“I believe we, the Americans of today, are ready to act worthy of ourselves,” President Ronald Reagan proclaimed in January 1981 during his first inaugural address, “ready to do what must be done to ensure happiness and liberty for ourselves, our children, and our children’s children.”
Reagan was nothing less than what the Greek philosopher Plato called an anamnesis, a remembrance of truth, goodness, and beauty. Because Regean believed in himself, he believed in us. Critically, he called us to be the best selves in our families, in our schools, in our neighborhoods, and in our world. Under the president’s inspiration and leadership, Americans responded mightily, and we not only created the greatest economic boom in history from 1983 to 1989, but also defeated Soviet communism, with the important exception of Romania, without a shot being fired. In every way, the 1980s were a decade beyond compare, and 1989 especially was an annus mirabilis, a year of miracle.
As we celebrate Thanksgiving this year, I encourage every one of us to think about the many, many blessings we Americans have experienced in our history and recognize that whatever sins we’ve committed, each has also come with great goods done in and for the world. We are, to be certain, a fiercely audacious and independent people, perhaps the most audacious ever, and we aspire to greatness. Not just greatness in terms of material achievement, but moral and ethical greatness.
I love to imagine what it must have been like to be a member of the Mayflower, arriving on North American soil hundreds of miles to the north of their originally projected Virginia, in utterly virgin land and incomprehensibly vast forests, just on the verge of winter, in 1620. Undaunted by the sheer overwhelming circumstances, the strangers and sojourners of that voyage covenanted with one another, creating the first extra-legal, not quite legal and not quite illegal, document, the Plymouth Combination, what we remember as the Mayflower Compact. Armed with the tradition of English common law, a Puritan stubbornness, and a Protestant faith in sola scriptura, the Pilgrims audaciously decided they could govern themselves.
Over a century and a half later, colonists again met extra-legally in the First and Second Continental Congresses, creating the extra-legal Continental Army under the stalwart leadership of George Washington, and, a year later, passed the extra-legal document, the Declaration of Independence, one of the most audacious and aspirational in world history. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” Thomas Jefferson’s document thundered, “that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The audacity and the aspiration are off the scale.
Though a somewhat secular shadow of the Abrahamic and Mosaic covenants and a strong reflection of the celebrated Magna Carta and Mayflower Compact, the Declaration asserted timeless and universal truths in a particular moment. There is no asterisk for “all men.” Black, white, male, female, gentile, Jew — Jefferson and Congress meant all men, past, present, and future, here and abroad. Though American society was still deeply racially flawed at the time of the Founding, the Declaration proved, as Martin Luther King Jr. would one day put it, a promissory note.
The modern historian can go so far as to claim with only the slightest exaggeration that all American history has been an attempt to make the Declaration true. With its invocation of God several times, and with the final line, added by Congress to Jefferson’s original draft, the Declaration most certainly becomes a covenant: “And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”
Only 11 years later, in the summer and early fall of 1787, delegates from the colonies, led by Virginia’s James Madison and Pennsylvania’s John Dickinson, and presided over by the venerable Washington, once again extra-legally proved our audacity and aspiration by writing a written constitution, now the oldest such one in the world.
The aspirations and audacity of the Declaration and the Constitution would be brutally tested during our great Civil War. Right prevailed, and the 13th Amendment, abolishing slavery, fulfilled the greatest longings of the Founding. Even in the mighty victory of the spring of 1865, though, America witnessed aspirations of mercy.
In his River Queen Doctrine, announced March 1865, President Lincoln desperately desired “to get the deluded men of the rebel armies disarmed and back to their homes … Let them once surrender and reach their homes, [and] they won’t take up arms again …. Let them all go, officers and all, I want submission and no more bloodshed … I want no one punished; treat them liberally all around. We want those people to return to their allegiance to the Union and submit to the laws.”
Finally, let’s return to Reagan’s hope in us. In January 1989, as the president looked back over his two terms, he said: “And that’s about all I have to say tonight, except for one thing. The past few days when I’ve been at that window upstairs, I’ve thought a bit of the ‘shining city upon a hill.’ The phrase comes from John Winthrop, who wrote it to describe the America he imagined. What he imagined was important because he was an early Pilgrim, an early pioneer of freedom. He journeyed here on what today we’d call a small wooden boat, and like the other Pilgrims, he was seeking a home that would be free.
FDR’S VERY BIG ‘FRANKSGIVING’ MISTAKE
“I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don’t know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That’s how I saw it, and see it still.”
So, this year, may we Americans give thanks for our audacity and never forget our aspirations. May we be worthy of ourselves.
Bradley J. Birzer is a professor of history at Hillsdale College.