Photo of the Day: Old Glory, at Chautauqua, NY

I came across this huge flag yesterday on the grounds at Chautauqua Institution in southwestern New York. It was one of only many points commemorating Independence Day and honoring American heroes up here while I’ve been on vacation.

Yesterday afternoon, I attended a lecture by Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer David Blight on Frederick Douglass’ once-controversial, now-celebrated Fourth of July address. 

The day was capped by a “pops” concert in the famed amphitheater, as guest conductor Stuart Chafetz led the Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra (and the terrific baritone Michael Preacely) through a sprightly confection of pop, film, Broadway, and patriotic tunes. The night ended with towns along Chautauqua setting off complementary fireworks.

Photo of the Day: Chautauqua (NY) Community Band, 4th of July

Shortly after noon today, in Bestor Plaza, vacationers like me gathered to listen to patriotic tunes like “God Bless America” and “Stars and Stripes Forever” at Chautauqua Institution. The conductor of this spirited and festive music was Jason Weintraub.

This has been a longtime vacation site for me, but I had not visited this picturesque lakeside Victorian-era community during this particular week until now.

Several American Presidents have come to this National Historic Site, most notably Franklin Roosevelt (who delivered his “I hate war” speech here at the Amphitheater) and his cousin Theodore, a four-time visitor who said Chautauqua was the most American thing in America.

Quote of the Day (Henry David Thoreau, on Liberty and Slavery in Massachusetts)

“Three years ago, also, just a week after the authorities of Boston assembled to carry back a perfectly innocent man, and one whom they knew to be innocent, into slavery, the inhabitants of Concord caused the bells to be rung and the cannons to be fired, to celebrate their liberty — and the courage and love of liberty of their ancestors who fought at the bridge. As if those three millions had fought for the right to be free themselves, but to hold in slavery three million others. Nowadays, men wear a fool's-cap, and call it a liberty-cap. I do not know but there are some who, if they were tied to a whipping-post, and could but get one hand free, would use it to ring the bells and fire the cannons to celebrate their liberty. So some of my townsmen took the liberty to ring and fire. That was the extent of their freedom; and when the sound of the bells died away, their liberty died away also; when the powder was all expended, their liberty went off with the smoke.”— Henry David Thoreau, “Slavery in Massachusetts,” address delivered in Framingham, Mass., July 4, 1854

In another month, Henry David Thoreau would celebrate the publication of Walden, his account of a year spent in the woods near his native Concord, Mass.—an attempt to free himself from the “factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life” that began, very self-consciously, with his move into a cabin on the woodlot of friend Ralph Waldo Emerson on Independence Day, 1845.

Nine years after that personal declaration of independence, however, Thoreau would use the Fourth of July for a radically different occasion: a speech at a rally sponsored by abolitionist editor William Lloyd Garrison against the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, a measure meant to dissipate secessionist sentiment among slaveowners by allowing them to recover runaways, even in free Northern states.

Thoreau would not permit an American Revolution that began in protest to devolve into an annual rite of self-congratulation. The risk was especially high in Concord, where the Minutemen had fired on the redcoats at the local bridge—a now-legendary event alluded to by Thoreau, then quickly undercut by him.  

Thoreau’s address didn’t deign to attack Southerners but his own listeners, as well as anyone else in Massachusetts who stood idly by as slaveowners tried to suborn the laws and moral code of the state. Only five weeks before, abolitionists had stormed the Boston federal courthouse in an unsuccessful attempt to free runaway slave Anthony Burns. Moreover, this wasn’t the first time the arm of the law had acted in favor of the slave power: three years before, in an incident Thoreau takes note of here, the escaped Georgia slave Thomas Sims had been apprehended in Boston, endured a trial, and was returned to his owner.

“Slavery in Massachusetts,” then, doesn’t refer to a pre-Revolutionary era when human chattel could still be held in the Commonwealth, nor even to the insidious manner in which the now predominantly Southern institution was making its presence felt here. It referred to the moral subjugation of a people unaware that their freedom had gone “off with the smoke.”

Like Frederick Douglass’ fiery Fourth of July oration of 1852, Thoreau is rebuking latter-day complacency about the American political faith. Righteous anger led him to a radicalism to match Southern extremists. If they did not want to be part of the Union, fine. “Let the State [Massachusetts] dissolve her union with the slaveholder,” he advised. “She may wriggle and hesitate, and ask leave to read the Constitution once more; but she can find no respectable law or precedent which sanctions the continuance of such a union for an instant.” (Garrison, the organizer of this mass protest, had expressed similar sentiments in 1829, when he first entered public life, as I discussed here.)

