Quote of the Day (Archibald MacLeish, on Why ‘Democracy is Never a Thing Done’)

“Democracy is never a thing done. Democracy is always something that a nation must be doing. What is necessary now is one thing and one thing only, that democracy become again democracy in action, not democracy accomplished and piled up in goods and gold.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet, playwright and statesman Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982), The American Cause (1941)

When MacLeish wrote these words, Americans would shortly unite in the most dramatic fashion possible: to defend their nation following the attack on Pearl Harbor, and in the process take up arms against dictatorships overrunning Europe and Asia.

But democracy depends on quieter moments, too—like voting. (Only, since the turn of the millennium, even this action has become unexpectedly fraught with tension.)

Nevertheless, it remains the case that, if this country desires to remain intact and to preserve what Abraham Lincoln termed “the last best hope of earth," performing this civic, and profoundly patriotic, duty in an informed, non-frivolous manner remains a prerequisite.

(The image accompanying this post, an example of a voting booth in the Old State House in Hartford, CT, was taken Dec. 22, 2023, by Kenneth C. Zirkel.)

Quote of the Day (Archibald MacLeish, Contesting ‘The Spreading Ruin of the Countryside’)

“A town is not land, nor even landscape. A town is people living on the land. And whether it will survive or perish depends not on the land but on the people; it depends on what the people think they are….If they think of themselves as living a good and useful and satisfying life, if they put their lives first and the real estate business after, then there is nothing inevitable about the spreading ruin of the countryside.’’—Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet, playwright and statesman Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982), “A Lay Sermon for the Hill Towns,” originally printed in Riders on the Earth: Essays and Recollections (1978), reprinted in The Pioneer Valley Reader: Prose and Poetry From New England’s Heartland, edited by James C. O’Connell (1995)

(The image accompanying this post shows a covered bridge in Arlington, VT, within a short walking distance of the onetime home of Norman Rockwell, who chronicled small-town New England life visually, as Archibald MacLeish attempted to do in poems and prose like this excerpt.)

Quote of the Day (Archibald MacLeish, on Hate and the Threat to ‘The American Idea’)

“America cannot survive if the American idea is repudiated. Nations are not made by territory, or the greatness of nations by extent of land. Nations are made by commitments of mind and loyalties of heart, and the nobler the commitment of the mind, the higher the loyalty of the heart, the greater the nation. If the American proposition is no longer the proposition to which the American heart and mind were committed at our beginning, then America is finished, and the only question left is when America will fall.”—American poet-statesman Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982), “Must We Hate?”, The Atlantic, February 1963

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.)

 

Quote of the Day (Archibald MacLeish, on Justice and Love)

“You wanted justice, didn't you? There isn't any...there is only love." ―J.B's wife in Archibald MacLeish, J.B.: A Play in Verse (1958)

This day in 1958 marked the premiere, at the ANTA Playhouse in New York City, of J.B., a drama in free verse, a modern retelling of The Book of Job (with the Biblical figure reimagined as a banker), directed by Elia Kazan. Archibald MacLeish, a former Librarian of Congress and Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs, had already won two Pulitzer Prizes for poetry, and now he would be awarded another, for drama, with this production.