The Revision of the Declaration of Independence in 1941

HE WASHINGTON POST, on January 21, 1973, published a feature article by Judith Martin, Trimmed to Fit: Some Quotes are More Unalienable than Others. The point of the story was that the passages from the Declaration of Independence on the panel in the Jefferson Memorial differ in a number of points from the official text of the Declaration. The article was based largely on information that I had given to Miss Martin and on interpretive background that Julian Boyd, editor of the Papers of Thomas Jefferson, had furnished to her. The article told the story well and performed a public service in calling to the attention of a wide reading audience the editing of the Declaration of Independence thirty years ago by the Jefferson Memorial Commission. There are, however, further aspects of the case that should interest historians and in fact all social scientists concerned with the broader problem of reliability of data and accuracy of human observations. There is the specific question of just how a commission of twelve men came to authorize a panel with so many errors, and why their recommendations were not challenged by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. I became aware four years ago that there was something wrong with the inscription when I heard Lord Kenneth Clark, in his film Civilisation, read a passage from the Declaration of Independence and show on the screen the panel in the Memorial. Not only did he, following the panel, speak of rights rather than rights, but some of the other phrases did not sound right. Two years later, when I had an hour free in Washington, D. C., I visited the Memorial and purchased a postcard of the panel. On my return home I checked this against the official text of the Declaration, and found two words misspelled, a total of five words in three places omitted, and some minor changes in punctuation. The misspelling of unalienable as inalienable and of honor as honour was a return to an early draft of the Declaration in Jefferson's handwriting, and the thought occurred that the memorial commission might have felt that a memorial to Jefferson should give his words, rather than the words as changed by Congress

Declaration · Declaration of independence · Independence (probability theory · Political science · Statistics · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Law · Mathematics

• Sovereignty

  Open Access•Ian Duncanson•Law/text/culture•2008

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