Last week a friend was cleaning out her study,
preparatory to repainting and –carpeting it, and she came across a box o’
letters and cards. Naturally she had to sit down and read them—as you do. One
of them was an email I’d sent round in 2002, which she had printed out and
saved, because for her it struck to the heart of the Independence Day matter.
I’d completely forgotten about it—this was six years BP
(before Parallax Views), after all. But it seems appropriate, in light of some
recent events, to revisit these thoughts. So, I’m going to recycle, with some
tweaks.
* *
* *
It’s the Fourth of July, and most of you have the day off
and are involved in family activities, acts of home improvement and
incineration of various food items. But since my improvement efforts are
limited to the not inconsiderable task of decluttering, and I am forbidden by
state and local law from handling flammable substances, I’m spending some time
thinking about this holiday. Here are my thoughts:
In June 2002 I made a trip to Gettysburg and Valley Forge.
It had been years since I’d last visited the former and I’d never been to the
latter, so I decided it was time to see both places…to contemplate someone else’s
spilt blood for a change, but also to refresh my intellect with some more
visceral stimuli. (I may need to rethink the idea of trying to escape
depression by visiting battlefields; but I have to say that it’s not a bad
thing to be reminded that, no matter how dreadful our life might seem at any
given time now, it was made possible by the sacrifices of generations of men
and women who thought—no, who believed—that the idea of the United States was
worth a lot more than most of us ever consider today.
At Valley Forge, because it’s so peaceful now, and the
weather was so gorgeous, I had to push my imagination to picture what those men
(yes—and women) endured all those years ago. But the winter of 1777-78 was as
harsh and miserable climatically as the Continental Congress was mean with
supplies. The men encamped there for six months faced elements of the finest
army then known just a few miles away, fat and happy in Philadelphia, while
they huddled in tents and log cabins and tried to ignore hunger pangs by
staying busy mending gear or being drilled by imported professional soldiers.
More than anything, I think, those six months represented
an act of faith. How could they possibly have found logical reasons to support
the idea that from those wretched conditions, and with those few, hungry, poorly-equipped
citizen-soldiers, they’d be able to find a way to defeat an imperial force at
the height of its power?
It was a very bleak winter indeed for those men camped on
those slopes that are now green with the exuberance of summer. I wondered how
the commanders stopped the desertions, when it must have been so easy for the
individual soldier—unpaid, underfed and ill-clothed—to just disappear in the
night. From where I was standing, it looked like they had very little to keep
them in Valley Forge, and plenty to draw them anywhere else. But, for the most
part, they stayed. They trained. They learned how to act in contravention of
their natural instincts as pioneering types who valued the interests of the
individual above all; they banded together to face forces in superior numbers
and with superior arms, and to keep coming back again and again even when they
lost battles.
(And they actually had very few victories. The
astonishing thing I recall from my embarrassingly brief studies of our
rebellion against Mother England is how Washington managed to win the war
without ever really winning any decisive battles until Yorktown—time after
time, he would nip at the British heels, or leave the enemy holding the ground,
but always manage to stay in the game…until the French joined forces with us
and until Parliament decided that they were tired of the American sinkhole.
Pity we didn’t study that model as we began wading into the big Muddy 55 years
ago…)
The name of the place is certainly apt, for it was the
forge of the Continental Army that in turn transformed the Declaration of
Independence into the reality of the United States. (Back in November 2000, my
colleagues in the UK took great glee in sending me that “Notice of Revocation
of Independence.” You know—the one that starts out, “In the light of your
failure to elect a President of the USA and thus to govern yourselves, we
hereby give notice of the revocation of your independence, effective today.”
And goes on to trash our beer, our cars and our sports. After laughing jovially
[the first couple of times] and politely [the next seven times] I finally had
to draw the line. I made a point-by-point rebuttal that concluded with the
irrefutable reminder that no one, and certainly no Brit, could revoke our
independence because it wasn’t GIVEN to us, we took it by force of arms. That
seemed to dampen the hilarity.)
Think about it: the challenge of creating a citizen army
of farmers, merchants, lawyers, tailors, doctors, teachers. Men who struggled
with the idea of breaking away from Mother England; whose only substitute
loyalty for the King was to their individual colony, being forged into a single
fighting force that would eventually send packing the imperial forces of the
most powerful nation then on earth. That deceptively peaceful valley was where
that citizen army—the first ever—was created: forged and tempered, like
weapons-grade steel.
A hundred miles west and nearly 90 years later, the
ground of Gettysburg was more actively baptized in blood than that of Valley
Forge. Three days in July, in the ghastly heat of a mid-Atlantic summer, with
the soldiers on both sides wearing woolen uniforms and carrying 60-pound packs;
two armies of Americans making use of all the technology and “best practice” at
their disposal to destroy one another. The term “killing ground” comes to mind
as you pass through the various battle sites and landmarks—the Lutheran
seminary, Cemetery Hill, Big Round Top. So many names of places; so many more
names of the dead left there. At one area near Little Round Top, they reported
that you could walk across the entire field without your boots ever touching
the ground, it was so thick with corpses.
Two armies, 75,000 in grey and butternut brown, 93,000 in
blue, descending on a town of a few hundred. It must have seemed like
Armageddon to the residents. Summer stillness broken by the sounds of marching
infantry, artillery carriages being positioned, skirmishers testing the
opposition. Then Hell came to town.
I was once shooting (photography) the commissioning of a
new cruiser for the Navy. When they fired the ceremonial cannon I popped a
contact lens. I cannot imagine the unholy din of the mechanics (field guns, rifles)
mixed with the more chilling screams of wounded and dying men and horses. For
three days, in heat like today, the two armies fought themselves to exhaustion.
