Quote of the Day (Franklin Roosevelt, Asking ‘What is to Become of the Country We Know?’)

“Every generation of young men and women in America has questions to ask the world. Most of the time they are the simple but nevertheless difficult questions, questions of work to do, opportunities to find, ambitions to satisfy. But every now and again in the history of the Republic a different kind of question presents itself—a question that asks, not about the future of an individual or even of a generation, but about the future of the country, the future of the American people….There is such a time again today. Again today the young men and the young women of America ask themselves with earnestness and with deep concern this same question: ‘What is to become of the country we know?’

“Now they ask it with even greater anxiety than before. They ask, not only what the future holds for this Republic, but what the future holds for all peoples and all nations that have been living under democratic forms of Government—under the free institutions of a free people.” —U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945), Address at University of Virginia, June 10, 1940

Photo of the Day: Fifth Avenue, Source of ‘Some Semblance of American Unity’

Among the many photos I have taken over the years, I searched unsuccessfully for something with the wide vistas that Kathryn Jean Lopez mentioned in the following contribution to a National Review collection of articles from Sept. 9, 2019 on “What We Love About America”:

“Freedom, in fact, is what I feel like I’m breathing in as I see the blue of the sky or the road that leads down to Washington Square Park. Anything seems possible on Fifth Avenue. And one miracle in particular: some semblance of American unity. At some places on Fifth, the Stars and Strikes seem to be everywhere. It’s as if America does, in fact, still mean something we can all agree on. I keep looking and I think about [Abraham Lincoln’s phrase] ‘the mystic chords of memory.’ Fifth Avenue inspires gratitude. I don’t want to look at my phone. I want to keep walking. American culture today can be overwhelming with noise and soil-crushing images. But here, even with the traffic, things seem quieter.”

Then I came across what you see here: a photo of a Tom Ford shop display at the Saks Fifth Avenue flagship store in Midtown Manhattan, which I took a few days before the Fourth of July six years ago.

In one way, it seems a bit crass to transform the Stars and Stripes—something people have carried and even died for—into such commercial fodder.

But at least, the instinct this window display appealed to was pride in America. These days, the most powerful instinct is fear.

Maybe, at this current perilous moment in American history—when the husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has been critically wounded in their home, when Capitol Hill lawmakers of both parties and Supreme Court justices are investigating, as never before, security arrangements for themselves and their families—it would do well for us all to catch our breath, and remember the “gratitude” and “semblance of American unity” that Ms. Lopez evoked.

In a tweet from last night about the assault on Paul Pelosi, Ms. Lopez also noted that “Sometimes it’s better to pray for fellow human beings and that by some miracle the temperature of hate and anger is turned down.”

Well, I suppose that’s a start. But more than a few of us are getting tired of hearing “thoughts and prayers” or their equivalent evoked for victims of violence.

More basically—and painfully—we need an examination of conscience, and a commitment to the “mystic chords of memory” and “firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right” that infused President Lincoln with the political courage to take on those accepting aggression to tear the Union asunder.

Quote of the Day (Walt Whitman, on an Earlier American Crisis of the Spirit)

“I say we had best look our times and lands searchingly in the face, like a physician diagnosing some deep disease. Never was there, perhaps, more hollowness at heart than at present, and here in the United States. Genuine belief seems to have left us. The underlying principles of the States are not honestly believ'd in, (for all this hectic glow, and these melodramatic screamings,) nor is humanity itself believ'd in. What penetrating eye does not everywhere see through the mask? The spectacle is appaling. We live in an atmosphere of hypocrisy throughout. The men believe not in the women, nor the women in the men. A scornful superciliousness rules in literature. The aim of all the littérateurs is to find something to make fun of. A lot of churches, sects, &c., the most dismal phantasms I know, usurp the name of religion. Conversation is a mass of badinage. From deceit in the spirit, the mother of all false deeds, the offspring is already incalculable. An acute and candid person, in the revenue department in Washington, who is led by the course of his employment to regularly visit the cities, north, south and west, to investigate frauds, has talk'd much with me about his discoveries. The depravity of the business classes of our country is not less than has been supposed, but infinitely greater. The official services of America, national, state, and municipal, in all their branches and departments, except the judiciary, are saturated in corruption, bribery, falsehood, mal-administration; and the judiciary is tainted. The great cities reek with respectable as much as non-respectable robbery and scoundrelism. In fashionable life, flippancy, tepid amours, weak infidelism, small aims, or no aims at all, only to kill time. In business, (this all-devouring modern word, business,) the one sole object is, by any means, pecuniary gain. The magician's serpent in the fable ate up all the other serpents; and money-making is our magician's serpent, remaining to-day sole master of the field.” —American poet-editor Walt Whitman (1819–1892), Democratic Vistas (1871)

