America's stories
Introducing a new series, "The Cause," in celebration of 250 years of American independence
Two hundred and fifty years ago tomorrow, America was at war, but not yet independent.
The United States of America did not exist, though the colonists were most certainly no longer loyal subjects of His Majesty the King.
The fighting had raged since April 19, 1775, at Lexington and Concord. The battle of Breeds and Bunker Hill killed so many of the victorious British that one officer drily commented that “a few more such victories would have shortly put an end to British dominion in America.”
The British were on the edge of evacuating Boston, which had been ringed by cannon captured from Fort Ticonderoga by Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys of Vermont, 250 years ago tonight.
The rebelling colonists had formed a Continental Army, and made a Virginian named George Washington its commander in June of 1775.
His name was placed in nomination for the position by John Adams of Boston.
Independence was a hushed word in the late winter and early spring of 1776.
It was a frightening word.
A treasonous word.
For what was it the founders were fighting?
How does it matter for us today?
Let’s talk about it.
At the beginning, the war was called “The Cause” by the people fighting it.
“The Cause” was an idea, and make no mistake that the founders of the country were deeply aware what it had cost to bring it into life. Said John Adams:
Posterity! You will never know how much it cost the present generation to preserve your freedom! I hope you will make a good use of it. If you do not, I shall repent in Heaven that I ever took half the pains to preserve it.
Each Sunday, I’ll be writing an essay for a new series called “The Cause.”
Here is the first one.
It may not seem like a seminal event in human history is upon us, but it is. The 250th anniversary of the independence of the United States is at hand. It is the greatest story of human achievement regarding the practice of liberty in all of recorded history. The United States remains an experiment. It is a fragile work of genius that has become the most complex society on Earth. The greatest achievement in history deserves the greatest celebration in the country’s history.
Since independence in 1776 more than half of the population of Americans who have ever lived are alive today, and many of them have become isolated and estranged from Americanism.
They have lost touch with our story, and don’t see themselves as part of it. Scores of Americans are quick to judge the past, while ignoring the present and scorning a future of possibility for the pursuit of grievance.
Group think, speech codes, collective punishments, witch hunts, political persecutions, bigotry, racial discrimination, religious discrimination and ethnic hatred have been magnified in 21st century America because of this dogma, which is antithetical to liberty. It holds that group identity should dominate all considerations, and that the world is divided into two classes: the oppressor and the oppressed. Retribution and score-settling aren’t viewed as not just necessary, but just.
Like all authoritarian dogmas this bundle of lies assaults language and the meaning of words, substituting a form of what George Orwell called “meaningless words.” What it produces is a world where “silence is violence,” and violence isn’t if it’s been earned through the collective guilt of an oppressor class. These beliefs are a license to commit evil.
There is a better path.
All Americans are connected through our shared citizenship and the shared struggle to obtain it fully. There is a fundamental conception of Americanism that this series will embrace with absolute conviction and without apology. Perhaps it is best captured in the words of Martin Luther King Jr. who said:
When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.
Our connection does not exist simply in this moment of time, but rather connects each American to all Americans through time. When a woman from Pakistan who wears a chador, for example, takes the Oath of Citizenship by choice, she becomes as much an American as a descendant of a Revolutionary War soldier, and more importantly, becomes connected to the whole of the American story. She has now become a descendant of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, of George Washington and Rosa Parks. Their achievements are her story, and so is their unfinished work.
There have been almost 600 million human beings who have ever lived on Earth who could rightly call themselves Americans. Four hundred and seventy-five million of them were born within the geographical boundaries of the United States, and more than 75 million were born in a foreign land. More than one million Americans have given what Abraham Lincoln would call “the last full measure of devotion” to the Union. Their graves are marked and unmarked around the world, and wherever an American soldier has fallen, American hearts have broken at home.
American freedom, and the ideas that underline it, have not come easily. They have been paid for in blood and sacrifice. Our freedoms are not a gift; they are an inheritance and an obligation that require the practice of citizenship. “Liberty” is a nonsense word when it is left unaccompanied by responsibility and obligation.
Making the country better is not a burden, but rather a duty and a joy. The call of duty should be better understood and have meaning for a younger generation of Americans. We are stewards of the greatest trust that has ever been handed off between one generation, to be stewarded and strengthened for the next. It is necessary to examine from time to time the faithfulness of any generation of Americans towards their obligations and to speak directly about the conditions of the country.
The story of America is not a tale of justice and happy endings. There has been brutality, slavery, massacres, murder and racial injustice that equal any atrocities ever committed anywhere, as well as indifference towards suffering that beggar belief in our story.
It is also true that it has been relentlessly confronted by certain qualities of character. Americans share a disposition towards defiance, fortitude, truth-telling, honesty, great courage, ingenuity, creativity and freedom that has always demanded that change is necessary to make tomorrow better than today. They have largely succeeded in transforming an idea into a reality that has endured longer than any constitutional republic in human history. They have created the most dynamic, complex, free society that has ever existed in human history.
The American people through all of their faults and shortcomings have cured, fed, liberated, clothed and protected more people than all of the nations of the world put together since the beginning of time. During the 21st century alone, the American people have saved 27 million African lives from the AIDS virus — and now that program, USAID, has been cancelled by the Trump regime. There is indeed something extraordinary about the only nation that has planted a flag on the moon, and been the world’s leading center of innovation, science and discovery for more than 150 years.
