Our Declaration

The first and most obvious act of reading is that of the Declaration of Independence itself. Allen presents the Declaration between her Prologue and first chapter; we are invited to read its entirety then and many times over throughout the text. At the same time, Allen makes it clear that it was a lifetime of reading that established her interest in equality. She used these skills to teach her night students and then began an even slower reading of the Declaration that produced her book. Reading is inextricable from democratic writing; the members of the Declaration committee were constantly reading each other’s work, talking about it, and then editing documents to produce final drafts. Finally, Allen advocates for slow reading, claiming the “value of learning to read slowly and listen closely is not merely that we will understand the Declaration better, but that we will understand every politician better” (150). It is slow reading of the Declaration that allows Allen to explain her argument about equality.

Allen first asserts the power language in Prologue, when she argues that “language is one of the most potent resources each of us has for achieving our own political empowerment” (21). She notes that the Founding Fathers “grasped” the transformational “power of words,” which they wielded to bring “the Declaration, and their revolution, into being” (21).