Page:Bertram David Wolfe, Jay Lovestone, William Francis Dunne - Our Heritage from 1776 (1926).pdf/5

Rh heritance as well and declares that there is nothing in 1776 which can be carried forward toward 1927 and beyond. Such purely negative reactions to incorrect tactics and programs is a natural and wholesome first reaction of an undeveloped working class. But it must outgrow these reactions if it is to grow up. Hence, in the year 1926, on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the first American revolution, it is appropriate that the American working class should "grow up" sufficiently to debunk the history of 1776, throw away the chaff of chauvinism, mystification and reaction and keep and use the wheat of revolutionary traditions and methods and lessons.

And there is much debunking to be done. The average Fourth of July "celebration" would be better named a "silly-bray-tion." The official orators of the Sesquicentennial will portray the revolutionary fathers as demigods, the revolution as a glorious vindication of the eternal rights of man, the institutions created as classless and eternal and unimprovable.

A first examination of the revolutionary "fathers" reveals them to be for the most part smuggling merchants fighting against the restrictions on trade set by the British government, "bootleg" manufacturers illicitly fabricating and selling articles that the British law forbade them to make or sell, land speculators trying to lay their hands on land which belonged to the British Crown or which had been awarded to Canada by the Quebec acts, men of wealth and affluence who continued to own slaves after "all men were created free and equal." The eternal rights of man prove to be the class interests of certain classes struggling for dominance as against another set of dominant classes. The glorious phrases of the Declaration of Independence to the effect that "all government rests upon the consent of the governed" did not prevent the rulers of the newly freed land from continuing the property and other qualifications for suffrage and putting over a constitution illegally and secretly drafted by the consent only of a small minority of those who were to be governed under it. If the right of the "pursuit of happiness" which the Declaration declares inalienable still