Born a slave in Maryland, Frederick Douglass escaped the South’s “peculiar institution” in i838, traveling first to New Bedford, Massachusetts. He became a prominent abolitionist speaker and author - he published a newspaper, The North Star, and penned no fewer than three autobiographies - and regularly lectured on behalf of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. His Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), his first and best-known autobiography, proved a powerful counterargument to slaveholders’ assertions regarding the capabilities of African Americans, and a potent propaganda publication for abolitionists both North and South. Douglass traveled widely, at home and abroad, to spread his message. He consistently challenged the United States to live up to its stated civic ideas, and in one famous speech reminded his audience that national celebrations held little meaning for African Americans; held little meaning, indeed, so long as slavery existed. “What to the slave is the fourth of July?” he demanded in 1852. “The existence of slavery in this country brands your republicanism as a sham, your humanity as a base pretence, and your Christianity as a lie. It destroys your moral power abroad; it corrupts your politicians at home.” Slavery, he went on, “is the antagonistic force in your government, the only thing that seriously disturbs and endangers your Union. It fetters your progress; it is the enemy of improvement, the deadly foe of education; it fosters pride; it breeds insolence; it promotes vice; it shelters crime; it is a curse to the earth that supports it; and yet, you cling to it, as if it were the sheet anchor of all your hopes.” When the Civil War came, Douglass saw the conflict not just as an opportunity to end slavery, but a chance for African Americans to prove their patriotism by fighting for the Union. He was appalled that, at first, they were denied the right to do so. After the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, and the official raising of black regiments, Douglass’s sons, Charles and Lewis, joined the North’s most famous African American regiment, the 54th Massachusetts Colored Infantry (although Charles transferred to the 5th Cavalry). After the war, Douglass continued to speak out for the rights of African Americans, and was dismayed at the growing tendency to downplay the significance of emancipation in the public evocations of the war. “We are sometimes asked in the name of patriotism,” he reminded Americans in 1871, “to forget the merits of this fearful struggle, and to remember with equal admiration those who struck at the nation’s life, and those who struck to save it.” The Civil War, as Douglass realized, was fast becoming the exception to the rule that history is written by the winners.
W.E.B. Du Bois represented a new generation of African-American spokesmen to follow men like Douglass, and in Black Reconstruction (1935), he echoed Douglass’s 1871 comments by noting that America had fallen “under the leadership of those who would compromise with truth in the past in order to make peace in the present.” His entire career was devoted to challenging and seeking to eradicate what he identified, in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), as the “problem of the twentieth century,” the “color-line.” Born in Massachusetts, Du Bois was educated at Fisk and at Harvard (he was the first African American to gain a doctorate from Harvard), and was professor of history and economics at Atlanta University. His perspective was that of the Progressive era in which he grew up, as he believed that through education, social reform might be effected and racism eradicated, and he argued that the educated elite -what he termed the “talented tenth” of the African-American population - should lead the way. In 1905, he organized a meeting of black leaders in Canada (or rather, the Canadian side of Niagara Falls, where the hotels accommodated blacks; hence the group came to be known as the Niagara Movement), out of which emerged a “Declaration of Principles” that called for franchise reform (many African Americans had been effectively disenfranchised under the so-called Jim Crow laws of the South) and the ending of racial segregation. Together with white Progressive reformers, and in a reaction against a lynching, one that took place not in the South but in Illinois, Du Bois founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) that remains active today. In the early twentieth century, the NAACP pushed hard for the implementation of both the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, but with little success. With the outbreak of World War I, and
America’s commitment of troops in 1917, Du Bois, like Douglass in the case of the Civil War, encourage African Americans to join up to fight, to establish their claim to equal citizenship rights. In 1919, when the troops were returning home, Du Bois considered the implications for these black “Returning Soldiers” in The Crisis, the NAACP’s monthly journal, whose return to a country that disenfranchised and lynched African Americans held out hope that blacks would return “fighting” for equality. “Make way for Democracy,” Du Bois declaimed. “We saved it in France, and by the Great Jehovah we will save it in the United States of America, or know the reason why.” Over the course of a very long life, Du Bois would challenge both the social and scientific arguments that supported racism, although his perceived radicalism and support for communism attracted both criticism and the attention of the FBI. He was one of the few African-American spokesmen to challenge the forced internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.
One of America’s Founding Fathers, Benjamin Franklin seemed to exemplify what came to be called the American Dream over the course of a life that saw him rise from poverty to international prominence and a career that covered printing, publishing, and politics, and combined science with statesmanship. Famous for his many inventions, including the lightning rod (devised after his famous kite-flying experiment), the Franklin stove (or circulating stove, as it was designed to circulate hot air around a room) and bifocal spectacles, perhaps his greatest invention was himself and, through that, the nation that became the United States. Franklin’s career began in printing, but from the start he was driven to publish his ideas on social and individual progress, at first under pseudonyms, Silence Dogood, and later the persona of Poor Richard (Richard Saunders) of Poor Richard’s Almanack fame, published from 1732 to 1758. The Almanack contained pithy pieces of wisdom concerning the efficacy of frugality and hard work, collected together in as The Way to Wealth (1758). Perhaps the best-known of these is the “early to bed, and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise” maxim. Although a little too relentlessly upbeat for some tastes - both at the time and since -Franklin’s advice resonated in a colonial setting in which the possibility of reinvention of both self and society seemed real enough to many. At the very least, the opportunity existed in the colonies to critique the elite, which Franklin did via the pages of the Pennsylvania Chronicle and