Quote of the Day (John McCain, on America, ‘The Land That Repairs and Reinvents Itself’)

“We are living in the land of the free, the land where anything is possible. The land of the immigrant’s dream, the land with the storied past forgotten in the rush to the imagined future. The land that repairs and reinvents itself, the land where a person can escape the consequences of a self-centered youth and know the satisfaction of sacrificing for an ideal. The land where you can go from aimless rebellion to a noble cause, and from the bottom of your class to your party’s nomination for president.”—John McCain (1936-2018), U.S. Senator (R-AZ) and Vietnam veteran, POW and war hero, speech accepting the Liberty Medal, National Constitution Center, Philadelphia, Oct. 16, 2017

Quote of the Day (John McCain, on the International Order Created by America)

“We are blessed, and we have been a blessing to humanity in turn. The international order we helped build from the ashes of world war, and that we defend to this day, has liberated more people from tyranny and poverty than ever before in history.”— John McCain (1936-2018), U.S. Senator (R-AZ) and Vietnam veteran, POW and war hero, and Mark Salter, The Restless Wave: Good Times, Just Causes, Great Fights and Other Appreciations (2018)

Quote of the Day (Woodrow Wilson, on Maintaining the World’s Faith in America)

“All mankind deem us the representatives of the moderate and sensible discipline which makes free men good citizens, of enlightened systems of law and a temperate justice, of the best experience in the reasonable methods and principles of self-government, of public force made consistent with individual liberty; and we shall not realize these ideals at home, if we suffer them to be hopelessly discredited amongst the peoples who have yet to see liberty and the peaceable days of order and comfortable progress. We should lose heart ourselves, did we suffer the world to lose faith in us as the champions of these things.”—Princeton Univ. professor (and future New Jersey Governor and U.S. President) Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924), “Democracy and Efficiency,” The Atlantic, March 1901

Quote of the Day (Patrick Henry, on the Use Americans Make of Their Blessings)

“Whether this [American independence] will prove a blessing or a curse, will depend upon the use our people make of the blessings which a gracious God hath bestowed on us. If they are wise, they will be great and happy. If they are of a contrary character, they will be miserable.—Righteousness alone can exalt them as a nation. Reader! whoever thou art, remember this; and in thy sphere, practise virtue thyself, and encourage it in others.”—American lawyer and patriot Patrick Henry (1732-1799), in the concluding lines of a note found with his will after his death, quoted in William Wirt, Sketches of the Life and Character of Patrick Henry (1817)

Quote of the Day (Joshua Busby, on Climate Change in the U.S. and China)

“Humans have proved highly adaptable, but the collective effects of climate change on cities, food production, and water supplies present an enormous challenge for the planet. China and the United States will be central to the global response. Together, the two countries are responsible for more than 40 percent of global emissions. . . . Relations between China and the United States have soured recently, but the countries need to work together, as the world will be ill served by an all-encompassing rivalry between them. They will have to build a system that allows issues to be compartmentalized, in which they can jockey over regional security in Asia, for instance, but still cooperate on issues on which their fates are linked, such as climate change and pandemics.” —University of Texas Associate Professor Joshua Busby, “Warming World: Why Climate Change Matters More Than Anything Else,” Foreign Affairs, July/August 2018

Oh, my—it’s the last word in the above quote that really hurts. If we can’t cooperate on something as immediate (certainly more so than when this was published) as pandemics, what are we going to do about something longer-term such as climate change?

Quote of the Day (Sarah Kendzior, on the Urgent Need to ‘Be Your Own Light’ Now)

“Write down what you value; what standards you hold for yourself and for others. Write about your dreams for the future and your hopes for your children. Write about the struggle of your ancestors and how the hardship they overcame shaped the person you are today. Write your biography, write down your memories. Because if you do not do it now, you may forget. Write a list of things you would never do. Because it is possible that in the next year, you will do them. Write a list of things you would never believe. Because it is possible that in the next year, you will either believe them or be forced to say you believe them.”— Anthropologist and journalist Sarah Kendzior, “We’re Heading Into Dark Times: This is How to be Your Own Light in the Age of Trump,” The Correspondent, Nov. 18, 2016

Four years ago, as has happened so often in the past, this warning might have seemed alarmist. But anyone following the news runs the danger of becoming inured to the nightmare scenario outlined in the last four sentences in the above quote.

