Donald Trump 對於承認錯誤的抗拒，暗示著今年 7 月 4 日我們不太可能看到任何深入探討國家歷史複雜本質的事件。
Commemorations often tell us as much about the times in which they are being held as they do about the events they are commemorating. The two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, this July 4th, falls at a moment when the nation is being led by a twice-impeached President amid a widely recognized crisis of democracy—last Wednesday, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Louisiana v. Callais further weakened an already enfeebled Voting Rights Act—and in a social climate whose volatility might be measured by acts of political violence. The most dramatic recent example came with the frantic apprehension of an armed man in the hotel where the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner was being held. The alleged gunman fortunately did not reach the ballroom where the President and the other attendees were gathered, but he has been charged with an assassination attempt—the third made against Donald Trump in two years. This is the backdrop against which our recollections of the nation’s origins are taking place. Commemoration has been a complicated undertaking in this country from the start.
On July 4, 1826, President John Quincy Adams decided to forgo making a major speech and instead rode by carriage in a parade to the Capitol, where he listened to celebratory remarks and a reading of the Declaration. He would later find out that two of his predecessors—his father, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson—had died that day. Once fierce rivals, the two men were responsible for the country’s first peaceful transfer of power between parties, after Jefferson and his Democratic-Republican Party defeated Adams and the Federalists in the election of 1800. The nation’s centennial, in 1876, arrived in the wake of a civil war that had left some seven hundred thousand Americans dead. The Declaration’s insurrectionist contention—that people, when unjustly provoked, have the right to dissolve their government—hung heavily in a country that had just witnessed the eleven states of the Confederacy make the same argument. That year, President Ulysses S. Grant, who had commanded the Union forces, spoke in his annual address to Congress of the great economic and social progress that the United States had made during its first hundred years. But, though the guns of war were a decade in the past, the nation had not escaped the spectre of conflict. The Presidential election of 1876 pitted the Democrat Samuel J. Tilden against the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, but disputed returns from Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina, where there had been violence directed at Black voters, cast the results into doubt. With neither candidate gaining a clear majority in the Electoral College, the election was turned over to a special commission, which declared Hayes the winner. A compromise was then struck, insuring that Hayes could take office in exchange for the Republicans’ promising to cease the federal occupation of the former Confederate states—thereby ending the period known as Reconstruction. Grant was compelled to celebrate the nation’s hundredth anniversary just as its boldest experiment in democracy to date was being dismantled.
The nation’s bicentennial, the only major commemoration in living memory, was framed by the exigencies of the Cold War and by the scarcely healed scars of the Vietnam War, as well as by Watergate and President Richard Nixon’s consequent resignation. President Gerald Ford’s Fourth of July address hit the boilerplate notes of progress and enduring values in a speech so anodyne that his audience might have overlooked the fact that the national festivities were being led by a man who had been elected to neither the Vice-Presidency (Nixon appointed him, in 1973) nor the Presidency (he assumed that office when Nixon resigned).
The cumulative lesson of all this recollection is that, in commemorating the past, we may not like all that it calls attention to in the present. There are other contexts worth considering at this moment. The semiquincentennial inherently underscores the comparative youth of the United States; Italy, Greece, China, and India count their historic legacies in millennia, not centuries. At the same time, the past two hundred and fifty years of popular self-government represent a global milestone: the Declaration of Independence marks the birth of the world’s oldest constitutional democracy.
Those divergent truths point to the sober reality that the vast majority of people who have existed on this planet lived under some form of tyranny. The events of July 4, 1776, signalled a partial departure from a miserably well-worn path in human history. In that light, two hundred and fifty years seems like a very long time. The meaning of the Declaration was not entirely clear at the outset, even to those who wrote or signed it. With the haphazard spelling of the era, the signers refer to themselves in the final paragraph of the document as “Representatives of the united States.” The use of the lowercase with the word “united” suggests that it is serving as an adjective, not as a herald of the new nation’s name. (A subsequent line refers to the confederation as “United Colonies”—there were still things to be ironed out.) Notably, it was not until after the end of the Civil War that American grammar reliably described the United States in the singular: “the United States is” rather than “the United States are.” Other editorial decisions in the founding document were less ambiguous. Jefferson’s first draft contained a hundred-and-sixty-eight-word denunciation of the transatlantic slave trade, which was excised from the final text.
