American Revolution
...an unbelievable amount of emphasis on the very idea of equality; making it the "center of the nation’s public morality." (Pole, 38) When the revolution was over, the Bill of Rights and the Constitution -- the framework of this nation -- emphasized equality so greatly that it has now persuaded the rest of the world that America is, indeed, the so called, promised land; the land of freedom. "The men who led the colonial protest... had little idea that they were inaugurating an intellectual upheaval." (Pole, 132) Yet, by the time the Revolutionary War was done, America had a new identity and new egalitarian values. And this new equality "retained a remarkably central place as the moral imperative around which American thinking turned..." (Pole, 132) Equality had begun, however inadvertently, in the aftermath of the Revolutionary War. Pole states that during the time of the Revolutionary War, it would have been foolish to believe that any event, no matter how significant or momentous, would have foreseen "the proclamation of the ideal of natural rights equality as the general principle of the American people. Yet that is what happened in the American Revolution." (Pole, 23) According to Pole, the Revolution caused what he calls the "Interchangeability Principle:" the idea that Americans are exchangeable with one another. This theory suggests that all Americans are equal in regards to their natural abilities. However, the differences appear in the area of circumstance: "...vast differences made by education, habits of life, leisure..." and so forth. (Pole, 142) Yet there is still the belief that America is devoid of any class structure. This was brought about by such historical events as the Revolutionary War; just as this idea is constantly being steeped in the minds of American society by any circumstance that promotes egalitarian beliefs. Any such fight for freedom or equality simply emphasizes the idea that Amer...