FIRST ANNUAL PICNIC OF THE KNIGHTS OF LABOR
, 1882
(NIDAY PICTURE LIBRARY / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO / JOSEPH KEPPLER)A
ll men are created equal.” To-
day, it is difficult to appreciate
the radicalism of Thomas Jef-
ferson’s almost matter-of-fact
pronouncement in the Dec-
laration of Independence. The 18th cen-
tury was a world of inequality, grounded
in deeply rooted hierarchies of class, race,
gender, and religion. The Declaration
of Independence tied the new American
nation’s fate to the ideal of equality. Jeffer-son’s words provided a standard by which
people could judge their society and, not
infrequently, find it wanting. Ever since,
a perceived lack of equality has been the
catalyst for powerful social movements in
the United States and abroad.
Equality may be, as Jefferson wrote,
“self-evident,” but its precise meaning
is not. Like freedom, equality has always
been what philosophers call an “essen-
tially contested concept,” one that is a
subject of disagreement and that pos-
sesses multiple meanings. Does it sug-
gest equality of opportunity or equality
of economic condition? Does it apply
primarily to how one is treated in the
public sphere, or does it reach into theintimate realm of the family? Equal legal
and political rights frequently coexist
with widespread economic inequality.
Equality for some often involves inequal-
ity for many others. The equality of
white men has historically rested on the
subordination of nonwhites and women.
The rallying cry of equality has been, to
borrow a phrase from the Italian histori-
an Franco Venturi, a “protest ideal”— a
critique of the existing order more than
a clear blueprint for changing it.
In the aftermath of American inde-
pendence, the lexicographer Noah Web-
ster described equality as “the very soul
of a republic.” Indeed, by the 1830s,
Alexis de Tocqueville and countless otherTHE VERY SOUL OF THE REPUBLIC
Equality’s vexed meaning in Gilded Age America
by ERIC FONER
Eric Foner is the DeWitt Clinton Professor
Emeritus of History at Columbia. His new book,
out this fall, is The Second Founding: How
the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade
the Constitution.