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| Rodney "Buz" Piercey as Ben Franklin (still from video) |
"We dared to dream of what America might become -- and look at you now," Benjamin Franklin said at the Spirit of 76 Celebration. Well, Ben Franklin as portrayed by Rodney Piercey Jr., better known as "Buz," in the Mount Union Chrstian Church where he grew up.
"Franklin" recalled that he was involved in drafting the Declaration of Indepedence in 1776 and the Constitution 11 years later, both at Independence Hall in Philadelphia, the city where he lived.
"We needed a birth announcement . . . a ceclaration to the world, a statement of our intentions" and reasons for separating from Great Britain, he said. That job was assigned to a five-man committee, but Thomas Jefferson did most of the writing.
Franklin said one "correction" he made was to replace Jefferson's line "We hold these truths to be sacred and inviolate" to "We hold these truths to be self-evident," because people can disagree on what is sacred and "The monarchy gets its authority from the church."
When the drafters of the Constitution emerged from Independence Hall in September 1787, a woman asked Franklin, "What have we got? A republic or a monarchy?" Franklin replied, "A republic, if you can keep it."
"A democracy, unlike a monarchy, is not self-sustaining," Franklin said. "If you want to have a democratic republic, you'd better get to work. . . . In a democracy, the work is never over." He said that when democracies fail, it is usually from "a decay of civic virtue."
Franklin, who discovered several of the fundamentals of electricity, then staged a pseudo-science experiment that failed. His point was that while most scientific experiments fail, they can be repeated until success is achieved, but "Our democratic experiment is very different. We might not get another chance. . . . We must not let it fail."
He said divisions of opinion nearly prevented adoption of the Declaration and the Constitution, and "Division is still your worst enemy," made worse by misinformation and the desire for confirmation of our beliefs over information that might be contrary to them.
Keeping a republic "requires seeking truth over confirmation," and compromise, "which is the very soul of a democracy," he said. "It involves seeking cooperation and compromise every time. . . . When we compromise, we are not surrendering principles. That's not what compromise is about."
He quoted from a letter that he wrote at the constitutional convention: "We must all approach our public lives with a degree of humility, recognizing that our opponents may sometimes be right and that we ourselves may sometimes be mistaken."
Concluding, he shifted to the present: "If we've lost that skill set, if we've lost that ability, then we certainly have lost this country."
