PHILADELPHIA — Lily was the name of the park ranger who led us through Independence Hall. She wasn’t a theater major like some tour guides. She wasn’t very theatrical at all. In fact, she was a mix of wry and blunt.
Her job was to tell us the story of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution in a concise and compelling fashion: no easy task, given her 30-minute time window.
By the end of the tour, I was choked up and teary-eyed, welling up with gratitude and patriotism.
When I told a Spanish friend of this, she said, “In Spain, that reaction would make you a fascist.”
It turns out that, in America, that reaction could make me a racist, in the eyes of some of our major corporate spokesmen and activists.
Love of country is not a popular thing these days. As the elites worry more and more about the evils of “nationalism,” expressions of patriotism are becoming officially insensitive. And from Western Europe to the U.S., nothing will brand you as an unsophisticated jingo more than believing a “founding myth” that sounds like a sappy morality tale.
Nike, the sneaker giant (who is happy to bow to the political bullying of Communist-run China), agreed just before Independence Day to pull off the shelves a new line of shoes because they included the 13-star American flag from 1776. Nike publicist Colin Kaepernick objected to that image. Why? Because a symbol of America’s founding is an embrace of slavery, as told in press reports.
“For lots of people, it’s quite similar to, say, the Confederate flag,” one professor told the New York Times.
At the same time, Charlottesville, Virginia, decided to abolish its traditional birthday celebration for Thomas Jefferson, who founded the University of Virginia.
This national self-loathing is en vogue in the West these days. Michael Brendan Dougherty wrote about the Irish version of this in his book, My Father Left Me Ireland. Dougherty noted a deep desire among the Irish “to be unsentimental and undeluded about their history.” This manifested itself in obsessing on the impure motives, real or imagined, of Ireland’s rebels. “My boyhood understanding of Irish history,” he writes, “a people coming out of captivity, now got a chuckle from serious historians.”
Of course, there were real flaws among the rebels of both 1916 and 1776. America’s Constitution explicitly accepted and explicitly protected slavery. The question isn’t whether we should ignore those flaws. It’s whether we will let those flaws define the men and their project of building an independent nation.
Kaepernick and his colleagues at Nike say yes.
Lily, the park ranger, said no.
She pointed out that the Founders were all white men. She mentioned slavery repeatedly. But none of these men’s failings detracted from their bravery and the magnitude of their task.
“To us,” Lily told me, my three oldest children, and two dozen other visitors to Independence Hall, “the Declaration is a birth certificate. Had the rebellion failed, it would have been a death warrant for these men.”
And the heroes in this story weren’t merely the famous men.
“This Declaration, which took our Founding Fathers nearly a decade to get to — now it was time for ordinary people like you and I in the 18th Century to do something really important: You kind of have to pick a side,” she said in her understated way. “Will you stay loyal to the British, who have protected you for decades, or do you take this chance and fight for your independence?”
On Jefferson, whose sins were grave and now well-known, Lily still spoke a plain truth that didn’t diminish his flaws. “He had a pretty daunting task ahead of him,” in the summer of 1776: Expression of the American mind … How one man could get his hands on the American mind, boil it down, and fit it all on one page — that is remarkable.”
As a writer, I was overwhelmed with the idea of Jefferson’s task. As a father, I asked myself if was raising my children so that they would stand up to power and for what is right, as the rebels of 1776 did.
The story of our founding can be told a thousand ways. And we shouldn’t hide the sins and flaws. But we also must avoid that very modern hatred of sentimentality and contemporary conceit that causes us to disdain every generation before us.
Lily painted the American Revolution the same way Dougherty as a kid saw the Ireland of 1916: a people coming out of captivity. The work done in Independence Hall was incomplete, as reflected by the visits Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony would make to that same building over the next 100 years. It’s still incomplete. But the imperfection of the revolution doesn’t mean we should “cancel” Betsy Ross’ flag and Thomas Jefferson, to use the parlance of today.
We should understand their flaws, and then celebrate them. Perhaps with a cup of tea.
