by Frank James
On this Independence Day, as we pay annual homage to the Declaration of Independence for which Thomas Jefferson gets most of the credit for authoring, let's not forget the signal contribution made by Benjamin Franklin -- entrepreneur, scientist, diplomat, statesman and, apparently, wordsmith.
If not for Franklin, one of the most famous parts of the Declaration would likely read, "We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable."
Franklin, a member of the Continental Congress committee charged with creating the document, had a better idea. He crossed out the words "sacred and undeniable" and substituted "self-evident."
You can see the actual draft declaration, with Franklin's edit, here
Walter Isaacson, in his Franklin biography, explains how the amply padded founding father and Renaissance man arrived at "self-evident."
The idea of "self-evident" truths was one that drew less on John Locke, who was Jefferson's favored philosopher, than on the scientific determinism espoused by Isaac Newton and on the analytic empiricism of Franklin's close friend David Hume. In what became known as "Hume's fork," the great Scottish philosopher, along with Leibniz and others, had developed a theory that distinguished between synthetic truths that describe matters of fact (such as "London is bigger than Philadephia") and analytic truths that are self-evident by virtue of reason and definition ("The angles of a triangle equal 180 degrees"; "All bachelors are unmarried"). By using the word "sacred," Jefferson had asserted, intentionally or not, that the principle in question--the equality of men and their endowment by their creator with inalienable rights--was an assertion of religion. Franklin's edit turned it instead into an assertion of rationality."
This may be one of the few times in history that a committee actually improved on the final product.