A good deal of the speech needs to be read with allusions to contemporary events spelled out, as this annotated text does. But Thoreau also spiked the address with a number of statements from his journals that stand on their own as brilliant aphorisms, including:

*“Those who have been bred in the school of politics fail now and always to face the facts.”

* “It is to some extent fatal to the courts, when the people are compelled to go behind them.”

* “A government which deliberately enacts injustice, and persists in it, will at length ever become the laughing-stock of the world.”

*“Whatever the human law may be, neither an individual nor a nation can ever commit the least act of injustice against the obscurest individual without having to pay the penalty for it.”

*"Probably no country was ever ruled by so mean a class of tyrants as, with a few noble exceptions, are the editors of the periodical press in this country. And as they live and rule only by their servility, and appealing to the worse, and not the better, nature of man, the people who read them are in the condition of the dog that returns to his vomit."

*”The law will never make men free; it is men who have got to make the law free. They are the lovers of law and order who observe the law when the government breaks it.”

Thoreau’s Framingham address is a reminder that deep dissatisfaction with governmental refusal to confront problems—and judicial complicity in this process—will inevitably call for organized action to redress the balance. Mid-19^th century jurisprudence, to its enduring shame, proclaimed the rights of slaveowners. Our Supreme Court discovers equally unsuspected rights among corporations and gunowners. Where is our Thoreau to heap scorn on them?

Song Lyric of the Day (Bruce Springsteen, Hailing the Coming Holiday)

“Sandy, the fireworks are hailin' over Little Eden tonight

Forcin' a light into all those stony faces left stranded on this warm July.”—Bruce Springsteen, “Fourth of July, Asbury Park (Sandy),” from The Wild, The Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle album (1973)

Quote of the Day (Pauline Maier, on the Declaration’s Continued Vitality)

“The vitality of the Declaration of Independence rests upon the readiness of the people and their leaders to discuss its implications and to make the crooked ways straight, not in the mummified paper curiosities lying in state at the Archives; in the ritual of politics, not in the worship of false gods who are at odds with our eighteenth-century origins and who war against our capacity, together, to define and realize right and justice in our time.”—Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (1997)

Happy 4th of July!

This is the 2,000th post of this blog, and I can't think of a better way or day to celebrate it than this one. Without the freedom of expression guarantees of the Bill of Rights, this blog and countless others simply would not exist.

Quote of the Day (Abraham Lincoln, on Immigrants’ Ties to the Declaration)

“Perhaps half our people…are men who have come from Europe—German, Irish, French and Scandinavian…finding themselves our equals in all things. If they look back through this history to trace their connection with those [revolutionary] days by blood, they find they have none,…but when they look through that old Declaration of Independence…they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men….That is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together,…as long as the love of freedom exists.”—Abraham Lincoln, Speech at Chicago, Illinois, July 10, 1858

Yesterday afternoon, WNYC-FM’s Jonathan Schwartz played Aaron Copland’s Lincoln Portrait. It reminded me that, though Thomas Jefferson might have written the Declaration of Independence, it was Abraham Lincoln who had reinterpreted and extended it for generations to follow.

(By the way, in his haste to honor Lyndon Johnson for signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on Independence Day that year, New York Times columnist Frank Rich today unaccountably—and inexcusably—left out Lincoln, the essential transitional figure between Jefferson and Johnson in expanding the American promise to all.)

I’ve read a fair amount of the 16th President’s writings as well as several biographies, but I only came across the above quote for the first time a week ago. As the son and grandson of Irish immigrants, it obviously has special resonance for me.

Lincoln Portrait, which Copland wrote himself, drew heavily on a number of the President’s speeches and writings, notably the Gettysburg Address and his annual message to Congress in December 1862. Perhaps the folksy overtones of the above quote (“That old Declaration of Independence”) might not have fit in that well with the austere majesty of the Portrait narration (rendered, on the recording I heard yesterday, by Adlai Stevenson, who sounded to me, on first hearing, like the late actor E.G. Marshall).

Nevertheless, the quote goes a long way toward explaining so much about American history: about why so many foreigners have taken the promise of the Declaration to such heart that many have given their lives in defense of their new country; about why, more than two centuries after the release of the Declaration, it still represented a beacon of hope to dissidents in places like Communist Russia and pre-Tiananmen Square China; and about why Lincoln himself has become such a towering figure not just in American but world history.

