On September 2, 1945, in a grassy field in Hanoi known as Ba Dinh Square, a fifty-five-year-old man wearing a worn khaki tunic and white rubber sandals gave the speech that launched the Vietnam War. The man, who would be long dead when that war finally ended, was Ho Chi Minh, and the speech that he gave was, essentially, the American Declaration of Independence in Vietnamese.
He did not just begin by quoting its most famous words—“All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among them are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness”—his whole speech was copied from the Declaration. Ho enumerated the ways that a colonial power (France) had abused the rights of the Vietnamese, and he ended with another echo of Thomas Jefferson: “The entire Vietnamese people are determined to mobilize all their physical and mental strength, to sacrifice their lives and property in order to safeguard their independence and liberty.”
It was part of Ho’s intention, when he gave the speech, to solicit the support of the United States in driving the French out of his country. (That plan did not work out so well.) But Ho was also a student of political history, and he knew that he was not the first leader of a national liberation movement to appropriate the Declaration of Independence. In fact, according to the historian David Armitage, Vietnam was something like the fifty-fifth country to do so. The Declaration created, as Armitage puts it, “a new genre.” It provided a template for claims of national sovereignty that, in the years since 1776, has been used by more than a hundred countries, from Flanders (1790) and Haiti (1804) to Bulgaria (1908), Finland (1917), and Ireland (1919) to Abkhazia (1992) and Eritrea (1993).