‘JOIN, or DIE’

Benjamin Franklin’s plea is just as relevant now as it was in the 1750s.

By
33

Now just four years shy of the 250th anniversary of our founding, Americans are faced with the same question this Independence Day that we have been since the first one: Was it worth it?

Most nations can point to moments in their history that served as hinge points, but Americans can always ask a more fundamental question about our past: Given all of the troubles, injustices, and unmet expectations of the past 246 years, would we do it all again? Our national identity is not just the evolutionary result of DNA, geography, and the march of empires (though it is all those things, too). To be an American means inheriting the consequences of a choice made for us by our forebears. The perceived merit of that choice therefore changes with the experiences and expectations of each new generation.

One could certainly argue that in the decade before our break with Britain, the mother country and its colonies had drifted into such alienation that by the summer of 1776, independence and war were foregone conclusions. After the abuses of the Townshend Acts and the Boston Massacre, it would have been hard to convince Americans to accept continued rule by a distant, arrogant Parliament and King George III. After the bloodshed of the spring of 1775 at Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill, it may have been impossible to restore the bonds across the Atlantic—certainly not as they had been in the 1750s, before the strains of the French and Indian War and its aftermath.

But even if rupture and war with Britain were foregone conclusions, the scope, ambition, and principles of the founding we celebrate today were far from obvious.

Keep reading with a free account
Create a free Dispatch account to keep reading Get Started ALREADY HAVE AN ACCOUNT? SIGN IN
33
By
Comments (33)
Join The Dispatch to participate in the comments.
 
  1. R. James

    Its a bit of a strawman to say that the Gadsden Flag "is seen today as an expression of individual liberty in opposition to government power" without clarifying how common that viewpoint is. It stands to reason that many more Americans who use the flag may see it as a symbol of collective resistance of the People in the form of local communities or states against national government overreach. In which case, the Flag would be used in a similar way as the founders used it. Afterall the founders saw themselves as Englishmen seeking the recognition of their rights under English common law.

    Collapse
  2. Token Liberal

    After a week of Supreme Court disaster, with more to come next year, I've been thinking about this. Unlike snowflake Republicans (looking at you, Texas Republican Party), who want to end the Country every time they don't get their way, I've been thinking about the Blacks, American Indians and Japanese Americans who volunteered to fight in WWIi despite fighting for a country that went out of its way to deprive them of their rights. So I have resolved to stay and work to get things back to how they should be. It might take 50 years, or longer. But the point of this country is not that justice will always prevail, but that we are each free to pursue that justice. I intend to do that, and leave the cutting and running to others.

    Collapse
  3. Avatar photo
    BrandonAlleman

    I see a parallel between the Gadsen Flag and 2nd Amendment where they both were originally about unifying individuals and protecting the state as a whole and now are viewed as rights and symbols of indiduals protecting themselves against the state and each other.

    Collapse
  4. Avatar photo
    Carl M

    Short and sweet and pleasingly distinct from the bulk of July 4 encomia.

    Collapse
  5. Avatar photo
    Scarlette Tarte

    We can't know if it was "worth it", as we don't have the alternate history to compare it to.

    I would say I do not think we should have founded a nation based on the concept that all people are created equal with a grounding in individual liberties, on the backs of slaves.

    I think that we may have avoided most of our problems if we had started the nation as a free state. Then, we would not have had to even use the concept of Federalism, but rather would have been a nation built in commonality of creed.

    Instead, it was two halves, one slave, one free, constantly trying to accommodate each other. There was not a way to ever reconcile these two competing and opposite idea systems...one based in actual freedom and one on the idea of supremacy, and that really only all white males were created equal.

    The founders were not perfect of course, and convinced themselves that this was the best they could do. But they were smart enough to know that slavery was going to cause massive problems for us down the line.

    It is best to just accept our history warts and all, and just try to make life better now. No need to mythologize these men or try to make the founding into some supernatural event. It was what it was, an imperfect answer in an imperfect system.

    Collapse
  6. TNDOCNAV

    Perspective....Thanks and Happy 4th.

    Collapse
  7. Avatar photo
    Kevin M. James

    It might be worth pondering the differences between the sort of unity described here, which was so vital to the survival of young America, and the popular-front/cult-of-unity impulse that Jonah frequently denounces (and rightly so).

    Collapse
  8. Avatar photo
    Jim Canestrari

    I never gave much thought about why the Gadsden Flag has become so wildly popular among the populist crowd. Now I get it. Thank you. What irony.

    Collapse
    1. Anna A

      I find their use of the Betsy Ross flag equally ironic.

      Collapse
  9. Mild Bill

    Great article, Chris. Akhil Reed Amar goes into great detail on Franklin's "Join or Die" drawing in his book "The Words that Made Us." Makes for great reading. I got the T-shirt last summer when I visited the Saratoga National Historic Park. I'm prepared if anyone asks me what it means and where it came from. Also, I look damn good in it. Happy 4th!

    Collapse
  10. DRHanson

    Your question “So was it worth it?” would be an interesting one to pose to the Founders, if we could. In the final chapter of his book “The Radicalism of the American Revolution,” Gordon Wood, eminent historian of the early republic, pointed out that many of the leaders of the Revolution came to be dismayed by the social and political democratization unleashed by their success. Wood wrote: “This democratic society was not the society the revolutionary leaders had wanted or expected. No wonder, then, that those of them who lived on into the early decades of the nineteenth century expressed anxiety over what they had wrought. Although they tried to put as good a face as they could on what had happened, they were bewildered, uneasy, and in many cases deeply disillusioned. Indeed, a pervasive pessimism, a fear that their revolutionary experiment in republicanism was not working out as they had expected, runs through the later writings of the founding fathers. All the major revolutionary leaders died less than happy with the results of the Revolution…[T]he numbers of old revolutionaries who lost faith in what the Revolution had done is startling…” Wood’s examples include Benjamin Rush, James Warren, Samuel Adams, David Ramsay, Light Horse Harry Lee, Christopher Gadsden, and even George Washington, John Adams, and Jefferson (who was alarmed by the popularity of Andrew Jackson). But Wood says the Founders weren’t disillusioned because they thought their revolution had failed; they “were unsettled and fearful…because it had succeeded, and succeeded only too well. What happened in America in the decades following the Declaration of Independence was after all only an extension of all that the revolutionary leaders had advocated.” Americans today tend to be unaware that the Revolution didn’t just bring new political institutions and legal principles; it also led to the upending of traditional social structures and relationships in ways that the Founders might have found distressing but Americans today would never agree to reverse.

    Collapse
Load More