Mark​​​​ Canada, Ph.D.​

When the Fourth of July arrives next week, you will be ready for this trivia question: "Who wrote the Declaration of Independence?"

 

Or will you?

 

Thomas Jefferson actually was only one member of the committee appointed to draft this famous document.  The others were Roger Sherman, Robert R. Livingston, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin.  To be honest, I don't know what Sherman and Livingston contributed (perhaps a comma here or a semicolon there--or maybe just an "Attaboy, Tom!"), and I can only imagine John Adams's role, which almost certainly involved niggling, blustering, and attempting to draw more attention to himself as the woefully neglected genius of the group.

 

I do know that Franklin suggested a significant revision.  Where Jefferson had written, "We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable," Franklin struck out "sacred & undeniable" and suggested "self-evident."  Franklin's words became immortalized in the most famous part of the Declaration of Independence.

 

Actually, we shouldn't be surprised.  Franklin was a very experienced writer.  A printer by trade, he published the leading newspaper of the early eighteenth century, The Pennsylvania Gazette, for decades and wrote numerous articles and essays for it and other papers.  By 1776, he also had begun writing his autobiography, which would become the greatest American contribution to this genre.

 

Indeed, if you ask me (you didn't, but, hey, it's my newsletter), Franklin was also the better of the two writers.  I have read Jefferson's own autobiography, as well as his Notes on the State of Virginia, and they don't stack up to Franklin's work.  Then again, Franklin's style tended to be wry and conversational--probably not the best choice for the Declaration of Independence.

 

Jefferson himself recognized Franklin's way with words.  “Will Doctor Franklin be so good as to peruse it," he wrote to his elder statesman, "and suggest such alterations as his more enlarged view of the subject will dictate?” In his excellent biography of Franklin (my favorite), H. W. Brands quotes this request from Jefferson and observes, “After decades as a writer and editor, Franklin knew good prose when he read it.  He treated Jefferson’s draft gently" (511).

 

In requesting assistance with his prose--and in accepting the revisions--Jefferson demonstrated a quality that I wish were more common today.  Call it "intellectual humility."  (By the way, he also asked Adams to review the draft, perhaps because--and I'm only half-joking here--he didn't want to listen to Adams whine that he had not been consulted.  Adams was not a paragon of intellectual humility.)

 

It can be hard for some geniuses to consult others for help or, for that matter, to accept advice.  After all, they are used to being the smartest people in the room.  I would contend, however, that even the non-geniuses often have something to contribute.  In any case, there were plenty of geniuses in the rooms where the United States was being crafted into existence.

 

Franklin himself would later offer some valuable insights into intellectual humility.  After the Americans succeeded in securing their independence and got to work on a constitution, Franklin became concerned about what he was seeing at the Constitutional Convention of 1787.  Apparently, there was some quibbling over details, if you can believe it.

 

Franklin himself had some doubts, but he tried to see the bigger picture.  In a speech he wrote for the convention, he encouraged his colleagues to do the same.  This speech, as it appears in The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, begins:  

 

"I confess that I do not entirely approve this Constitution at present, but Sir, I am not sure I shall never approve it: For having lived long, I have experienced many Instances of being oblig’d, by better Information or fuller Consideration, to change Opinions even on important Subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise."

 

Franklin's words constitute an eloquent case for intellectual humility.  If we concede that we have been wrong in the past, why would we insist on our position in the present, especially when some equally intelligent people are taking different positions?

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Furthermore, as a highly practical person, Franklin recognized that a very promising project might fail because his colleagues could not reach a consensus. The final sentence calls on the men at the convention to exercise some intellectual humility for the good of the country:

 

"On the whole, Sir, I can not help expressing a wish that every member of the Convention who may still have objections to it, would with me, on this occasion doubt a little of his own infallibility, and to make manifest our unanimity, put his name to this instrument."

 

Of course, the Constitution--and the United States--did indeed get off the ground.

 

If two of the greatest geniuses in American history can doubt themselves and seek a greater good, surely we can, too.