A seed of conflict was sown in that moment. Donald Trump’s personal aversion to admitting fault suggests that we will not likely see commemorations that grapple with the nuanced, complicated nature of the country’s founding and subsequent history this Fourth of July. What is more likely is that, fifty years hence, Americans will observe that this anniversary took place during a polarizing time, but that such circumstances were not unprecedented. One version of the nation’s history anchors itself in the efforts to navigate those tempests, to better the imperfect tools bequeathed to us by imperfect men. This more mature approach to our past recognizes that national greatness does not exist without a simultaneous reckoning with national failure—and that this undertaking, rather than diminishing American standing, is the surest path toward a country where “united” is as much an aspiration as an adjective.
Commemorations often tell us as much about the times in which they are being held as they do about the events they are commemorating. The two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence , this July 4th, falls at a moment when the nation is being led by a twice-impeached President amid a widely recognized crisis of democracy—last Wednesday, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Louisiana v. Callais further weakened an already enfeebled Voting Rights Act —and in a social climate whose volatility might be measured by acts of political violence. The most dramatic recent example came with the frantic apprehension of an armed man in the hotel where the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner was being held. The alleged gunman fortunately did not reach the ballroom where the President and the other attendees were gathered, but he has been charged with an assassination attempt—the third made against Donald Trump in two years. This is the backdrop against which our recollections of the nation’s origins are taking place. Commemoration has been a complicated undertaking in this country from the start. On July 4, 1826, President John Quincy Adams decided to forgo making a major speech and instead rode by carriage in a parade to the Capitol, where he listened to celebratory remarks and a reading of the Declaration. He would later find out that two of his predecessors—his father, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson—had died that day. Once fierce rivals, the two men were responsible for the country’s first peaceful transfer of power between parties, after Jefferson and his Democratic-Republican Party defeated Adams and the Federalists in the election of 1800. The nation’s centennial, in 1876, arrived in the wake of a civil war that had left some seven hundred thousand Americans dead. The Declaration’s insurrectionist contention—that people, when unjustly provoked, have the right to dissolve their government—hung heavily in a country that had just witnessed the eleven states of the Confederacy make the same argument. That year, President Ulysses S. Grant, who had commanded the Union forces, spoke in his annual address to Congress of the great economic and social progress that the United States had made during its first hundred years. But, though the guns of war were a decade in the past, the nation had not escaped the spectre of conflict. The Presidential election of 1876 pitted the Democrat Samuel J. Tilden against the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, but disputed returns from Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina, where