The idea that they might be united is, to use a word we’ve heard in recent months, aspirational.
But it is an aspiration with a pedigree.
“Unity through diversity” is only the more recently coinage – a new generation’s expression of the motto our founders forwarded July 4, 1776.
I suspect they chose to express “out of many, one” as the Latin e pluribus unum for the same reason they chose Greek architecture for the buildings in Washington, D.C.: to suggest that the 13 states they had stitched together into the world’s sole democracy had a much more solid foundation than it did.
As times changed, the motto took on an updated understanding: that immigrant people of diverse backgrounds could unite, a higher challenge yet.
And that’s made the motto an aspiration with a history, as well.
Because democracy, like governments of every form, faces the challenge of governing not only a nation but human nature – a nature whose answer to problems posed by diversity has a long and bloody history wherever human beings are found.
Which brings us to a point growing springing from a historic truth that, despite being well-known will always confound me: That “all men are created equal” – a touchstone phrase of democracy -- was written into our Declaration of Independence by a slave-owner.
Many argue convincingly that Thomas Jefferson was a flat-out hypocrite. But to me, it speaks to a profound weirdness of a human condition we all share.
“American Sphynx” is the title of Joseph Ellis’ biography of a Jefferson whose behavior seems to defy logic. To me, it might also serve as the title of the collective history of the nation helped to found.
A bit now from this 66-year-old about the history of our understanding of our history.
I was 7 when the centennial of the Civil War was observed beginning of 1961. And, back then, I did not understand the Confederate Battle Flag as solely a sign of white supremacy.
The Civil War army set I played with included not only canon, fences, pickets and plastic soldiers but collecting cards, some of which showed yanks and rebels tending to one another’s wounds after battle.
Innocently believing the fundamental racial issue had been settled by that war, the Confederate flag represented to me less an expression of white supremacy than it did the lip-curling defiance that powers the Billy Idol song “Rebel Yell.” But six years later, I was in Ghent, Belgium, looking at a newspaper picture of Detroit burning in a race riot.
I later would learn about another of race riots in the 1920s, one in Springfield itself.
And I have come to realize that there’s good reason for diverse people of a diverse nation have diverse understandings of our history and it symbols. Our experiences are different – and provide a healthy reality check.
This tells me that if we’re to gather together to move forward, it’s likely not going to be at a pole flying the stars and bars of the Confederate battle flag.
It also suggests that while the naming of military bases for Confederate generals may have seemed a necessary compromise to Southern people during two worlds wars, that position has always been morally compromised. As important, I think, it’s evidence of the compromised position of minorities inseparable from majority rule, which makes voting rights a crucial protection.
What’s clear is that in a changing and changed America, we cannot remain slaves to past understandings, which begs the fundamental question: What are we gonna tell the children?
To focus on the worst would leave them nothing to believe in. To gloss over our problems would perpetuate the myth of American exceptionalism by arguing that Americans alone are spared from struggling with the dark side of our human nature.
My sense is that we need to find a way to teach the kids something aspirational from our history, but one anchored in reality.
To me a good place to start is the Gettysburg Address.
There’s much to admire about it. But, as a writer, I’m particularly fond of Lincoln’s word play.
Early in the speech, he tells people gathered to dedicate and consecrate the cemetery that that’s a fine idea. “Altogether fitting and proper,” is how he puts it.
But he then says it’s above his and their pay grade, that there’s no way they can do it.
Why?
“Because the brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract.”
Compared to what the soldiers did, showing up to the dedication of a cemetery doesn’t register on any scale of action. He then urges his audience to dedicate themselves “to the unfinished work which they who fought here have so nobly advanced.”
He appeals to them to, then and there, “highly resolve that those dead shall not have died in vain.”
The sentiment here is the same expressed when John Lewis died: The notion that to honor his life and sacrifice at the Edmund Pettus bridge and elsewhere, people should carry his flag forward. The beatings, dogs and fire hoses must all be part of that story if the bridge is ever rededicated in his name. The stories could be taught in tandem.
The hope in the Gettysburg address – the aspiration -- is that by continuing the work of those who struggled “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom.”
It’s a phrase easy to hear in the voice Martin Luther King, Jr. for a simple reason: The words are nothing if not preacher-like.
There are a few things I would be sure to ground the lesson in an always conflicted reality.
I would tell them:
Not everybody agreed with Lincoln, even in the North.
His “all men are created equal” line was not universally applauded.
His Emancipation Proclamation – his first steps toward expanding equality – was issued by him alone and lost his Republican party a significant number of seats in the 1862 Congressional elections.
The nation was, at the time, growing far more weary of the war than we are of the pandemic.
Finally, I’d point out that Lincoln, the man now seated in stone behind Greek pillars, was shaken with worry that he would not be re-elected -- and convinced that, if that were to happen, slavery would not end with the war. And that the sacrifice of all those men would be in vain, the kind of unthinkable outcome that may have led the people of the South to erect monuments to their own war dead.
The bottom line?
The quest to expand freedom will always be aspirational, and those who fight for it will often do so in mightily challenging times.
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