American Genius
Patriotism Despite It All
It’s the afternoon of July 4th in Como, Colorado. My family and I arrived here (a vacation rental) last night to start BirzerFest 2023. We already got a good morning hike in, just before a massive rainstorm hit. Now, as I type this, the sun has returned, and the weather is simply beautiful. Summer in Colorado is a bit like living in God’s air conditioner.
I wish had something utterly profound to write on this July 4th. It feels like that kind of day. . .a day for profundity. After all, this is my 55th Independence Day, and I’ve been teaching American history—and quite specifically, a specialized course on the American Founding—for over twenty-five years now.
A friend of mine, and former student, sent out a gut-wrenching Substack post earlier today about his disappointment as an American. He’s a former (active) Marine. There’s much with which I can sympathize, and I certainly understand and respect his position. After all, our last great president was Ronald Reagan. Gone, now, for 34 years from the White House. Since then, we seem to have had little but imperial executives, wimpy Congresses, federal overreach, nearly constant warfare, FBI corruption, and outrageous debt. It’s hard to love the America of 2023.
And, yet, the Declaration remains. The Constitution remains. The Northwest Ordinance remains. The Bill of Rights remains. As my great colleague and friend, Miles Smith, likes to remind his fellow historians, whatever bad America has done, it has also done incredible things. That is, we may once have been a nation of slave owners, but we are also a nation of abolitionists.
Truly, our revolution ushered in several profound (there’s that word!) things and it reawakened several deeply old and traditional things. I’m reminded, in particular, of President Calvin Coolidge’s July 4, 1926 speech.
About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.
Then, I think of all the great Americans who have ever existed, and I am immediately humbled. And, when I think of every immigrant who landed on these shores seeking freedom and opportunity, I am even more humbled.
I am, to be sure, terribly sorry for the American Indian. In no way did we (all of us absent native blood) do the natives justice. They demand our respect and our sorrow. Perhaps, with good will and solid imaginations, there can one day be some form of redemption.
Despite our faults, America, then, is still a land of genius, a land of hope, a land of promise. And, despite what horrors we’ve experienced since Ruby Ridge, our underlying principles remain. In 1979, things looks truly bleak as well. Then came Reagan, who reminded us all that we should be worthy of ourselves. And, for a while, we became so. We can become so again.