Eric Falk: Our Founders were all too human

It hurts to realize your heroes had flaws, major flaws. It really hurts.

As a society we are now finally confronting the tangled legacy of the Founding Fathers. It is a legacy summarized in one simple, yet profound contradiction — many of the men who wrote and approved of the words, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” did not practice that in their own lives.

The Founders were not prophets, and they were not gods. They were men. They had good points and did good things, some of which we can safely regard as great things. They had bad points and did bad things, some of which we can now concede were cruel and inhumane.

We all know the story of Thomas Jefferson, who wrote those words in the Declaration of Independence. Monticello was built and maintained by slaves; he had a mistress, Sally Hemings, who was a slave; he fathered children with her. A recent column in The Washington Post highlighted George Washington’s slave legacy, a column which recited the names of some his slaves, and how he worked to keep them enslaved.

Yet the men of 1776 did not remove those words from the Declaration of Independence. The fact they kept those words means something for us today even as we confront their contradictions. They wanted those words in there and left it to us to figure out the importance of those words.

Those words were the most revolutionary statement of political thought then and they remain the most revolutionary expression of political thought today. Those words make this country the most revolutionary country ever conceived.

All other nations were founded, and remain founded, on some form of shared identity. A shared ethnic identity, a shared language, a shared cultural identity, a shared geography, etc. We are the nation ever founded not on a shared identity, but on a shared belief. We are the only nation founded on the idea that all people are equal in their possession and enjoyment of those rights. Those words are American exceptionalism.

America is an ideal. As an ideal, America beckons to us forever on the horizon, asking us to strive to meet the ideal, asking us to forever prove to the world and to ourselves that, yes, all people are created equal in their possession and enjoyment of those rights. America demands when we fall short of that ideal, we pick ourselves up and keep moving towards it.

In my humble opinion, that is why the Founders kept those words in the Declaration of Independence, even though for many of them, those words were not practiced in their own personal lives. They wanted those words in the Declaration for future generations, to forever remind us of the core belief that is America.

We want to idealize the Founders. We need to idealize them. Something they did, something they said, was so noble it leaps out of the pages of history. Surely, they must have been angels. Now, we confront their flaws, massive flaws wrapped in what seems to be (and perhaps is) hypocrisy. And it hurts … it hurts so much.

It is right that it hurts, because confronting that good and bad can exist simultaneously in each person, even within ourselves, is necessary in order to have the reckoning we need to have. This confrontation is necessary so we can continue to move forward with the dream that is America, and continue to make the words of the Declaration applicable to all.

Perhaps we can take solace in some additional words from Jefferson, who also wrote “that the earth belongs … to the living … the dead have neither powers nor rights over it.” He used the phrase “self-evident” to describe this observation, the same phrase he used in the Declaration.

It was a statement not just of philosophy, but of truth. It is up to us, the living, to sort through and deal with the legacy of past generations. The Founders knew this. They knew they were not perfect. They tried, and in some ways they succeeded and rose to greatness, and in some ways they failed and succumbed to their own flaws. That is fact; not an excuse, not forgiveness. It is simple fact; self-evident Jefferson might have said.

They were human, and they knew that future generations will have to come to a reckoning with what they did that was great and timeless, and what they did that was wrong and immoral.

One day, future generations will come to terms with our generation, just as we are finally coming to terms with the Founders.

Because it is true that the earth belongs to the living.

Pittsburgh lawyer Eric Falk is chairman of the Norwin Area Democratic Committee and a member of the Westmoreland County Democratic Committee.