“Who are we?” ask Leon Kass, Amy Kass and Diana Schaub at the start of “What So Proudly We Hail,” their anthology of works about the American character. “How do we identify ourselves? … What larger community and ideals are we willing to fight and to sacrifice? … What do we look up to and revere?” they ask.
These are good questions to ask in this week of our national birthday, and of much else besides. On July 4, 1776, the 13 original colonies declared themselves a nation, determined to break free of British control and dominion.
On July 4, 1826, two of the men who declared it, the second and third presidents of the United States (and our first and second vice presidents too), died within hours of one another, 50 years after the day.
July 4, 1863, was the day after the Battle of Gettysburg, the great turning point in the war of the century, which cemented the concepts that all men are equal and that “government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the Earth,” as President Lincoln so eloquently put it.
“Citizenship is a legal and political status … character is an ethical condition,” the Kasses and Schaub tell us, but our national character is broader and deeper, an emotional construct that helps to unite us, that anchors us both in the past and the future, and provides the sense of deep emotional solace made likely by belonging “freely and feelingly to something larger and more worthy than our individual selves.”
National character, says Michael Novak, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, makes a tangible entity out of a mob. “A mob is composed of a multitude of atomized individuals,” he tells us.
“A people is composed of persons who have social identity … a communion of souls” reaching back to antiquity, and looking ahead to the prospect of still greater things. This identity also has its own character, which Pope John Paul II roused, appealed to and utilized in his effort to undo the Soviet empire by what were nonviolent means.
“John Paul II often concentrated on this characteristic of people-hood,” Novak adds. “In the nine days in 1978 that changed history, he awakened the people of Poland to the memory of their own particular past. … In Cuba, he again stressed the Cuba of history. … Wherever he went, he first knelt and kissed that particular soil. He reminded the world that in identity there is strength, there is communion, there is a record of actions to inspire one’s soul. … Such an identity forbids anyone from feeling alone and ungrounded and weak.”
The colonists in the 1770s forged an identity that conquered an empire with an amateur army; John Paul revived identities many times over, and brought down an empire without a shot.
John Paul was supported in this by the American president, Ronald Reagan, and the British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, whose country’s sense of its own heroic identity drove it in 1940 to stand alone against Hitler.
It was backed in this stand, to the best of his power, by the then-president of the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Longings for freedom are indeed universal, but in 1776 they were embodied in a particular nation that fought for them in a particular war, embedded them in a unique form of government and fought for them in the last century in three brutal wars.
American exceptionalism does not mean Americans are better than others, that their record is spotless, that they never fail, falter or stray. It means Americans’ works in the interests of freedom are unique and unequaled. May they remain so.
Happy birthday to us.
Examiner Columnist Noemie Emery is contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