When Martin Luther King came to the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963, 100 years after the Emancipation Proclamation and Gettysburg address, he did not come to burn down the republic that allowed for the dehumanization, oppression and murder of Black human beings.
He came to “collect a promissory note.”
King didn’t march to burn down Washington, DC, but to lift America up. He understood the creed and moral obligation that all Americans have towards the freedom of one another. He marched under the American flag.
Before he was martyred, he left us with a transcendent prophesy of the “just era” he saw from the mountaintop. He marched to breathe full life into these words, which mark a ‘before and after’ moment in human affairs.
All men are created equal.
Speaking in 1936 at the Democratic National Convention, Franklin D. Roosevelt proclaimed that “this generation has a rendezvous with destiny.”
It seems in the affairs of our nation that another generation will be called to measure up for its rendezvous at the boundary line between the world that FDR, Abraham Lincoln’s presidential peer, could not see beyond.
Roosevelt is the architect of the American-led portion of the 20th century that led to the greatest, fastest and most sustained spread of liberty and prosperity in all of the history of human civilization. His conversations with his friend, Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King, are particularly poignant, given our arrival at the hour he foretold. In a late-night conversation, FDR imagined a world at peace, one in which the United States would be the dominant military, scientific and economic power. FDR imagined a world that, in many ways, would come to pass. He didn’t spend late nights in the White House plotting coups and the ruination of the American experiment. He imagined the type of world that could be created for Americans and all people. He dreamed about better.
Donald Trump has been America’s dominant figure for 11 years in a time of spiraling greed, corruption, institutional rot, moral decay and cruelty. There has been a fraying of the American spirit, character and cause. A demagogue has arisen. The founders always knew such a man would come, and the entire system of American government is designed to thwart his ambitions, but it is not a fail-safe.
A moment has arrived during which an American president has repudiated the American revolution and the American creed. He has created division as an answer to challenges. He imposes control as an answer to uncertainty. He imposes revenge as an answer to disagreement. He imposes retribution as an answer to dissent. He has promised prison as an answer to opposition.
He has become a dictator who will defend freedom by abolishing elections and the choice of the people in favor of the wisdom of a minority with the power to rule – regardless of whether it comes with legitimacy or not.
Knowing America’s story is essential in this moment of pessimism. The truth is simple to comprehend when the story is known. What happens next is in our hands. Specifically, American hands. Those hands come in every form of human pigmentation and range from newborn to old and twisted.
This series is not the history of America, but will share some of our stories across our history. There have been many uncertain nights in the American story. There are sure to be more ahead.
There is a common link that is shared by millions of Americans who are the descendants of the 73 million who breathed their first breath in another country and chose to come here. For many, they boarded boats long before there was television, radio, or even much photography. America was an idea and a dream. It was a possibility. It was not fulfilled for all who came. It was not a magic land, but it was a place where magic happened.
I thought about this as I watched the television screen aboard Air Force Two, which was broadcasting the live landing of the airplane on Polish television in Krakow. I was a 34-year-old deputy assistant to the president of the United States of America and counselor to the vice president. I was part of the American delegation that had come for the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in 2005.
My great-grandfather Kujalowicz was from Krakow. He was the father of my grandmother who died in hospice care at my parents’ home in 1987. I thought about both of them as the plane was touching down, and about the millions upon millions of families who gathered around a dinner table and had a modest meal, lit by candles and surrounded by some packed bags. They would be leaving in the morning. Leaving for America. It was a decision that gave me my life and that of my children. There are no words that can measure the gratitude for an act of love and courage in search of better. I am not alone in this experience, and perhaps it should be tempered before snarling at an immigrant arriving today with the same hopes for their children.
“The Cause” will tell the stories, words and virtues of Americans who struggled, persevered, fought, lived and died in the cause of freedom and justice.
They did not live and die to build an empire of malice, oppression and hate. They lived as Americans. They struggled as such. Some faced excruciating injustice, brutality and violence, yet none ever gave in to panic, despair or hopelessness. Within their lifetimes, a great story advanced that is continuing to unfold.
Freedom is the business of ordinary people and the birthright of every American. Celebrate freedom. Honor it, and celebrate America. There is work to be done and more stories to be written. Let what is to come be built on what has been laid. The foundation is being attacked, but it remains strong because the strength of America has never been with factions that seek control and subjugation. They simply have not been able to hold their position against the great tides of history and currents of change. The American tide pulls towards justice.
This series will celebrate America with love. It will also look with clear eyes at our painful past and egregious hypocrisies that are made worse by the magnificence of our charters and high principles stated in flowery language about human dignity and freedom.
In the end, there will be no rest for America. It is not possible in the way it is not possible for the oceans to be still – if even for a fraction of a second. There should be no association that has any higher meaning for a citizen of the United States than American. There should be no higher aspiration than to be a patriot who can lay a brick of their own in the construction of the “shining city on the hill.”
There is work to be done. Let’s get started. I plan to share the stories of Americans who built the republic with love, fury, determination, and always, with patriotism. Each is your legacy. Each story belongs to you because each is an American story.
Within each story will be a lesson and a warning from the greatest experiment in history. I hope this series will be a guide to all of you for political courage, dissent, defiance and resolve against extremism and dictatorship.
I love this idea, Steve. You mentioned your great-grandfather being from Krakow. I spent a few days there last November. I was profoundly affected by my visit to Poland. The Polish understand what is at stake. The Holocaust affected almost everyone, and they make it a priority to keep that history relevant to their citizens, but just as importantly to all visitors.
Timely and beautiful. Thank you.