuses and usurpations.” The focus in my class has been on the contradiction between the promise of “equality for all” and the brutal realities of enslavement that lasted for nearly 100 years after the Declaration of Independence was signed.
The average adjusted gross income of students at my university is $47,500. Undergraduate tuition is $896 a credit. Approximately two-thirds of students in bachelor’s degree programs nationwide take out loans, racking up an average of $24,000 debt by the time they graduate. At the same time, federal grants based on financial need are likely to be slashed. Still worse, despite all the touted benefits of a college degree, recent graduates face dismal job prospects, a major contributing factor to the groundswell of support for OWS.
I plan to assign Manski’s article, “What Liberty Square Means,” to my students next week. They will have to draw their own conclusions about the meanings the words of the Declaration of Independence have for us today. Do they apply to economic inequality? What will an “American Revolution” look like in our time? Are the effects of deregulation, privatization, and austerity programs “abuses” of our rights? Are market forces, like hurricanes or tornados, out of our control? Or are the financial struggles of ordinary people the result of policies—human decisions—like the import duty King George III imposed on the colonies? If so, do the people have a right to resist and change them? We are looking for answers to these questions as the OWS protests continue to unfold.
