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Unity
Neil Baldwin’s new
book, The
American Revelation, provides a respite from divisive political rhetoric
and offers the stories of ten individuals who helped form selected ideals
that we now hold as “American.” Baldwin
provides enough depth and context to each of the characters and their lives
to support his premise on where these ideals came from and what they mean for
us today. Readers know some of the characters well, and others may be
introduced on these pages. The ideals are clear, and this reinforcement
provides an opportunity to reflect on what we hold in common. Here’s an excerpt,
all of the Introduction, pp. 1-5:
Ideals
cannot exist without idealists. The
American Revelation pays tribute to the people who engendered ten
essential ideals in our history and illuminates the times in which they were
first expressed. In our own twenty-first century, as I write these words, the
pulse of the nation often sounds as if it is emanating from two separate
heartbeats. We need to turn to galvanizing beliefs that will provide a
unifying focus for our thoughts and our lives in an instructive mental
conversation with the past. The ten ideals discussed in The American Revelation are the rightful patrimony of all
Americans.
The
first inspiration for this book came to me when the new issue of The Economist landed on my doorstep one
day in early September 2002. A feature
called “A Year On” caught my eye. A “special report” on the gargantuan
struggles facing America twelve months after the cataclysm of 9/11, the piece
endeavored to capture the powerful national theme “of America as a place
apart. . . from George Washington’s warning to the new
republic against ‘entangling alliances’ to Ronald Reagan’s summons to his
fellow citizens to build an ideal ‘shining city on a hill.”
President Reagan was
indeed fond of that popular image, which he used in his January 11, 1989,
farewell address to the nation. But he did not create the concept. The
English Puritan leader John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay
Colony, invoked the “city on a hill” in the spring of 1630 in a sermon
delivered to his fellow passengers on the ship Arbella preparing to set sail from Yarmouth
at the dawn of “the Great Migration” to the New World.
Imagining the land across the sea, Governor Winthrop, in turn, took
inspiration from Christ’s words in the Sermon on the Mount in the fifth book
of the Gospel according to St. Matthew: “Ye are the light of the world. A
city that is set upon a hill cannot be hid.”
President
Reagan, like Winthrop before him, saw America as
above all else a moral exemplar. “I’ve spoken of that shining city all my
political life,” he recalled from the Oval Office in a valedictory speech
televised just after nine o’clock in the evening. “In my mind it was a tall,
proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, windswept, God-blessed, and
teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with
free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity.” Reagan’s lofty remarks
set my imagination spinning. What provoked John Winthrop’s vision of an ideal
community in a new Promised Land? How did he come to develop such a romantic
image of our country as a world paradigm, a vantage point for vigilance,
likewise willingly exposed, open to be judged—and emulated— from afar?
John Winthrop’s vivid metaphor is the natural beginning for the book
you hold in your hands. He was a lawyer, scholar, and religious man, devoted
to family and church. His colleagues on the governing Board of the
Massachusetts Bay Company selected him as their leader to shepherd them
across the ocean and make a new home in the wilderness. Winthrop employed his knowledge of
scripture to inspire, not intimidate. He accepted his responsibility to set
the tone for a fledgling pioneer community far from England. Winthrop conceived of
this uncharted land as a place of promise where worldly fulfillment was
possible through good works. His lay sermon, “A Model of Christian Charity,”
entered our national discourse precisely 375 years ago.
A century later
another Englishman, Thomas Paine of Norfolk,
came to America
with the single-minded intent to start anew. From his earliest career as an
excise collector in Lewes, Paine was an adamant champion of the rights of the
workingman. Once on these shores, he sensed the undercurrent of desire for
self-determination in the character of the American colonies as emblematic of
“the cause of all mankind.” In Philadelphia
in January 1776, encouraged by Benjamin Franklin, Paine wrote and published
Common Sense, the most influential
and politically engaged pamphlet of its time, perhaps of all time. It was a
hymn to America
as a republic meant to survive for posterity. Paine’s inflammatory rhetoric
stands as a landmark in the American tradition of the free press.
The
source for the ideal examined in the third chapter—our national motto, E Pluribus Unum, which means, “Out of
many, one”—was likewise an immigrant, by way of Geneva and the West Indies.
His name was Pierre Eugene Du Simitière,
and he lived in Philadelphia
during the Revolutionary War. Among his talents were heraldry and graphic
design. During the momentous summer of 1776, Du Simitière was asked to serve as consultant to the Great
Seal Committee of the Second Continental Congress. He labored closely with
Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson to create an enduring
coat of arms and a symbolic slogan for the thirteen United States of America.
After trying various phrases and sketches, Du Simitière selected three words that have come to express
the nation’s multifaceted identity.
I
turned next to Boston-raised, Harvard-educated Ralph Waldo Emerson, the most
eloquent practitioner of nineteenth-century American individualism. Trained
for the clergy, as a young man he abandoned the conventions and restraints of
the church, preferring to make a living as an itinerant lecturer, preaching
the gospel of the inexhaustible self. To “see into the life of things,”
Emerson dared to be different. He believed it was necessary to go against the
grain in order to improve the society at large. Emerson’s philosophy
advocated truthful introspection as the foundation for integrity in the wider
world, In 1841, living with his family in the quiet sanctuary of the Concord
woods, he published the essay “Self-Reliance,” a hymn to the singular
American spirit.
