The Golden Apple of Democracy

Key Takeaways 

• Danielle Allen framed the Declaration of Independence as the nation’s “golden apple”—a living inheritance whose promise of equality still asks to be read, contested, and used. 
• Allen praised The Huntington’s “This Land Is …” exhibition as “the richest exhibit for the 250th” she had seen anywhere in the country. 
• The lecture placed Allen’s reading of the Declaration in conversation with The Huntington’s founding-era collections, including its six July 1776 printings of the Declaration of Independence. 
• In conversation with Susan Juster, Allen discussed equality, belonging, civic education, democracy renovation, and the challenge of recovering a shared sense of “we.” 

Before Danielle Allen stepped to the podium in Rothenberg Hall, she spent an hour inside “This Land Is …,” The Huntington’s major Library exhibition marking the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. 

Allen, the James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University and one of the country’s leading scholars of democracy, had come to deliver the 2026 Shapiro Lecture on “Democracy and the Declaration Across 250 Years.” But first, she walked through an exhibition that asks visitors to consider the American story not only through founding documents but also through land, migration, dispossession, belonging, conflict, and repair. 

When Allen began her lecture, she urged the audience to do the same. 

“It is the richest exhibit for the 250th that I have yet had the chance to see anywhere in the country,” Allen said. 

She noted that commemorations on the East Coast, particularly in Boston and Philadelphia, often focus tightly on the 18th century. By contrast, she said, The Huntington’s exhibition takes in “the whole sweep of American history,” the breadth of the continent, and “all the different streams of people, different experiences, the challenges as well as the triumphs of our history.” 

“It forms a tapestry,” she said. “I really do urge you to take the time to go see it. I think you will find it quite moving.” 

Over the course of the evening, Allen invited the audience to read the Declaration not as a relic but as what Abraham Lincoln once called the nation’s “golden apple”: a living inheritance to be studied closely, argued over honestly, and used in the ongoing work of democracy. 

The event was part of THIS LAND IS …, The Huntington’s multiyear initiative that invites visitors to reflect on the American story through the lens of land. Anchored by the tagline “Reflections for America at 250,” the initiative spans the Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, drawing on The Huntington’s collections and living landscapes to consider relationships among land, U.S. history, and American identities. 

For Allen, the evening began with a question at the center of the 250th anniversary: How can people living now receive the inheritance of the Declaration of Independence honestly, without denying either its ideals or the exclusions and contradictions embedded in the country’s history? 

Her answer was close reading—of the Declaration, its omissions, and the uses Americans have made of it across generations. 

A Lecture Rooted in the Archive 

The Shapiro Lecture is named in honor of L. Dennis and Susan R. Shapiro, who established the Shapiro Center for American History and Culture at The Huntington in 2019 to advance scholarship and public understanding of American history and culture, especially the early republic and the nation’s founders and leaders. The inaugural Shapiro Lecture was delivered in 2020 by historian Annette Gordon-Reed, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family. 

While introducing Allen, Sandra Brooke Gordon, Avery Director of the Library, situated the lecture within both the Shapiro Center’s work and The Huntington’s broader America at 250 commemorations. She noted that The Huntington has marked earlier national anniversaries through its collections, including a major America at 150 exhibition in 1926 and 1927 and bicentennial commemorations in 1976. A century later, THIS LAND IS … extends that tradition across the institution. 

The exhibition, curated by Josh Garrett-Davis, H. Russell Smith Foundation Curator of Western American History, and Linde B. Lehtinen, Philip D. Nathanson Senior Curator of Photography, includes two of The Huntington’s six July 1776 printings of the Declaration of Independence, along with materials that bring visitors into conversation with such figures as Thomas Jefferson, Woody Guthrie, Octavia E. Butler, Langston Hughes, Otis Marston, and Noni Olabisi. 

Allen’s book Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality became a touchstone for many involved in planning The Huntington’s America at 250 commemorations, including Huntington President Karen R. Lawrence, who helped make the connection that brought Allen to the Shapiro Lecture. 

Democracy: Past, Present, and Future 

Allen began by offering a compact description of her scholarship. 

“I work on democracy, past, present, and future,” she said, “with no question mark at the end of that.” 

The line drew applause. Allen went on to explain that the focus comes from family inheritance. On her mother’s side, her great-grandparents fought for women’s right to vote; her great-grandmother later served as president of the League of Women Voters in Michigan. On her father’s side, her grandfather helped found one of the first NAACP chapters, in northern Florida in the 1940s, at a time when lynchings were on the rise. 

