“THE TUMULT OF LIBERTY”–A MESSAGE FOR THE FOURTH OF JULY
It’s the Fourth of July, and I personally can’t remember a grimmer one, with bigotry and cruelty and greed in the ascendancy and the bad guys winning on so many fronts. But America has known lots of Independence Days when the outlook for the country was just as bleak, like, say, the one in 1776 when the Congress signed the Declaration of Independence. The signers were facing not only possible defeat at the hands of the British Army, but the loss of everything if they lost. And Ben Franklin wasn’t kidding when he said, “We must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.”
The American rebels were a ragtag band of country boys with no uniforms (and often no shoes), very little ammunition, and often not enough food to eat. They were outgunned, outmanned, and up against what was considered to be the best Army in the world, and General Washington wrote in his dispatches, “Many of us are lads under fifteen and old men, none of whom can truly be called soldiers. How it will end, only Providence can direct. But dear God, what brave men I shall lose before this business ends.”
Or look at July 4th, 1942, when America was facing a war against Hitler AND Japan after losing a huge part of its fleet at Pearl Harbor, and everything was going the Axis’s way–the Japanese had taken the Philippines and forced American soldiers into the Bataan Death March, the Allies were losing in North Africa, the Germans seemed to be unstoppable, and the first unbelievable reports of Nazis gassing Jews were starting to come to the United States.
Or look at July 4th, 1944, when America had lost 30,000 of their sons and brothers and husbands in the D-Day invasion and they were facing the prospect of losing many more as the troops battled their way toward Paris and then toward Germany against an enemy who thought nothing of lining prisoners up and shooting them.
Or July 4th, 1948, when America, having vanquished the enemy, turned on itself. The country was in the grip of the McCarthy Red Scare and Housemaids and Hollywood stars alike, (like Ring Lardner, Jr., screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green (who wrote “Singin’ in the Rain” and “On the Town”) were being hauled up before Congress and told they either had to “name names” and betray their friends and neighbors or lose their jobs, and you could have your life ruined just because Joe McCarthy decided he didn’t like you.
Or July 4ths in the early 1980s, as AIDS raged unchecked through the gay community, decimating Broadway and Hollywood and all of the arts, and prejudice kept anyone from even trying to stop the disease.
Or nearly all Independence Days during the 17 and 1800s and the Jim Crow years when blacks were enslaved or had crosses burned on their yards or were beaten or lynched and weren’t allowed to go to school or check books out of the library.
Or at any of the July 4ths of the Civil War, when the country was literally being torn apart at the seams, families were fighting families, men who had served in the US Army together were facing each other in battle, and young farm boys were being slaughtered in cornfields and orchards, at Shiloh and Antietam and Gettysburg and Chancellorsville, and it didn’t look like the nation was even going to survive.
And now it’s our turn face a doubtful future and to rise to the occasion. But thankfully, we don’t have to do it alone. We have a long history of people who have gone before us and who know firsthand the challenges we face.
So I thought it might be helpful to hear what some of them had to say about the threats facing us. And what words of wisdom they have to offer us:
Like the Founding Fathers:
–John Hancock: “We have all one common cause; let it therefore be our only contest, who shall most contribute to the security of the liberties of America.”
–Thomas Jefferson: “I prefer dangerous freedom over peaceful slavery.” (It’s the translation of what he actually wrote in Latin. It can also be translated, “I prefer the tumult of liberty to the quiet of servitude.”)
–Ben Franklin: “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
–John Adams: “Our obligations to our country never cease but with our lives. We ought to do all we can.”
Past Presidents:
–Woodrow Wilson: “The history of liberty is a history of resistance.”
–Harry Truman: “America was not built on fear. America was built on courage, on imagination, and unbeatable determination to do the job at hand.”
–Ulysses S. Grant: “If we are to have another contest in the near future of our national existence, I predict that the dividing line will not be Mason and Dixon’s, but between patriotism and intelligence on the one side, and superstition, ambition, and ignorance on the other.”
–Franklin Delano Roosevelt: “Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.”
–Abraham Lincoln: “Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves.”
–Barack Obama: “If we want democracy to flourish, we will have to fight for it.
And other patriots:
–Thomas Paine: “It is impossible to conquer a nation determined to be free!”
–Davy Crockett: “Liberty and independence forever.”
–Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
–Harvey Milk: “All men are created equal. No matter how hard they try, they can never erase those words. That is what America is about.”
–Clarence Darrow: “True patriotism hates injustice in its own land more than anywhere else.”
I find it very comforting that we don’t have to do this alone.
And that all the good guys are on our side.
Finally, some hopeful words for this Fourth of July, from two of my favorite people:
–John Adams: “(Independence Day) ought to be commemorated as the Day of Deliverance by solumn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp, Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires, and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other, from this time forward forevermore. I am well aware of the Toil and Blood and Treasure that it will cost Us to maintain this Declaration, and support and defend these States. Yet through all the gloom I can see the rays of ravishing light and glory. I can see the end is more than worth all the means. And that posterity will triumph…”
–Eleanor Roosevelt: “Surely, in the light of history, it is more intelligent to hope rather than to fear, to try rather than not to try. For one thing we know beyond all doubt: Nothing has ever been achieved by the person who says, “It can’t be done.”
Have a happy Fourth of July, everybody!
And keep calm and carry on,
Connie Willis
