A Look Back at America’s History
Even though the United States of America is just over 250 years old, there are many things to be proud of. Next, try this timeline exercise for another take on Independence Day.
Take the oldest
person you've ever met as an example. In the mid-1990s, Irene Seiberling
Harrison (1890–1999) lodged on three separate occasions at the
bed-and-breakfast my wife and I then owned in Waynesville, North Carolina. Irene’s father, Frank Seiberling (1859–1955),
was the co-founder of the Goodyear Tire Co. in Akron, Ohio. Born just before the election of Abraham
Lincoln and the outbreak of the Civil War, he would likely have grown up
knowing many Union Army veterans. Many
of those soldiers were the grandchildren of people who were alive when Thomas
Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence. Hearing Stories Firsthand
This third bit of
Independence Day diversion is mostly for kids and young adults.
Inquire about your
grandparents' or older neighbors' childhoods. What games did they play? What television shows did they watch? How did they keep in touch with friends and
relatives before the invention of smartphones and social media? What did it feel like to watch American
astronauts walking on the moon? What was
it like on 9/11 when terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center?
A fascinating journey
back in time can be had by first-hand hearing such tales. When I was a boy, my
grandfather’s brother, Uncle John, introduced me to our family’s history and
shared Civil War letters written by my ancestors. In my mid-30s, a normally staid neighbor, Sue
Willard Lindsay, beamed with delight as she described the changes in the 1920s
that indoor plumbing had brought to Pigeon Street. In 1990, I met an elderly man whose father,
having married a much younger woman late in life, was a Confederate
veteran. While the above-mentioned
Ms. She informed me that Harrison was
staying in our bed and breakfast and that Theodore Roosevelt, not Franklin, was
her favorite president. All these people have since died, but their stories
reside in me, bits and pieces of our great American saga that I am passing on
to my grandchildren.
Young Nation, Big
Achievements
Take a few minutes
while firing up the grill or sipping a beer on the deck, and make a mental list
of American achievements since 1776.
Here are a few items
to help you get started:
*The Constitution of the United States,
*The Rules of the Northwest,
*The Constitution
*The Bill of Rights
*Expedition of Clark and Lewis
*The mechanical reaper of Cyrus McCormick
*John Deere’s steel plow
*The cotton gin made by
Eli Whitney marked the end of slavery
*The railroad across the United States
*The denim jeans invented by Levi Strauss and Jacob Davis are now
ubiquitous around the globe
*The incandescent
lightbulb made by Thomas Edison’s phonograph
*Parks National
*Henry
Ford’s assembly line and affordable automobiles
*The Canal of Panama
*The Wright Brothers and the world’s first powered airplane flight
*Hollywood films
*The shipbuilding and
armaments industries of World War II
*Helped defeat the
Axis powers of Germany, Italy, and Japan
*The Marshall Plan
*The Eisenhower
Interstate Highway System
*Aid to countries
around the world
*The 1964 Civil Rights Act brought about the end of racial segregation.
*Americans walking on the moon
*The personal computer
*Internet access.
For
all you sweet-tooth aficionados, feel free to add Ruth Wakefield’s chocolate
chip cookies to this compendium of achievements.
Missing from this
Red, White, and Blue Hall of Fame are all sorts of other categories—sports,
exploration, Nobel Prize winners, American writers and artists, entrepreneurs,
social welfare organizations, and more.
How is it possible that a nation that has only been around
for a quarter of a millennium could produce such an impressive list of
achievements? A Can-Do Attitude and a Moral Conscience
Some credit America’s
vast store of natural resources for its power and wealth. Others point to the American pioneering
spirit, that can-do attitude that led settlers through suffering and hardship
to plant farms and towns in the wilderness.
In the movie “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” an immigrant explains to her
grandchildren: “Here in this place, each one is good to go as far as he’s good
to make himself. This way, the child can
be better than the parent, and this is the true way things grow better.” You can achieve your goals by moving to this
nation made up of nations, America. All you need are perseverance, sweat, and
inventiveness. Our curious American mix of pragmatism and moral sensibility
surely boosted our country’s successes.
The great homegrown thinker, William James, fathered the philosophy of
pragmatism, writing that the pragmatist “turns away from abstraction … from
fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins … He
turns towards concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action, and
towards power.”
The ideas of European
thinkers like Hegel, Marx, and others had no place in America until recently.
As a nation, we valued what worked, not a system imposed on human nature from
an obscure and tangled philosophy.
Americans overall
have long embraced a strong sense of right and wrong, praising virtue and
disdaining vice. In the 19th century,
for instance, this high ethical standard, preached from church pulpits for most
of our history, gave rise to the many movements and organizations that brought
an end to slavery and helped the poor and downtrodden.
The Cornerstone
All these
explanations for the American Dream stand on one document and a single moment
in history. When we read the Declaration
of Independence, we discover a mixture of practical and moral justifications
for our decision to leave Great Britain and her king. Most important of all to
the American character and destiny is this world-shattering sentence: “We hold
these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are
endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are
Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Bold words, but
they’re not worth the ink with which they were written unless brought to
life. That’s just what Americans
did. They took to heart Thomas
Jefferson’s words, absorbing them, melding them into their flesh and bone,
blood and breath. For them and for their
descendants, every day in America was Independence Day.
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