Equality

Equality. “We hold these truths to be self‐evident, that all men are created equal” Although these words from the Declaration of Independence are among the most familiar in the American canon, much of American history challenges the principle they proclaim.From the nation's beginnings onward, certain groups of Americans were judged unequal, not according to their virtue, intelligence, or talent, but rather on the basis of race, religion, gender, or wealth. Non‐whites, women, some immigrants, and the propertyless were denied the privileges and obligations of citizenship, despite the nation's ostensible commitment to the principles of legal and political equality.

Yet Thomas Jefferson's ringing declaration, even if not fully observed in practice, nevertheless echoed long and loud. Successive generations of reformers—Jeffersonians and Jacksonians challenging economic privilege; abolitionists challenging slavery; women's‐rights and woman‐suffrage advocates challenging the subjugation of women; civil libertarians challenging the suppression of dissent; farmers and workers challenging the unchecked prerogatives of capital; and critics of intolerance challenging religious, ethnic, and racial injustice—invoked the principle of equality as one of their primary weapons. Protracted and sometimes bloody as their battles were, these crusaders prevailed: by the late twentieth century, legally imposed discrimination on the basis of religion, race, ethnicity, gender, income, or sexual preference had been outlawed in the United States. Given the nation's long record of exclusion and oppression, this achievement testifies not only to the activists' heroic efforts, but also to the protean power of the principle of equality.

In the economic and social spheres, the record has been more equivocal. While most Americans' commitment in these areas was to equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome, even that more limited goal proved difficult to achieve. From 1913, when the quintessential progressive reform measure, the graduated income tax, was authorized, through the New Deal of the 1930s and the Great Society legislation of the 1960s, economic inequality diminished in the United States. Taxing the wealthy and regulating the economy to expand social and economic opportunities for the poor made a difference—albeit a less dramatic difference than that of the post–World War II rights revolution.

The trend reversed in the two decades after 1980, however, as the gap between the richest and poorest Americans widened steadily. The civil‐rights and women's movements did not automatically assure equality of opportunity in the economic and social spheres. Many women, members of minority groups, and recent immigrants still in the late twentieth century faced barriers, and de facto racial segregation persisted in urban America. The quality of public schools and other governmental services varied widely among neighborhoods of different ethnic make up and income level, as did the employment opportunities available to different groups. The late twentieth‐century prosperity of highly educated, technologically sophisticated computer specialists and information‐service providers, and of entrepreneurs in these fields, was accompanied by the decline of industries that had lifted earlier generations from poverty, the eroding buying power of the minimum wage, and a proliferation of entry‐level service‐sector jobs leading nowhere. As a new century dawned, the goal of equality first promulgated in 1776 remained elusive.
See also African Americans; Asian Americans; Antislavery; Capitalism; Civil Liberties; Economic Regulation; Equal Rights Amendment; Feminism; Hispanic Americans; Immigration; Immigration Law; Industrialization; Laissez‐faire; Racism; Social Class; Social Darwinisn; Socialism; Suffrage; Taxation; Utopian and Communitarian Movements; Woman Suffrage Movement; Women's Rights Movements.

Bibliography

J.R. Pole , The Pursuit of Equality in American History, 2d ed., 1993.
Rogers M. Smith , Civil Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History, 1997.

James T. Kloppenberg