by W.D. Ehrhart
If you will indulge me, I would like to begin with a poem I wrote in celebration of the 248th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Rather uncreatively, its title is “Independence Day”:
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It is indeed inarguably
self-evident that all men
are created equal, endowed
by their Creator with certain
inalienable rights including
life, liberty, and happiness,
or at least the pursuit thereof.
–
All men, excepting of course
Negroes, savages, the poor,
the uneducated, indentured
servants, and women; all
women, regardless of race,
ethnicity, social standing,
economic status, or education.
–
After all, it doesn’t say that all
people are created equal,
or all human beings, but rather
all men. And women aren’t men.
Moreover, how can anyone be
a real man if he is not white,
propertied, and literate?
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It should be “inarguably self-evident” that I think—no, that I am convinced—our so-called Founding Fathers were raging hypocrites who didn’t for a single moment believe that all men were created equal.
For starters, of the 47 men depicted in John Trumbull’s painting Declaration of Independence, which hangs in the capitol rotunda, the Illinois Answers Project identifies 34 of them as slave owners. While estimates vary, of the 56 men who signed the Declaration, perhaps as many as 50 of them owned slaves at one point or another in their lives.
Some of these men—for example: George Washington, James Madison, Charles Pinckney, and Thomas Jefferson—owned over 100 slaves each. Others owned from a few slaves to a few dozen. Still others, even those overtly opposed to slavery such as John Adams and George Clymer, inevitably profited from an economic system built on the labor of slaves.
Without exception, these men were all white, all educated, and all wealthy. There was not a blacksmith or wheelwright or cooper or farmer—and I mean actual dirt farmer as opposed to “planter”—among them.
Barely a decade later, many of these same men came together to write what became the Constitution of the United States in which the right to vote was limited to men only—in spite of Abigail Adams’s admonition to her husband to “remember the ladies”—and only men who possessed wealth in the form of property or measurable material wealth. Oh, yes, and white men only, of course.
So it is perfectly patently obvious that these men didn’t for a single heartbeat believe that “all men are created equal.”
It is also obvious that over the years, restrictions on the right to vote have been loosened considerably. Property qualifications were the first to go, allowing pretty much any white man to vote. The Civil War 15th Amendment theoretically extended the franchise to Black men, though it would be another century of Jim Crow, the Ku Klux Klan, and public lynchings before that would even begin to become a reality. Women finally achieved the right to vote in 1920. Native Americans got the franchise only in 1924, and some states were able to deny them the vote for decades to come thereafter.
Meanwhile, though Chinese laborers were brought to the U.S. in large numbers to build the transcontinental railroads in the 19th century, Chinese in the U.S. could not become citizens, let alone vote, until 1943. And the Supreme Court ruled in 1922’s Ozawa v U.S. that the 14th Amendment applied only to whites and Blacks, but not to Asians, who were neither Black nor white.
And through it all, from 1776 to the present day, regardless of who gets to vote, real political power has always been in the hands of wealthy white men. Every now and then, an anomaly pops up—a Miriam Adelson or David Steward—but if one looks at the 2025 list of Fortune 500 CEOs, only 55 are women, and only nine are Black.
And as for politicians, while there are currently 124 women in the House of Representatives and 26 in the Senate, and about 25% of current members of Congress identify as “people of color” (Black, Hispanic, Asian American or Native American), real political power resides with those who fund these politicians’ campaigns.
After all, one never saw a Senator Cornelius Vanderbilt or Representative Andrew Carnegie, nor these days a Senator Mark Zuckerberg or Congressman Jeff Bezos. But if you want to see whose tunes Congress dances to, and has always danced to, as the saying goes: “Follow the money.”
So where does all this leave us? The hypocrisy of our nation’s founders is so blatant that there is really nothing more I can say about it. But I suppose, as a great many Americans have been doing for 250 years, we can always continue to hope. Despair gets us nowhere. And while our current political situation under the “leadership” of the Felon-in-Chief and his Merry Band of Incompetent Sycophants looks pretty bleak, this isn’t the first time the nation has fallen on hard times.
After all, the nation was so divided in the first half of the 19th century that even the rich and powerful white elite couldn’t agree on a way forward, and we ended up fighting a civil war. And if you think intolerance and hatred are the exclusive province of the Orange Cheeto and his MAGAFaithful, look at the photographs of the 1926 KKK March in Washington, D.C. Or the hundreds of photos of lynchings all over this country—not just in the Old Confederacy—with white spectators proudly grinning into the cameras.
So as pessimistic as I am about ever altering where real power resides in this country, I remain inspired by people like Martin Luther King, Jr., Daniel Ellsberg, Cora Weiss, and Rosa Parks, and though I often falter, I continue to hope that a better future is possible. And to live my life as if that may one day come to be.
* The title of this article is a play on the famous quote from George Orwell’s Animal Farm: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
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W.D. Ehrhart is a retired Master Teacher of History & English, and author of a Vietnam War memoir trilogy published by McFarland.