In 1973, as the bicentennial of the United States approached, the great American essayist and illustrator Eric Sloane was commissioned to write a book commemorating what is great about America. He focused on what we once had and might be losing.
He chose this theme because he was unique in understanding the American experience of the past. He had already written and illustrated several evocative books on Americana, and his voice came to be beloved in circles centered on literary nostalgia.
He begins with a reflection on the age of the value of the past.
“Man so often comments: ‘If we only knew then what we know now,” but few of us consider: ‘If we only could know now what they knew then!’”
That’s a sentence to commit to memory. It embeds a powerful truth. We have forgotten so much, or never learned, what our ancestors knew from hard experience. We’ve had it easy, but this has also denied us the wisdom that comes from building something from scratch.
We’ve inherited a castle and never thought to wonder who laid the stones. The problem gets worse as we age, and as the country ages.
“We seldom see ourselves growing older,” he writes. “The slow change is insidious and although we are told that time flies, it is hard to realize that it is we who do the flying while time actually stands still: the past is but a moment ago.”
Yes, that gives you a flavor of the power of his prose. It never stops being insightful and provocative. He goes on to apply the insight to the history of the United States.
“The truth is that 1776 belongs to 1776. We cannot hope to recapture the old ways easily, partly because we have so destroyed our past but also because we ourselves have become different. The godly, frugal, content, thankful, work-loving man of yesterday has now become the money-oriented, extravagant, discontented, thankless, work-shunning man of today.”
So, yes, his book is meant as a wake-up call: see who we were so that we can compare with who we have become, as people but also as a nation, and then get better.
“We charm ourselves into believing that we have a birthday each year: the truth is that there is only one birthday; all the others are merely celebrating that past event. Stopping long enough to glance backward to see where we once were and where we are now can be enlightening, possibly critical.”
That is what his small book does.
The first subject he chooses concerns what he calls “the spirit of respect.” I tried but failed to anticipate what he means with this word, but it becomes clear quickly. He proposes the word respect as a replacement for the word patriotism, which he finds too much wrapped up in the history of warfare. The Vietnam experience did indeed loom large in those days.
Respect in his view covers the whole of what is good about patriotism but is inclusive of so much more. It means respect for country and the symbolism thereof, including its music, national anthems, and flag. More than that, it is about respect for the inner air of what these symbols mean to signify.
Above all else, they signify freedom. That is for him the essence of the American idea.
With respect for freedom comes respect for that which freedom grants unto us, including faith, family, community, the dignity of oneself, and the dignity of others. He found tremendous evidence of this idea in American history and worried already in 1973 that this attitude was ever more rare.
Of course, he was writing in a time of tremendous crisis in American life. The draft riots, the assassinations, the political scandals, the loss of cultural identity were fresh on everyone’s mind.
Hardly anyone in 1973 was particularly interested in celebrating America’s 200th birthday because patriotism had become so demeaned and diminished as a cultural force. It was a time just following the rise of a countercultural movement that aggressively rejected everything having to do with respect for faith, family, and individual dignity.
It occurs to me to be grateful about all that we have regained in these 50 years. Despite everything, the place of freedom and family and community does seem to have made a comeback. The demoralization that the generation of those years seems to have yielded to a new clarity, at least concerning what needs to be done.
In the spirit of updating his text, consider what might be unique about the American respect for country.
Countless times in my travels and conversations with people from abroad, I have heard them say some version of the following: Americans are fortunate to have a history that is defined by love of liberty and rights, and to have these themes codified in your founding documents.
It’s an interesting point to consider. Many European and Latin American countries have rich and glorious histories, with ups and downs, revolutions and counterrevolutions, leaders good and bad, times of poverty and times of plenty. Every citizen of Mexico, Portugal, Italy, and Poland feels this and loves their countries’ histories, and rightly so, taking pride in many features.
America might actually be distinct in having a definite birthday that coincided with a document that ended up pretty much serving as a global template for what government is, what rights are and to whom they belong, and a long list of examples of what it means for government to do things it should not do.
I speak of the Declaration of Independence. More than any document in the history of politics, its influence has been felt the world over and continues to rise to this day.
I’m not sure any country in the world can boast such a thing. It has certainly left a mark on what America aspires to be. We even fought a civil war to make sure that ideals were achieved, and later attempted to perfect those ideas with the civil rights movement.
Despite all the various interpretations and fights over how to get there, this document does serve as a kind of shared understanding of civic life.
The author of the Declaration was Thomas Jefferson, who took the main ideas therein from his study of John Locke and the French liberal tradition. He refined those ideas and wrote a small treatise for the ages. For many of the men who signed it, it was a death warrant and they knew that when they put their signatures on that parchment. Their sacrifices gave birth to a new order for the ages.
A few years ago, I revisited Monticello, the home that Jefferson built. I took the tour, which had been revised to fit in with 2010s-era fashion for hating on the Founding Fathers. The guide had almost nothing good to say about Jefferson, who, despite failings, has long been revered the world over as a voice of emancipation.
This “woke” tour broke my heart. The first chapter of this book by Sloane makes this point. The tour simply denied Jefferson the respect he deserves. The experience thereby denied the Declaration and the America to which it gave birth the respect they deserve. I do hope this tour changes soon. I suspect it will, if it hasn’t already.
To say that America was born at a distinct time in history is not to disparage the Colonial experience or the long history of the natives of this continent. Indeed, America has always revered both, from its adoration of the Plymouth legends to its long celebration of the American Indian in its iconography and coinage.
When Senator Elizabeth Warren claimed native ancestry, she was not deliberately lying. Many generations of people from her class and region wrongly believed they had native ancestry, and claimed it as a matter not of victimhood but pride. It’s just a funny tick of New England culture, adding some perception of rootedness and perspicacity we have long associated with such a background. That it turned out to be false was genuinely a surprise to her.
Because of this birthday, which is not in dispute despite some attempts to change that, and the document with which it is associated, American civic culture is marked by ideals in ways most people in the world have only histories. This is not to put down others, but only to say that Americans are deeply fortunate to have this and claim it.
This is what Sloane was getting at with his idea of respect. To have it requires knowledge, pride, and a certain appreciation approaching piety. You surely feel it when you hear “God bless America.” The song represents a wish, hope, and prayer, one rooted in respect for our country’s ideals above all else.