Why, Allen asked, did they take such risks? 

“Because at the end of the day, they understood empowerment to be the bedrock for human thriving and well-being,” she said. 

That understanding was tested as she came of age. Allen described watching members of her generation move along radically different life paths. Some, like her, found extraordinary educational and professional opportunities. Others in her extended family were lost to addiction, gun violence, incarceration, and severe mental illness. 

Her youngest cousin, Michael, was sent to prison in Southern California in the 1990s after attempting a carjacking at age 15. He served 12 years and eight months. Allen worked to get him access to education while also helping build a night course for low-income adults through the Illinois Humanities Council. 

The students were often working multiple jobs while juggling childcare, public transportation, and other pressures. Allen and her colleagues wanted to offer them the same quality of education as her students at the University of Chicago—where she was a professor for 10 years—but with shorter texts. 

That is how Allen began teaching the Declaration of Independence. 

“It is 1,337 words,” she said. “Nobody was going to complain that the reading was too long.” 

The result, she said, was “the most explosive teaching experience” of her career. Her night students responded to the Declaration faster and more powerfully than many of her university students. 

Why? 

“Because they went to the heart of the text,” Allen said. “The Declaration of Independence is a story of agency, human agency.” 

In Allen’s reading, the Declaration begins with people surveying their circumstances and finding them wanting. They articulate principles, lay out grievances, link arms, and move forward together. Her night students were doing something similar. They were in class to change their lives. 

Many, Allen said, had never encountered the Declaration before. 

“I had this deep sense that their inheritance had been withheld from them,” she said. 

That word—inheritance—was central to the lecture. To inherit the Declaration is not to inherit a simple or uncontested document. It is to receive a text that contains high ideals, as well as the violence, exclusions, and compromises of the world that produced it. 

Allen turned to Abraham Lincoln to describe the nature of that inheritance. Lincoln, she said, called the Declaration the “golden apple” set in the “frame of silver” of the Constitution. The Declaration names the purpose: a community of free and equal self-governing citizens. The Constitution supplies the frame. 

“I want to make sure that you, before we leave tonight, can take the golden apple with you,” Allen said. 

Then she gave it to the audience: the long sentence at the heart of the Declaration, beginning with “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” Allen changed “all men are created equal” to “all people are created equal,” then paused to note the difficulty many contemporary readers feel when receiving that inheritance. 

“You heard me change the word men to people,” she said. “I’m sure you’re wondering about Thomas Jefferson. You’re thinking, well, but wasn’t Thomas Jefferson a slave owner? So, this stuff about equality, how seriously can we take it?” 

Her response was to widen the frame. 

Jefferson, Allen said, did not write the Declaration alone. He chaired a five-person committee that also included John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert Livingston. Adams, who did not hold people in bondage and objected to slavery, contributed the phrase “pursuit of happiness,” Allen said. The more conventional 18th-century formulation would have been “life, liberty, and property,” but property had already become entangled in the politics of slavery. 

The committee’s draft also included a critique of the slave trade, accusing King George III of violating the rights of people in Africa. Congress cut that passage. 

The compromise around slavery was real, Allen said, but so was the abolitionist language that remained. In January 1777, Prince Hall, a free African American in Boston, used the language of the Declaration in a petition to the Massachusetts General Court seeking to abolish slavery. The petition failed, but Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Vermont each moved against slavery before the end of the Revolutionary War through laws, constitutional provisions, or legal decisions shaped by the Declaration’s language. 

The ideals, Allen argued, were present from the beginning. So were the contests over who could claim them. 

Allen made a similar point about women. Abigail Adams, she reminded the audience, wrote to John Adams in 1776 asking him to “remember the ladies” as the founders drafted a new political order. John Adams replied, in effect, that the principles applied to everyone, but the organization of power would remain what he called a “masculine system.” 

Abigail Adams did not let the matter rest. She warned that women might not consider themselves bound by laws in which they had no voice or representation.  

In that response, Allen said, Abigail Adams articulated a central democratic principle: “You cannot protect the rights of all while putting power in the hands only of some.” 

In Allen’s account, the Declaration has never been only an artifact of 1776; it has also been a tool for those seeking access to power—from abolitionists and suffragists to civil rights leaders and LGBTQ+ rights advocates. 

The work, she said, is the ongoing effort to achieve “a full sharing of power and responsibility”—a phrase she attributed to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. In 1863, Lincoln expressed a similar idea in the Gettysburg Address, with its vision of government “of the people, by the people, for the people.” 

“It is for the people when it is by all the people,” Allen said. 

