“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Thus begins the second paragraph of the American Declaration of Independence.

Has our great nation upheld this ideal, though? The answer, we must admit to ourselves if we are honest, is no. As a culture, we have violated this most sacred principle time and time again. How?Women prohibited from voting. The enslavement of Africans. Blocking the right of many classes of people to vote, in all periods of our history. Discrimination based on race, religion, ethnic background, sexual orientation, and a thousand other useless artificial labels by which we arbitrarily categorize each other. Perhaps worst of all–the genocide waged against the indigenous peoples who were here first, but did not match the technology of the early settlers.

Well.

My friend Tom Bentley and I have co-authored a novel, Swirled All the Way to the Shrub.

Shrub is available on Amazon in eBook and print versions, and it’s off Amazon as well.

Ah, but what’s it about, you ask? Here you go:

The Roaring Twenties were bellowing along—until they weren’t. In a splintered bar in Boston, Pinky deVroom, newspaperman, amateur cynic and would-be-novelist, clutches his sour Prohibition brandy and watches his world get sucked down into the vortex. Hope comes in the form of an astute, comely literary agent named Elfred. But hope can be its own form of hell. Watch game Pinky twist, squirm and waffle while the world wobbles.

Shrub is about Pinky, and yet also about very much more. As Shrub unfolds, it grapples with these issues of equality and inequality, of how the word “inalienable” came to be applied to only a select few.

We didn’t actually set out to wrestle with these themes; it just happened as we created our world and began to wend our way through it.

In this first blog post on Shrub, let’s have a look at Dr. Alice Hamilton’s insights on equality.

In these troubled times, when the industrialists and politicians who run things are striving harder than ever to bleed the common man dry, we found breathtaking inspiration in making (with the utmost respect) Dr. Alice Hamilton one of our characters.

Dr. Hamilton was a physician and one of the finest toxicologists and industrial medicine experts of her time. She was also a social reformer–a lifelong part of the Settlement House movement and an associate of Jane Addams.

Dr. Hamilton had this to say about equality in America:

“We know that ability and character are not a matter of class, and that the difference comes from the unfair handicaps to which the children of the poor are subject, and we would remedy matters by working for equality of opportunity for all children, instead of trying to encourage the propagation of one class and not of the other.”