Published by the Civil Rights Congress
Written by Max Gordon – Published 1997
Can the right to a job be considered a civil liberty, subject to demand for enforcement by our governmental institutions, within our present constitutional framework? As an organization explicitly dedicated to the full exercise of our civil liberties and democratic rights, the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee [and the Civil Rights Congress] considers that particularly in this bicentennial year, when we are examining the roots of our national political system and traditions, it is incumbent upon it to explore this question.
My remarks here, directed at an examination of the issue in terms of the ideology and constitutional outlook of Jefferson and Madison — who were decisive in initially shaping our democratic institutions — are merely suggestive and preliminary. There is no effort at thoroughness or legal rigor. I offer them simply to initiate the process of examination and to give our constitutional lawyers something to nibble at.
The American tradition, like all social phenomena, has its sharply conflicting aspects. Various economic “factions” (in Madison’s term), or classes, have sought to shape or interpret it according to their material interests. But as the Jeffersonian philosophers had predicted, the concentration of wealth which has characterized our nation’s modem history had so dominated
our ideology as to submerge thoroughly the radical elements which were substantial in the thinking of these philosophers. In a sense we are now trying to recapture, and give life to, these radical elements in our national tradition.
Let’s take as our starting point a known fact of history most frequently cited as basis for the welfare state tradition -Jefferson’s substitution, in the Declaration of Independence, of the right to “life, liberty and pursuit of happiness” for ‘ life, liberty and property.” Many have viewed this as a rhetorical flourish, or a personal idiosyncrasy of Jefferson’s. The great historian of American thought, Vernon Parrington, wrote in the mid-1920’s that Jefferson gave the classical Lockean definition of human rights a “revolutionary” shift by the substitution, and that he did so because of his deep conviction that the nation’s political machinery should guarantee the enjoyment of human’s rights for all and not simply for the holders property.
TO BE CONTINUED
