If the new immigrants are a bridge to the nation's future, another disparate group of people provide a very special link to America's past. They are the direct descendants of the 56 remarkable farmers, traders, lawyers and physicians who signed the Declaration of Independence. Countless thousands of heirs of the signers are scattered throughout the nation, and TIME has interviewed a representative dozen of them. In their politics and professions, their attainments and attitudes, they are diverse, but they share many common opinions. All passionately support the ideal of democratic government, while recognizing the imperfections of the government they have. Some of their views about the nation and what they believe their illustrious ancestors would feel if they stepped out of a time machine and could see America today:
ARCHIBALD COX, 64, a sixth-generation descendant of Connecticut's Roger Sherman, won acclaim as the Watergate special prosecutor who insisted that a President, like any citizen, is accountable under the law. Now back at Harvard as a law professor. Cox believes the Watergate drama was a profound affirmation of the faith that the Declaration of Independence places in ordinary citizens. For him, "the most moving scene" occurred when Watergate grand jurors—"a fair cross section of men and women, black and white"—were polled one at a time by Judge John J. Sirica about whether they wished to subpoena the taped conversations of President Nixon. "I wondered whether they would stand firm. Each one did. Now suppose Roger Sherman had walked into that courtroom at that time. Would he not have said, 'This is just the way it should happen. Here are the representatives of the people of the United States calling their highest official to account.' "
In Cox's view, the framers of the Declaration were "supreme realists who had no illusions about the new nation they had founded." They did not expect it to be perfect. Says he: "Democracy is frequently diverted. It's slow, and it takes a lot of wasted effort. I do believe in progress, as the framers did. A lot of people think that because they can't have the millennium tomorrow, democracy isn't worth the effort. But that's not what human life has ever been about. Roger Sherman and the other patriots would not have been so obsessed with what was wrong or so blind to the accomplishments, as many people are now."
YUKIKO IRWIN, who attended both Tokyo Women's Christian College and Indiana University, is descended from Benjamin Franklin. She lives in Manhattan, where she is an expert in shiatzu, a finger-pressure therapy similar to Chinese acupuncture. Her grandfather, a Philadelphia trader, went to Japan in 1866 and wed a local woman in the first legally sanctioned marriage of an American and a Japanese. Her father also married a Japanese.
Mixed parentage made her feel wholly at home neither in Japan (where she lived until 1953) nor in the U.S., but now she feels more comfortable in America because of its "vastness." Today she believes America is plagued with self-doubt, as Japan was just after World War II, but she retains confidence in America "because it is such a dynamic country. There is always new blood being transfused into it, and its body never grows old."