John Whitehead

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute

"Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God." —Thomas Jefferson

Few will dispute the fact that Americans generally have lost the awareness that our republic began with a revolution. Not long ago, a group of students in Indianapolis showed copies of the Declaration of Independence to several hundred people and asked them to sign it. Most refused, stating that it sounded rather dangerous. In July 1975, the People’s Bicentennial Commission handed out copies of the Declaration of Independence in downtown Denver without identifying it. Only one in five persons recognized it, and one man said, “There is so much of this revolutionary stuff going on now. I can’t stand it.”

The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11th have further confused the situation. It is common to hear both our elected officials and citizens state rather bluntly that it’s time to relinquish some of our freedoms in order to feel more secure.

This kind of sentiment was completely foreign to those who founded this country. Lest we forget, the founders would today be considered by many as radicals who hold dangerous beliefs. Take, for instance, the opening lines of the Declaration of Independence:

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. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government.

Obviously, those who fought the arduous battles to preserve our freedom had a different conception of what a society should be and what it meant to be a good citizen. Indeed, America began with a dream, and the American dream is what has made the rest of the world look to our country in hope. All too often, however, the American dream is defined in material terms—a new house, a well-paying job and two cars in the driveway. But to the nation’s founders, the American dream was much more.

The Declaration of Independence and the history that preceded it are where we must look to find the American dream. In them, we find these fundamental concepts: rights, resistance and optimism about the future. These three themes run throughout the history of this country. Their current demise is a clear repudiation of the ideals of those who founded the United States.

Our rights—civil liberties—are threatened and violated by government entities on a daily basis. Many believe that in recent years America has been creeping closer and closer to becoming a police state, especially in light of post-Sept. 11th anti-terrorist legislation, executive orders and other actions by our government.

Resistance, or at least intelligent resistance, is practically nonexistent. Those who adopt the mantle of resistance all too often articulate it in the form of violence—a far cry from the reasoned radicalism of our Founding Fathers.

But even some of the greats among the founders often seemed to advocate something much stronger than merely peaceful resistance. As Thomas Jefferson wrote to James Madison in 1787, around the time the U.S. Constitution was being written:

I hold it that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms are in the physical. Unsuccessful rebellions, indeed, generally establish the encroachments on the rights of the people, which have produced them. An observation of this truth should render honest republican governors so mild in their punishment of rebellions, as not to discourage them too much. It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government.

And in that same year Jefferson also wrote: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”

Today, such statements would bring Jefferson under the surveillance of the FBI and other agencies as a terrorist.

As for future optimism, a dark cloud has descended over the country. And there appears to be no reasonable forecast of sunshine in the near future.

America is the great experiment in liberty. Let us hope our country will not turn out to be a historical accident—a brief parenthesis that is closing before our very eyes. Only “we the people” can avert the ominous growth of government and preserve our freedoms. Again, as Jefferson once wrote: “The people are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.”