Four
years later two words expressing the inexorable progress of the nation
entered the national vocabulary. John Louis O’Sullivan was a
thirty-two-year-old lawyer, Jacksonian Democrat,
and editor of the New York Morning News
and the United States Magazine and Democratic Review. His
passionate daily editorials added momentum to the expansionist fervor
sweeping America,
“to make the wilderness blossom as a rose” in the drive ever westward from
sea to shining sea. “The fulfillment of our Manifest Destiny,” he wrote, “is
to overspread the continent alotted by Providence for the
great experiment of liberty.” For John O’Sullivan, manifest destiny heeded a
higher purpose.
Chapter 6 is about a
neglected supporting player in American history. To Henry George, land was
also sacred property, but in a different way, as the basis for a worldwide
“single-tax” movement, inspired by the publication of his best-selling work,
Progress and Poverty, in 1879.
Dropping out of school in Philadelphia at
thirteen, George spent most of his adult life working as a typesetter and
printer in San Francisco.
Even when he founded his own newspaper and launched a career as a self-taught
writer, he never lost sight of the sufferings of the “proletarian laborers”
who bore the preponderant economic burden of an industrializing nation. In Progress and Poverty, Henry George
proposed a leveling revision in the nation’s unfair tax structure as the only
way to remedy the grievous gap between “monstrous luxury and debasing want.”
Long before the women’s movement, a singular “modern woman” lived in
perpetual motion, seeking to transcend the limitations imposed upon her sex.
Jane Addams of rural Cedarville,
Illinois, believed that “truest
womanhood can yet transform the world.” Committed to the obligation to serve
those less fortunate, Addams established Hull-House, the first major social
settlement in America.
Located in the poorest immigrant ghetto of Chicago, Hull-House combined school,
daycare and community center, gymnasium, soup kitchen, and library. Addams
was the charismatic presiding spirit. Her 1902 essay, “Political Reform,”
appealed to every thoughtful American to do well by doing good: “The sphere
of morals,” she wrote, “is the sphere of action.”
Three generations of a Jewish immigrant family living in a brownstone
tenement in a shabby neighborhood of Staten Island
within view of the statue of Liberty
Enlightening the World were the protagonists of The Melting-Pot, a drama by Israel Zangwill.
The son of an impoverished London East End old clothes trader, the playwright
was enthralled by America
as “God’s crucible” for “all the races of Europe. . . to unite to build
the Republic of Man and the Kingdom of God.”
The show premiered on October 5, 1908,
in Washington, D.C. Pres. Theodore Roosevelt was so
aroused by the final curtain that he shouted to the author across the crowded
theater, “That’s a great play, Mr. Zangwill!” The Melting-Pot idealized America as
the epitome of egalitarian opportunity.
Carter Godwin Woodson,
the first child of former slaves to attend Harvard, came north by way of the
coal mines of West Virginia.
Studying for the Ph.D. he earned in 1912, Woodson was told by his professor,
Edward Channing, that “the Negro had no history.”
The dismissive remark inspired Woodson to correct that misconception during a
life of lecturing, teaching, and exhaustive documentary research. He
published dozens of books by himself and other Negro scholars and amassed “an
arsenal of facts” on the saga of his race. With his own savings, he founded
the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. During the Harlem
Renaissance in 1926, he created the February celebration of Negro History
Week, now Black History Month. Carter Woodson’s stubborn insistence on the
legitimacy of black heritage laid down a path for all disenfranchised
Americans.
The
tenth and final chapter of The American
Revelation turns around the global perspective begun when we followed
John Winthrop westward on a voyage of hopeful renewal to foreign shores. In
1948 the Marshall Plan extended America’s helping hand for the
urgent cause of European recovery in the wake of a devastating war, harsh
winters, and sparse harvests. Former general of the army George C. Marshall,
Pres. Harry S. Truman’s secretary of state, shepherded through Congress the
largest voluntary transfer of economic resources in history—billions of
dollars in development loans and outright grants, as well as raw materials,
food, fuel, and machinery. On December 10, 1953, in ceremonies at Oslo, Marshall became the first professional
military man ever to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, accepting it “on behalf
of the American people” and telling the world of his conviction that America
was a compassionate country, mindful of its great riches, and cherishing “a
creed which comes to us from the deep roots of the past.”
The American Revelation sheds light upon the human nature of our
country. When we read the words of these ten patriots, we may well wonder if
history has diminished their idealism. However, it is my belief that just because
we have lost sight of a principle does not mean it no longer exists.
“Patriotism” is not a one-dimensional abstraction, and the definition of national
character does not come exclusively from the top down. Its legitimate
meaning needs to be developed one citizen at a time—one reader at a time.
I heartily recommend that you read The American
Revelation, and spend time reflecting on what these ideals mean for you
and for all Americans.
Steve Hopkins,
January 25, 2006
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