there had been violence directed at Black voters, cast the results into doubt. With neither candidate gaining a clear majority in the Electoral College, the election was turned over to a special commission, which declared Hayes the winner. A compromise was then struck, insuring that Hayes could take office in exchange for the Republicans’ promising to cease the federal occupation of the former Confederate states—thereby ending the period known as Reconstruction. Grant was compelled to celebrate the nation’s hundredth anniversary just as its boldest experiment in democracy to date was being dismantled. The nation’s bicentennial, the only major commemoration in living memory, was framed by the exigencies of the Cold War and by the scarcely healed scars of the Vietnam War, as well as by Watergate and President Richard Nixon’s consequent resignation. President Gerald Ford’s Fourth of July address hit the boilerplate notes of progress and enduring values in a speech so anodyne that his audience might have overlooked the fact that the national festivities were being led by a man who had been elected to neither the Vice-Presidency (Nixon appointed him, in 1973) nor the Presidency (he assumed that office when Nixon resigned). The cumulative lesson of all this recollection is that, in commemorating the past, we may not like all that it calls attention to in the present. There are other contexts worth considering at this moment. The semiquincentennial inherently underscores the comparative youth of the United States; Italy, Greece, China, and India count their historic legacies in millennia, not centuries. At the same time, the past two hundred and fifty years of popular self-government represent a global milestone: the Declaration of Independence marks the birth of the world’s oldest constitutional democracy. Those divergent truths point to the sober reality that the vast majority of people who have existed on this planet lived under some form of tyranny. The events of July 4, 1776, signalled a partial departure from a miserably well-worn path in human history. In that light, two hundred and fifty years seems like a very long time. The meaning of the Declaration was not entirely clear at the outset, even to those who wrote or signed it. With the haphazard spelling of the era, the signers refer to themselves in the final paragraph of the document as “Representatives of the united States.” The use of the lowercase with the word “united” suggests that it is serving as an adjective, not as a herald of the new nation’s name. (A subsequent line refers to the confederation as “United Colonies”—there were still things to be ironed out.) Notably, it was not until after the end of the Civil War that American grammar reliably described the United States in the singular: “the United States is” rather than “the United States are.” Other editorial decisions in the founding document were less ambiguous. Jefferson’s first draft contained a hundred-and-sixty-eight-word denunciation of the transatlantic slave trade, which was excised from the final text. A seed of conflict was sown in that moment. Donald Trump’s personal aversion to admitting fault suggests that we will not likely see commemorations that grapple with the nuanced, complicated nature of the country’s founding and subsequent history this Fourth of July. What is more likely is that, fifty years hence, Americans will observe that this anniversary took place during a polarizing time, but that such circumstances were not unprecedented. One version of the nation’s history anchors itself in the efforts to navigate those tempests, to better the imperfect tools bequeathed to us by imperfect men. This more mature approach to our past recognizes that national greatness does not exist without a simultaneous reckoning with national failure—and that this undertaking, rather than diminishing American standing, is the surest path toward a country where “united” is as much an aspiration as an adjective.
