Political leaders convene to discuss Declaration of Independence

Though "self-evident" to the founding fathers of the United States, the notion that "all men are created equal" is easier said than applied.

Only recently has the nation moved past an institutional racial hierarchy, which reigned not only over African Americans but also over Asian Americans, said Jennifer Hochschild, a Harvard University government professor.

Hochschild — along with former presidential candidate Steve Forbes '70, N.J. Gov. James McGreevey and other political experts — spoke at the Declaration of Independence conference held during the weekend by the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.

"After Sept. 11, it is clear that the basic values represented in the declaration are . . . indeed contested and challenged," McGreevey said in his keynote address, according to a University press release.

"We as members of a free society do not deny [the terrorists] the right to hold those beliefs. They, however, deny our right to hold our own beliefs and ideals."

Forbes spoke Friday on "Why Investors — and Everyone — Need Madisonian Restraint in Economic Policies."

Hochschild, in her speech, talked about the irony of those most famous words of the declaration. "They are false," she said plainly. Those words, used by political leaders around the world, neglected to include everyone but white men," she said.

But while racial differences concerned the framers of the declaration and the Constitution, gender issues were no more than a farce.

John Adams laughed at his wife Abigail when she asked him to "remember the ladies," said Hochschild, who is a former Princeton professor.

"Questions of gender got resolved much sooner and more successfully than questions of race," she said.

Race, especially the controversial point of slavery, was "an abhorrent mistake that somehow got built into the system," Hochschild said, referring to the three-fifths compromise which resulted in the Constitution counting slaves as only a fraction of a man for purposes of congressional representation.

But the institutional racial distinctions became an impetus for change.

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"It violates everything Americans believe most profoundly and everything most Americans stand for," Hochschild said.

Just as African Americans' status was evidenced by slavery and Jim Crow laws, the status of Asian Americans was seen during the early part of last century in the Chinese Exclusion Act, the banning of Japanese immigration and the quota imposed on Filipino immigration after they declared their independence.

The most politically sound and morally correct stance on immigration, she said, is to have open borders — with restrictions that were equal to all places of origin.

Washington Post syndicated columnist and Pulitzer Prize winner Charles Krauthammer closed the conference. He said the United States should not base its foreign policy on world opinion, which is based on the self-interests of other nations.

Instead, the United States should do what is morally right, he said.