Song Lyric of the Day (Katharine Lee Bates, from “America the Beautiful”)

“America! America!

God mend thine ev'ry flaw,

Confirm thy soul in self-control,

Thy liberty in law.”—“America the Beautiful,” lyrics by Katharine Lee Bates, music by Samuel Ward, in The American Reader: Words That Moved a Nation, edited by Diane Ravitch (1990)

The words that everyone knows in this song come from the first stanza, the one filled with the astonishing physical beauty of the sprawling United States—notably, the “purple mountain majesties/above the fruited plain.”

But there’s more to the lyrics than that, and it’s worth recalling now, exactly 115 years to the day that the poem “America the Beautiful” was published by Wellesley professor of English Katharine Lee Bates (1859-1929) in the religious weekly The Congregationalist. She was lucky to live in a time when a) newspapers still proliferated, b) they loved to print poems, and c) poetry was unafraid to deal with accessible public concerns rather than allusive, private obsessions.

“America the Beautiful” was inspired by a western trip that Bates took in the summer of 1893, beginning at Niagara Falls and ending in Colorado. Upon ascending Pike’s Peak, she immediately wrote down her impressions, but it took her awhile to translate it into a form she felt worthy of publication.

Bates’ poem elicited an enormous response from readers, many of whom felt it practically begged to be turned into song. At one point, approximately 70 different melodies were proposed as possible accompaniment to the lyrics. The winner, by common acclimation, was a melody from a Christian hymn book, composed by New Jersey choirmaster Samuel Ward in 1882.

Bates (whose image accompanying this post reminds me of what another Kathy Bates might have looked like in youth—the Oscar-winning actress of Misery) revised the poem twice more over the next two decades, to make it more direct—and, one would hope, capable of being sung.

Those of a certain ideological stripe might well be put off by the unabashed patriotism of the poem. Though not as bellicose as, say, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” certain lines might raise hackles with those concerned with America’s wars (“O beautiful for heroes proved/In liberating strife”) or the impact of its westward expansion on the environment (“A thoroughfare for freedom beat/Across the wilderness!”)

But there’s the above quote, from the second stanza, implying so much more. America might indeed be beautiful, but it isn’t perfect. That “liberating strife” was present, for instance, because a queasy bargain had been struck at the nation’s founding that slavery would not be interfered with in order that a united front could be presented against Great Britain.

The child of a Congregationalist minister, Bates felt the nation required divine guidance to “mend thine every flaw.” At the same time, you can sense the insistent note of her religious tradition’s tendency toward ruthless self-examination—an impulse that, in the 19th century, manifested itself in one reform movement after another—in the couplet, “Confirm thy soul in self-control,/Thy liberty in law.”

In other words, Bates realized that America was beautiful not simply because of pristine wilderness but because of the second chance it offered—to battered foreigners starting over in life, as well as to native-born citizens bringing honor to a badly compromised past.

This Day in Massachusetts History (William Lloyd Garrison Enters Public Life with 4th of July Address)

July 4, 1829—Three years after the author of the Declaration of Independence passed from the American scene, throwing up his hands at the prospect of ending slavery in this country or even freeing all of his own “servants,” the 23-year-old newspaper editor William Lloyd Garrison decided to press home the task of fulfilling Thomas Jefferson’s belief that “all men are created equal” with a fiery Fourth of July address.

Abolitionism was a loathed, even dangerous cause to support, not merely in the South but even in the North, when Garrison accepted the invitation to speak at the Park Street Church in Boston. Even eight years after Garrison spoke, an abolitionist newspaper editor in Illinois—a free state, mind you—named Elijah Lovejoy was murdered for his blistering attacks on the “peculiar institution.”

A number of Americans—even Southerners such as the “Virginian Dynasty” of Jefferson, Madison and Monroe—professed profound unease with slavery but were disinclined to ween the nation from it. The best thing that Americans could do for blacks, they felt, was colonize them elsewhere. African-Americans, in this view, had no place in American life.

Garrison was part of what has been termed the “second wave” of abolitionism. The first wave of the movement, from the founding of the republic through roughly the early 1820s, had been marked by polite, intellectually based strategies, including appeals to Congress by the likes of the Pennsylvania Abolitionist Society.

In the second wave, however, abolitionists such as Garrison, taking their cue from African-American ministers such as Philadelphia’s Richard Allen, decided that this incrementalist approach had reached a dead end. Now, the thinking went, you had to get in the faces of anyone who dared to turn their eyes away from slavery.