Democracy Renovation 

After the lecture, Allen was joined onstage by Susan Juster, W. M. Keck Foundation Director of Research and a scholar of early American history. Their conversation turned from the Declaration’s founding language to the work of democratic repair. 

Juster began with two words: equality, which is central to the Declaration, and democracy, which does not appear in the text. She asked whether the Declaration’s list of unalienable rights—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—has changed or expanded over time. 

Allen said the phrase itself is an invitation. It offers examples, not a closed list. Franklin D. Roosevelt expanded the idea with his Four Freedoms, including freedom from want and freedom from fear. Today, Allen said, she considers health a basic right, though Americans continue to debate both the principle and the means of securing it. 

Juster suggested another: the right to belong. The existence of stateless people, she said, points to the importance of having a home and a political community that recognizes one’s rights. 

Allen agreed. “Everybody has a right to belong to a society in which they have rights,” she said. 

The conversation then turned to the distinction between equality and equity. Equality, Allen said, is the starting point: the idea that human beings share a fundamental capacity for purpose, judgment, and the effort to make tomorrow better than yesterday. Equity enters later, as a corrective when legal or political systems produce injustice. 

“Everything we build should start with that commitment,” Allen said. “And then when we screw up, equity comes in as a corrective.” 

For Allen, that work is part of what she calls “democracy renovation”: rebuilding institutions so they govern more effectively, respond to people’s needs, and help restore confidence in civic life. 

That confidence has weakened, especially among younger people, Juster noted. Allen said the disaffection is understandable. Many young adults were born after the events of Sept. 11, 2001, into a nation at war. Their childhoods were marked by the Great Recession. They then came of age amid deep polarization, the 2016 election, the pandemic, the rise of artificial intelligence, and the climate crisis. 

“What has democracy done for me lately?” is “a rational attitude for young people, sadly,” Allen said. 

The answer, she argued, is not nostalgia but responsibility. Civics education is one part of the work. Allen described a yearlong eighth grade curriculum she has helped develop in Massachusetts, pairing core knowledge about government with student-led civic-action projects. 

For adults, she offered a practical answer: reconnect to municipal governance. The national political scene can feel distant and demoralizing, she said, but people can make a difference in their cities and towns. Local participation, multiplied across communities, can change the dynamics of the larger system. 

“The whole thing is actually built at the top level out of the stuff we do at the bottom level,” she said. 

This Land Is Beautiful, Layered, Empowering 

One of the evening’s most direct connections to The Huntington came when Juster described the response wall in “This Land Is …,” on which visitors are invited to complete the phrase “This land is …” 

Juster read several responses: “scarred, loved, torn, fractured, and beautiful”; “troubled, beautiful, breathtaking, not yet at rest”; “a constantly changing canvas of governments, tribes, temples, churches, monuments, peoples, and motivations.” 

Another visitor had written, “Not going to make it another 250 years.” Someone else replied beside it: “Gonna make it another 250 years. Don’t listen to that guy.” 

The wall, Juster said, had already become a conversation among visitors. 

Asked how she would complete the phrase, Allen said she had just signed The Huntington’s guest book with her own answer: “This land is beautiful.” 

Then she added more words. 

This land is inspiring, she said, because the stories of freedom and overcoming are inspiring. This land is layered, because the country’s history contains “as much tragedy and weeping as there is celebration.” And this land is empowering, because “the commitment to equal human dignity is where our path to flourishing begins.” 

Founders, Power, and “the We” 

Audience questions returned to the meaning of founding itself. 

Asked whom she considers founders, Allen offered an expansive answer. The founders include those who formally signed the nation’s founding texts, she said, but also those who contributed to the thinking behind the new political order: Abigail Adams, Prince Hall, and Indigenous legal and political traditions, including the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, which influenced Benjamin Franklin’s thinking about union. 

The final question returned to the Declaration’s first word: “we.” 

“I feel like our American society has lost the ‘we,’” the audience member said. “How do we get it back?” 

Allen called it a beautiful question—not because it asked whether the “we” could be recovered, but because it asked how. 

“It’s not a question of whether we will,” Allen said. “We have to get it back.” 

The answer, she said, would not come from a single person. It would come from asking the question in community: with one person, then three, then six. 

At The Huntington, the argument met its setting: a Library with deep founding-era collections and an exhibition that places the Declaration’s aspirations, shortcomings, and promise in conversation with 250 years of American history. 

The golden apple, Allen told the audience, belongs to them. The question is what they will do with it. 

Watch the full lecture and conversation here.