10,000 pieces of type

One of my favorite 4th of July traditions is to go to the historic fort in town for a reading of the Declaration and firing of the cannons by a historical reenactment group. This year, with the sweltering temperatures, we decided to go to a reading of the Declaration at the local town hall instead. It unexpectedly included a hand-printed copy of the Declaration that was made by setting roughly 10,000 pieces of type by hand and running each sheet one at a time on cotton linen paper, the same slow way it would have been done in 1776. There’s a fitting Massachusetts thread to this: in 1776, we were the only state to ask every town clerk to copy the text into town records and every minister to read it aloud from the pulpit. Two and a half centuries later, a version of this is still happening in our town halls.

There’s a line in the Declaration which defines our unalienable rights as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, rather than the more familiar “property”. Jerusalem Demsas and Kelsey Piper dwell on that choice: the historian Arthur Schlesinger read “pursuit” as practice, as in a right not merely to chase happiness but to have it. Piper goes on to describe all the ways in which Americans live lives of staggering wealth: hot water on demand, a refrigerator, a cupboard holding more kinds of tea than most people who ever lived drank in a lifetime. In 1900, Americans spent 43 percent of their income on food; the White House had no indoor plumbing until the 1840s. Medieval kings would envy us.

Jason Crawford reads the anniversary in a similar way. American history is not a story of decline but one of long, messy accumulation of things built: the reaper, the light bulb, the airplane, the interstate system, the Internet, eradicating polio and smallpox. His piece lands where I did in our foundational texts post: on Lincoln, and what we owe the institutions we inherit. What we have is precious and rare, and it should make us generous. The work is never finished, and every generation has to show up for it.