(This blog is one that is mostly connected to our Constitution Cafe and Declaration Project activities and writing.)
I (Christopher Phillips) find myself very sad over all the attempts to humiliate Melania (and now the Donald’s son, Donald Jr.), over what is widelyclaimed to be blatant plagiarism.
Let’s focus on Melania’s putative act of plagiarism, since it is questionable at best whether Donald Jr. committed the deed.
Well, let’s first ask: Is plagiarism bad? Or should we (including our First Lady) in this case see it as a supreme compliment?
Have we forgotten our history? The history of plagiarism? When it was a consummately good thing?
Have we forgotten our Plagiarizer in Chief? Don’t read any further. Close your eyes. Guess who it is?
None other than Thomas Jefferson.
Jefferson, for one, would be surprised by all the hoopla surrounding Melania.
After all, he gave little credit where credit was due. His draft of the Declaration of Independence owed so much to fellow Virginia George Mason’s Declaration of Rights and to the English Declaration that by today’s standards, he would be accused of gross plagiarism.
Yet Jefferson enshrined the myth that he was the author on his own tombstone. He’d composed himself the words that would be on his gravesite.
It starts off thus: ‘Here lies Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence.”
Though most of my fellow Americans take it for granted that Jefferson, as he puts on his tombstone, was the author, nothing could be further from the truth.
At best, in honor to the truth, Jefferson should have had some version of this composed on his tombstone instead: “Here’s lies Thomas Jefferson, author of the first draft of the Declaration of Independence.”
But apparently this did not have a sufficiently adulatory or glorifying ring to Jefferson.
Fact is, All signers had the right to put on their tombstones – ‘author, editor and signer of the Declaration.’Not just the Committee of Five, of which Jefferson was one member, but the entire Second Continental Congress, as you’ll see by juxtaposing these two drafts with the final document.
Even if they had changed just one or a few words of the documents, this qualified them not just as signers, but as editors, as revisors, even arguably as authors, given the sometimes dramatic changes they made. They changed many words in Jefferson’s draft; they excised huge chunks (thank goodness), altering the entire tone and tenor, and added many new words and phrases.
My firm belief is that if the Continental Congress hadn’t worked its collective magic on Jefferson’s initial draft, our Declaration wouldn’t have been the galvanizing document that led to victory.
As we all should know, one word can change the entire meaning of a passage. But our Declaration’s signers/editors did far more than that.
Yet they were far too comparatively modest and self-effacing to draw attention to their own contributions. To them, winning independence was all — but not to Jefferson.
To Jefferson, imitation was the sincerest form of flattery. Jefferson was the master adaptor, consummate plagiarizer, and he, along with his fellow members of Congress, in lifting material from elsewhere, adapted the document to ensure that the Declaration was a genuine expression of the American mind — indeed its highest expression, a yearning for freedom and independence that resonates to this day.
(Just check out all the scores of local declarations of independence among our colonies and townships (here’s one example from our comprehensive collection, the first of its kind online) that preceded our Declaration, that are on our Declaration Project site, and other earlier declarations from elsewhere, and you’ll see for yourself. Not only that, check out and juxtapose Jefferson’s original draft, on our site, with the draft approved by our other signers/editors/revisors/authors).
And so it is that a long chain of adaptors has followed — look at our Declaration Collection, and see for yourself (I say that a lot, don’t I) how many authors across the globe have launched their own movements for independence (this one by the suffrage movement, as just one for-instance), lifting huge swaths from our ‘original’ July 4, 1776 declaration.
And so it is that while our debatably outdated and ossified Constitution — haven’t had any amendments enacted in ages (and the last one was initially sent out to the states for a vote in 1789) is falling out of favor abroad, considered out of touch and outdated (and is widely viewed as woefully ineffective at home), our Declaration of Independence is touching more of a chord than ever.
I doubt any of what I put here will make much difference to all the holier than thou-ers gleefully heaping scorn on Melania (I wonder if they have ever copied anything without attributing credit to the ‘copy-ee.’ Are all their thoughts wholly original?)
But it should.