That meant eyewitness testimonies about the abuses of slavery. It meant constant, impassioned attacks in newspapers. It meant mock slave auctions. It meant defying the law of the land when adverse rulings such as the Dred Scott decision came down from the Supreme Court. It could even mean resorting to violence, as John Brown did in “bleeding Kansas” and at Harper’s Ferry in the 1850s.

Under these circumstances, many Northerners for the longest period regarded the abolitionists as troublemakers. If you want a contemporary analogy to the philosophical divisions arising, think of the battle now between activist pro-lifers and pro-choicers. Pro-lifers advocate for the right of the fetus in the womb, while pro-choicers push for maximum reproductive freedom, with no limit on how they view their body.

Similarly, fire-eating Southerners attempted to set up an impregnable judicial and legislative consensus against any limitations on their “right to property,” while abolitionists saw any compromise on this point as violating the rights expressed in the Declaration.

The more radical members of the movement, it’s now forgotten, even shared something in common with plantation aristocrats: they were prepared to tear the Union apart, if it meant they could start all over and get everything right this time by banning slavery, even if the new country was only confined to the North.

Garrison was an abolitionist disunion advocate. Twenty-five years to the day after his outspoken entrance onto the public stage, he burnt a copy of the Constitution, urging his followers to respond “Amen.” Many people who agreed with his insistence that the current union was a “devil’s pact”—including his protégé, Frederick Douglass—parted ways with him, believing that saving the Union was necessary to destroying slavery.

But much of that controversy lay in the future. Garrison’s achievement in 1829 lay in fracturing the sense of self-congratulation and complacency that had ensued in America following the War of 1812 (in effect, a second war for American independence), the survival of the nation after a half-century, and the passing of a generation of Founding Fathers already achieving the stature of demi-gods (a sentiment furthered by the passing of Jefferson and John Adams 50 years to the day after the adoption of the Declaration).

In 1829, Park Street Church was concluding an anti-slavery lecture series it had held annually on Independence Day six years before. It was the nerve center of an entire New England reform movement—one that Garrison, because of his background, was temperamentally inclined to support.

Garrison’s father had been engaged in the West Indian trade—in other words, a link in the system that kept slavery alive—before becoming a hopeless alcoholic and abandoning his family. The shame and privation he felt as a child spurred Garrison’s full-throated involvement in the temperance and abolitionist movements.

When he stepped up to the pulpit of Park Street Church, Garrison didn’t waste time on the platitudes to which speakers of the time were becoming increasingly prone. By the start of his third paragraph, he had denounced America’s slave-based politics as “rotten to the core.” He protested the condition of “two millions of wretched, degraded beings, who are pining in hopeless bondage.”

In other words, it was hypocritical to praise freedom in a land that permitted slavery, especially on such a far-reaching scale.

But Garrison did not confine himself to denunciations of slavery, or even to explanations for why it was immoral. The importance of his address to the future progress of abolitionism lay in the four propositions (yes, the same word Lincoln would invoke in the Gettysburg Address) he set out for doing battle against slavery:

* American slaves deserved “the prayers, and sympathies, and charities of the American people.”

* Non-slave-holding states are “constitutionally involved in the guilt of slavery,” and are obligated “to assist in its overthrow.”

* There was no valid legal or religious justification for the preservation of slavery.

* The “colored population” of America needed to be freed, educated, and accepted as equals by whites.

Garrison would go on to establish the foremost abolitionist publication, The Liberator, finally wrapping up publication after the Civil War and Emancipation. In one way, it is surprising that he left the public scene with the last of his propositions still very much in question.

In the larger sense, though, Garrison's career--and his address at the Park Avenue Church--call into question one of the more prevalent truisms of American politics--i.e., that moral questions are so divisive and counterproductive that they have no place in the public realm.

To be sure, Garrison's constant hectoring in The Liberator agitated pro-slavery forces. Yet who is prepared to say now that his polemics and his confrontational strategies did not serve their purpose?

Movie Quote of the Day (Sean Penn in “Fast Times at Ridgemont High,” on the Meaning of Independence)

Surfer-stoner Jeff Spicoli (played by Sean Penn): “What Jefferson was saying was, ‘Hey! You know, we left this England place 'cause it was bogus; so if we don't get some cool rules ourselves - pronto - we'll just be bogus too!’ Get it?”—Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), screenplay by Cameron Crowe based on his book, directed by Amy Heckerling

I doubt that this is exactly the history lesson that much-put-upon Mr. Hand (played by a wonderfully incredulous Ray Walston) had in mind, but hey! It’s a start, dude!