紀念活動往往告訴我們的，不僅是那些被紀念的事件，也反映了舉行這些活動所處的時代背景。今年 7 月 4 日，《Declaration of Independence》採納兩百五十週年，正值國家由一位兩度彈劾的總統領導之際，而這個時期正籠罩在一個公認的民主危機中——上週三，《Louisiana v. Callais》案的 Supreme Court 裁決進一步削弱了本來就虛弱不堪的《Voting Rights Act》，社會氣候的動盪程度甚至可以用政治暴力行為來衡量。最近最戲劇化的例子，發生在 White House Correspondents’ Association dinner 舉行的飯店裡，一名持械男子驚慌失措地被當場逮捕。這名涉嫌槍手的男子幸好沒有到達總統和其他出席者聚集的大廳，但他已被控犯下刺殺未遂罪——這是兩年內針對 Donald Trump 的第三起事件。這就是我們回顧國家起源的時代背景。
紀念活動往往告訴我們的，不僅是那些被紀念的事件，也反映了舉行這些活動所處的時代背景。今年 7 月 4 日，《Declaration of Independence》採納兩百五十週年，正值國家由一位兩度彈劾的總統領導之際，而這個時期正籠罩在一個公認的民主危機中——上週三，《Louisiana v. Callais》案的 Supreme Court 裁決進一步削弱了本來就虛弱不堪的《Voting Rights Act》，社會氣候的動盪程度甚至可以用政治暴力行為來衡量。最近最戲劇化的例子，發生在 White House Correspondents’ Association dinner 舉行的飯店裡，一名持械男子驚慌失措地被當場逮捕。這名涉嫌槍手的男子幸好沒有到達總統和其他出席者聚集的大廳，但他已被控犯下刺殺未遂罪——這是兩年內針對 Donald Trump 的第三起事件。這就是我們回顧國家起源的時代背景。
從一開始，「紀念」在美國就是一個複雜的過程。1826 年 7 月 4 日，總統 John Quincy Adams 決定不發表大型演說，而是搭乘馬車遊行到 Capitol，他在那裡聆聽了祝賀演講和《Declaration》的朗讀。後來他得知，他的兩位前任者——他的父親 John Adams 和 Thomas Jefferson——都在當天去世了。這兩位曾是激烈競爭的對手，但他們卻促成了美國史上第一次和平的政黨權力交接，即在 1800 年的選舉中，Jefferson 和他的 Democratic-Republican Party擊敗了 Adams 和 Federalists。
美國國慶（centennial）在 1876 年，是在一場內戰之後到來的，那場內戰造成了約七十萬美國人的死亡。《Declaration》中關於「人民當遭受不公的挑釁時，有權利解散其政府」的動亂主張，沉重地懸掛在一個剛剛目睹了 Confederacy 的十一個州提出相同論點的國家。當年，曾指揮 Union forces 的總統 Ulysses S. Grant 在他對國會的年度演講中，談到了美國在其第一個百年中所取得的巨大經濟與社會進步。然而，儘管戰爭的砲聲已經過去了一 decade，但這個國家仍未擺脫衝突的陰影。1876 年的總統大選將 Democrat Samuel J. Tilden 與 Republican Rutherford B. Hayes 放在對立面，但在 Florida、Louisiana 和 South Carolina 這三個州，由於針對 Black voters 的暴力事件導致選舉票數回傳有爭議，使得結果充滿疑慮。由於沒有任何一位候選人能在 Electoral College 中獲得明確的過半票，這次大選便交由一個特別委員會決定，該委員會宣布 Hayes 為獲勝者。隨後達成了一項妥協：Hayes 可以在共和黨承諾停止在前 Confederacy 州的聯邦佔領的前提下上任——從而結束了「Reconstruction」時期。Grant 不得不慶祝國家百年紀念日，卻恰逢其迄今為止最宏大的民主實驗正在被拆解。
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這是活人記憶中唯一的重大紀念活動——國雙週年（bicentennial），它受到 Cold War 的壓力、越南戰爭未癒的傷痕，以及 Watergate 和總統 Richard Nixon 隨之而來的辭職等因素所形塑。President Gerald Ford 在七月四日的演說，使用了關於進步和持久價值的陳腔濫調式的詞句，內容過於平淡無奇，以至於聽眾或許忽略了，國家慶典的領頭人是一位既沒有當選 Vice-Presidency（他於 1973 年由 Nixon 任命）也沒有當選 Presidency 的人物。所有這些回憶累積的教訓是：在紀念過去時，我們可能無法接受它帶給現在的全部關注點。
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此時還有其他值得考慮的背景。國半週年（semiquincentennial）本質上突顯了美國相對年輕的歷史；義大利、希臘、中國和印度將其歷史傳承計算為「千年」，而非「世紀」。同時，過去兩百五十年的人民自治代表了一個全球性的里程碑：《Declaration of Independence》標誌著世界上最古老的憲政民主國的誕生。這些不同的真相指向一個清醒的現實：絕大多數生活在這個星球上的人類，都曾生活在某種形式的暴政之下。1776 年 7 月 4 日的事件，象徵著人類歷史上那條極其老化的道路發生了部分偏離。從這個角度來看，兩百五十年似乎是一段非常漫長的時間。
時代隨意的拼寫，簽署人將自己在文件最後一段中稱為 “Representatives of the united States。” 使用小寫的 word “united” 暗示它作為一個形容詞，而非代表新國家的名稱。 （後續的一行提到邦聯為 “United Colonies”—當時仍有許多需要完善的地方。）值得注意的是，直到內戰 (Civil War) 結束之後，美國語法才可靠地將 United States 描述為單數：「the United States is」，而不是 “the United States are”。文件中的其他編輯決策則沒有這麼模糊。Jefferson 的初稿包含了一篇長達 hundred-and-sixty-eight-word 的跨大西洋奴隸貿易譴責，這段內容後來被刪除（excised）了。那一刻播下了衝突的種子。
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Donald Trump 個人對於承認錯誤的抗拒，暗示著我們在今年的 Fourth of July 期間，不太可能看到任何能深入探討國家創立和後續歷史那細膩、複雜本質的紀念活動。更可能的情況是，美國人在五十年後會觀察到，這個週年紀念日是在一個兩極化的時期舉行的，但這種情況並非史無前例。國家歷史的一個版本根植於應對這些風暴的努力，旨在改善那些由不完美的人們遺贈給我們的、本身就不完美的工具。這種更成熟的過去觀點認識到，國家的偉大不能沒有同時正視國家的失敗——而這項工作，比起削弱美國的地位，才是邁向一個「united」不僅是一個形容詞，也是一種抱負的最可靠途徑。♦