Over the issue of whether national sovereignty can be broken by its component
parts through secession.
In my own family there were men who fought on both sides
of that war. Men who believed that the individual states should shape the
destinies of their citizens (including the practice of owning other humans) and
men who believed that the Union, once formed, was indivisible, and that chattel
slavery is an abomination to God and man.
Now, when you get past the carnage of those three days in
Gettysburg (the costliest battle ever fought on the North American continent,
and the one that broke the back of Confederate hopes), and the two more years
it took for Grant and Sherman to finish the job, here’s the remarkable thing
about that war: when it finally ended, and the cannons were spiked and the men
returned home, the nation reunited and life resumed with a genuine peace. Even
with an assassinated President being replaced by a man of considerably lower
abilities, and even with the 30-odd years of Reconstruction (not a stellar
period in our history), the people of the South returned to full citizenship,
their representatives clogging up Congress to this day.
And this brings me to the point of this, well, rather
lengthy ramble, which is the whole point of this holiday. I.e., the anniversary
of the founding of this nation. Nearly 240 years ago, representatives of the
thirteen colonies got together and decided that the time had come to put up or
shut up. They tasked the gentleman from Virginia with putting into words both
their grievances with Mother England, and their aspirations for a new sort of
nation-state. Here’s what he said:
“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. –That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men,
deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”
What a concept! And it ends just as strongly as it begins:
“We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States
of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of
the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by the
Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That
these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent
States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and
that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is
and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States,
they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish
Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of
right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the
protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives,
our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”
Lives, fortunes and honor were on the line at Valley
Forge, and again at Gettysburg. The ideals that are enumerated in the
Declaration (and codified in the Constitution) so clearly are the same ones
that still make the United States the beacon of hope throughout the world.
Ideals that caused people for generation after generation to leave homes and
families, risk dangerous ocean and land journeys to come to places like
Massachusetts, Louisiana, Wisconsin or Oregon to begin new lives. Catholics,
Old Believers, Jews, Buddhists, Muslims, Baptists, atheists; and all the colors
that skins can come in. Many brought nothing with them but their dreams and
their willingness to work long hours come day, go day, year after year to build
a new life here—a life they could not possibly have imagined in their countries
of origin. They didn’t always have such an easy time, and they didn’t always
find a warm welcome, but they came, they worked and they created something
really unimaginable in any other country on earth.
One difference I noticed immediately on my arrival in the
UK for an ex-pat assighment was the underlying principle that shapes all
actions, both business and personal there. The Old Country still operates on
the premise that the economic and social conditions into which you are born are
your basic lot in life. Efforts at bettering your status through education, industriousness
and innovative thinking bring the risk of disapproval in a number of ways. (Not
in every case, but most of them) The class system is alive and well, and oddly,
some of the most ardent proponents are from the working and middle classes. I
actually heard the expression “She has ideas above her station” used by more
than one of my contemporaries. Needless to say, my gob was smacked, and I found
it hard to keep my eyeballs from bugging so far out of my face that they
bounced off the walls.
In contrast, the idea that has permeated American society
from the get-go is the conviction that, no matter what your starting point, if
you work hard enough, if you come up with a more effective way of doing things,
if you play a new angle, you can make life better. If not for yourself, then
for your children. Those unalienable rights: Life, Liberty and the pursuit of
Happiness. That hope brought some of my family to the East Coast in the early
years of the 17th Century, and the most recent additions to the West
Coast at the end of the 19th. It made some of them take that
trans-continental journey without benefit of the internal combustion engine or
air conditioning. It induced others to put on those woolen uniforms and
60-pound packs and risk everything in support of that promise: Life, Liberty
and the pursuit of Happiness.
It’s also what leads some individuals to fly commercial
aircraft into buildings where people are working to fulfill that dream.
I have to say that, with all our flaws, that ideal still
prevails. Think about it—four years of blood-soaked warfare that cost more than
500,000 American casualties amidst the greatest bitterness and rancor
imaginable, and we managed to literally pull ourselves together again pretty
quickly, sublimating the regional differences to professional sports rivalries.
Contrast this with what’s gone on in Ulster, the Balkans or the Middle East.
Even with the khaloshes of the 2000 presidential election, and whatever your
opinion of W., it is a tribute to the Founding Fathers that the government they
crafted didn’t collapse that November, nor did the military step in to “save
the day”. We get to be the source of amusement for the entire world, the press
goes wild for a couple of months, that big-haired broad gets a shot at the
Florida governorship (remember her?), and life goes on.
Contrast that with post-Perestroika Moscow in the early
90s. Remember those tanks outside the Duma building?
What the Founding Fathers put together back in the days
when Mozart was composing still works. Despite our abysmal history of racism,
our reprehensible record of national conquest, our lamentable policy of child
impoverishment and the appalling behavior of our greedy corporate executives,
people from all over the world are still lining up to leave everything and risk
all for the chance at Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Millions over the past four hundred years have come to
these shores to build a decent life for themselves and their families. In the
course of this individual pursuit they built an economy that, for all its
periodic woes, still manages some amazing feats. Among other things, that
economy and our belief in the improvement of the condition of man enabled us 70
years ago to spend billions blasting most of Western Europe back to the Stone
Age to combat Nazism, and then spend billions more rebuilding the
infrastructure and economies of those same countries. Where else in history will
you find that kind of thing?
So, listen, folks. I’d just like you to think about how
this all came about. The pledges of life, fortune and honor to the ideal that
Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness are unalienable rights. The frozen
faith of Valley Forge, the horror of Gettysburg. The men and women over the
past few centuries who, in the words of Lincoln, “gave the last full measure of
devotion” for that ideal.
I know we have miles to go (or possibly kilometers, if we
want to join most of the world). But we’ve already come so far.