What is at stake is nothing less than the same values of civilization held up in Pericles’ “Funeral Oration” to his fellow Athenians, according to Greek historian Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War:

“Our constitution does not copy the laws of neighboring states; we are rather a pattern to others than imitators ourselves. Its administration favors the many instead of the few; this is why it is called a democracy. If we look to the laws, they afford equal justice to all in their private differences; if no social standing, advancement in public life falls to reputation for capacity, class considerations not being allowed to interfere with merit; nor again does poverty bar the way, if a man is able to serve the state, he is not hindered by the obscurity of his condition. The freedom which we enjoy in our government extends also to our ordinary life. There, far from exercising a jealous surveillance over each other, we do not feel called upon to be angry with our neighbor for doing what he likes, or even to indulge in those injurious looks which cannot fail to be offensive, although they inflict no positive penalty. But all this ease in our private relations does not make us lawless as citizens. Against this fear is our chief safeguard, teaching us to obey the magistrates and the laws, particularly such as regard the protection of the injured, whether they are actually on the statute book, or belong to that code which, although unwritten, yet cannot be broken without acknowledged disgrace.”

Each day brings another assault against what Pericles called “our chief safeguard.” After four years, none of us can say any longer that we do not know the threats we face: nothing less than the protection of the individual citizen, even the most disadvantaged, from harm; the notion that no man is above the law; and the fate of the republican experiment itself.

Democratic Athens did not endure. We shall see, over the next few months, if democratic America will.

Quote of the Day (Thomas Wolfe, on the ‘Hunger That So Haunts and Hurts Americans’)

“All that we know is that having everything we yet hold nothing, that feeling the wild song of this great earth upwelling in us we have no words to give it utterance. All that we know is that here the passionate enigma of our lives is so bitterly expressed, the furious hunger that so haunts and hurts Americans so desperately felt--that being rich, we all are yet so poor, that having an incalculable wealth we have no way of spending it, that feeling an illimitable power we yet have found no way of using it.

“Therefore we hurtle onward in the dark across Virginia, we hurtle onward in the darkness down a million roads, we hurtle onward driven by our hunger down the blind and brutal tunnel of ten thousand furious and kaleidoscopic days, the victims of the cruel impulse of a million chance and fleeting moments, without a wall at which to thrust the shoulder of our strength, a roof to hide us in our nakedness, a place to build in, or a door.”—American novelist Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938), Of Time and The River: A Legend of Man's Hunger in His Youth (1935)

Quote of the Day (Charles Duhigg, on Why America Is Angry)

“One reason America is so angry is that anger works. When channeled by someone like [farmworkers union leader] Cesar Chavez, it can lift up the disadvantaged and reshape a nation. But its power is not reserved for the righteous. When less scrupulous leaders tap into our rage and use it for their own ends, the emotion can be turned against us, in ways large and small, often without us even realizing what is going on.”— Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Charles Duhigg, “The Real Roots of American Rage,” The Atlantic, January/February 2019 issue

Quote of the Day (Joe Queenan, on What America Can Use More—and Less—Of)

“This country could definitely use more doctors, more nurses, more teachers, more sheet-rock experts and more kids. A couple more lanes on I-25 out in central Colorado wouldn't hurt either. What the U.S. does not need is more laws, more pundits, more TV shows about zombies, more miracle diets, more rounds of National Hockey League playoffs or more people running for president who have no chance of being nominated.”—Joe Queenan, “America Is Having Way Too Much of a Good Thing,” The Wall Street Journal, Apr. 27-28, 2019

Quote of the Day (Archibald MacLeish, on America and ‘The Heart's Change’)

“This, this is our land, this is our people,

This that is neither a land nor a race. We must reap

The wind here in the grass for our soul's harvest:

Here we must eat our salt or our bones starve.

Here we must live or live only as shadows.

This is our race, we that have none, that have had

Neither the old walls nor the voices around us,

This is our land, this is our ancient ground —

The raw earth, the mixed bloods and the strangers,

The different eyes, the wind, and the heart's change.

These we will not leave though the old call us.

This is our country-earth, our blood, our kind.”—American poet, playwright, and teacher Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982), “American Letter,” in New and Selected Poems: 1917-1976 (1976)

These days, our not-so-social media are filled with talk designed to create divisions. Archibald MacLeish, a true man of the book (not just a poet, but a Librarian of Congress!) wrote this at the start of the 1930s, what W.H. Auden called a “low, dishonest decade” that turned destructive, with global consequences. Maybe it takes a poet to remind Americans of their best selves, of  what unites instead of divides us.

(The image accompanying this post is Norman Rockwell’s Spirit of America, from 1974.)