Maier, as an experienced student of the American Revolution, has no patience with the quasi-religious adoration of a document whose actual historical origins she has come to know so well. She is “uncomfortable,” she says, “with the use of religious words and images for what are, after all, things of this world.” The whole business of erecting a shrine for the worship of the Declaration of Independence strikes her as “idolatrous, and also curiously at odds with the values of the Revolution,” which was suspicious of Catholic iconographic practices. More important, the Declaration of Independence seems to her to be “peculiarly unsuited” for the role that it eventually came to play in America—“as a statement of basic principles for the guidance of an established society.” At the beginning, in 1776, it was not meant to be that at all.
In her book Maier wants Americans to know that the Declaration of Independence was created by human beings just like them and that they are its masters, not its supplicants. She wants to liberate the Declaration from its tomb by recovering the actual historical circumstances of its creation, circumstances whose mundane nature puts the origins of the Declaration greatly at odds with the seemingly religious character it later acquired. In confronting this contradiction Maier found herself with two different but related stories to tell—“that of the original making of the Declaration of Independence and that of its remaking into the document most Americans know, remember, and revere.” Her book thus presents a classic example of the longstanding conflict between history and heritage that David Lowenthal has recently described in a superb study.1
Maier has little sympathy with most previous analyses of the Declaration, which tended to concentrate on the ideas and the philosophies that presumably lay behind its words. She doesn’t bother with hermeneutics or attempt to refute Carl Becker, Morton White, and Garry Wills, the principal scholars who have written on the Declaration in this century. These scholars, like most students of the document, she writes, “examined the Declaration for the political ideas it expressed, and then jumped from its text to the more systematic treatises of eighteenth-century European writers.” Instead, she simply bypasses their often ethereal discussions of political philosophy and descends directly to “the grubby world of eighteenth-century American politics” where she has spent much of her working life. It is in that political world, she says, that an accurate understanding of the origins of the Declaration can best be found.