On the eve of America’s 250th birthday, the US Supreme Court voted to uphold the 14th Amendment to the Constitution which established birthright citizenship, adopted following the Civil War as one of the three great Reconstruction Amendments which came to be known as the Second Founding of America. This decision, by what has been a very fickle Court when it concerns Constitutional matters, may be accepted as a birthday gift to the nation.
Writing for the majority, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman on the Court, excoriated Justice Clarence Thomas, who, like Jackson, is the descendent of slaves. Thomas in his dissent insisted that the 14th Amendment was intended to be applied only to the children of former slaves.“Justice Thomas’s telling elides the entire point of the Second Founding: The Reconstruction Amendments were an anticaste, antisubordination reset for the Nation, not a mere spot treatment for the stain of slavery….
“The Amendment caused a paradigm shift in the trajectory of our Nation,” she wrote.
‘A Republic If You Can Keep It’
What diabolical spirits conspired to cause America’s 250th birthday to be celebrated during the second presidency of Donald J. Trump, who has shown nothing but contempt for our founding principles?
Were he alive today, Benjamin Franklin, a signer of both the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution, might say: “As I warned you back in 1787, at the close of the Constitutional Convention, ‘We have a republic … if you can keep it.’” He thus put his finger on the central question facing us today.
Dr. Franklin would likely be either deeply offended, or dumbstruck, or both, by what Trump’s idea of how our nation’s semiquincentennial should be honored.
In a preview of what he plans for the special July Fourth commemorations, the president marked the occasion on June 14, Flag Day (and also, by chance, his 80th birthday) with a human cage fight in a specially constructed, $60 million Roman Arena–Trump-style–on the White house front lawn. The only things lacking were the lions. Needless to say, never before in our 250-year history has such an abomination taken place at the “People’s House.”
The semiquincentennial celebrates the unanimous adoption by the Second Continental Congress in 1776 of the Declaration of Independence[1]. That Declaration and the US Constitution,[2] adopted in 1787, are the founding documents of the United States of America: though oft-cited, they are increasingly ignored or even disparaged today.
Indeed, as seen by Trump and his enablers, neither of those documents has had much, if any, relevance to his autocratic rule, except as things to be ignored or, in the case of Trump’s Supreme Court, frequently overruled.
What Is Reflected in the Reflecting Pool?
Today, there is no monument more cherished by Americans, as well as visitors from around the world, as the Lincoln Memorial and its Reflecting Pool, which draws millions of visitors each year. The monument, conceived as a single work of art and history, was modeled on Greek Classical temples, to honor our greatest president. The magnificent sculpture of Lincoln by Daniel Chester French, dedicated in 1922, has been admired by generations of Americans.
The Lincoln Memorial has been the site of many historic events. One of the most memorable was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where 250,000 people assembled on the National Mall to hear Dr. King give his iconic “I have a dream” speech.
Twenty-four years earlier, the renowned African American contralto Marian Anderson performed before 75,000 people from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, after the Daughters of the American Revolution barred her from singing at Constitution Hall because she was Black. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt (herself a member of the DAR) found a way to allow the concert to proceed: she could hold the concert at the Memorial which is on federal property. Anderson opened with the song, “My Country ‘Tis of Thee.”
The Lincoln Memorial and Reflecting Pool
Today, thanks to Trump’s decision “beautify” the pool by having it repainted in “American Flag Blue,” the pool has become a neon-green eyesore. Ironically, it was Trump’s decision to remove the pool’s water-filtration system (which prevented the growth of algae). Trump deemed the bubblers unsightly, and so, two days before his gladiator contest at the White House, they were removed. Now the algae blooms have taken over again.
It has been noted that the president’s outsize vanity bears a strong resemblance to the Greek fable of Narcissus, who became so enchanted with his reflection in a pool of water, that he forgot to eat or sleep, and died.]]
A Debate: What Is Patriotism?
As America’s 250th anniversary approaches, there have been intense debates about the true meaning of patriotism, in our deeply polarized country
Founding Father Patrick Henry joined the debates that took place in pre-Revolutionary days over whether to go to war against the British Crown. On March 23, 1775, he spoke with passion in favor of independence.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_F._Rothermel> Peter F. Rothermel, 1851)
The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle?… I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!
The opposing view is that of “America First,” meaning hostility to outsiders, foreigners, and immigrants, and imperial domination abroad, military power, etc., as represented by the current administration.
So, what then, is patriotism really? Declarations of love of country abound throughout our history. They remind us of what our forebears fought for through the Revolution, the Civil War, two World Wars, and in innumerable political and cultural battles over the past quarter millennium.
Lincoln’s View
What, then, did Abraham Lincoln have to say on this subject? Here are his words from an 1840 debate with Josiah Lamborn and Stephen Douglas (You may find it relevant to today’s political reality):
I know that the great volcano at Washington, aroused and directed by the evil spirit that reigns there, is belching forth the lava of political corruption, in a current broad and deep, which is sweeping with frightful velocity over the whole length and breadth of the land, bidding fair to leave unscathed no green spot or living thing, while on its bosom are riding like demons on the waves of Hell, the imps of that evil spirit, and fiendishly taunting all those who dare resist its destroying course, with the hopelessness of their effort; and knowing this, I cannot deny that all may be swept away. Broken by it, I, too, may be; bow to it I never will. The probability that we may fall in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just; it shall not deter me….
Some two decades later, Lincoln traveled to Washington for his inauguration as President. On the way, he stopped in Philadelphia, and on February 22, 1861, George Washington’s birthday, spoke at Independence Hall, the birthplace of the US Constitution. In his final sentence, the president-elect expands the scope of the Declaration to the entire world and to future generations:
I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence. I have often pondered over the dangers which were incurred by the men who assembled here, and framed and adopted that Declaration of Independence. I have pondered over the toils that were endured by the officers and soldiers of the army who achieved that Independence. I have often inquired of myself, what great principle or idea it was that kept this Confederacy so long together. It was not the mere matter of the separation of the Colonies from the motherland; but that sentiment in the Declaration of Independence which gave liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but, I hope, to the world, for all future time.
What to the Slave Is Your 4th of July?
Frederick Douglass was born into slavery in 1818 in Maryland. He escaped, and fled North in 1838, settling in Rochester, New York. Douglass became a leading Abolitionist, an outstanding orator, editor of an anti-slavery newspaper The North Star, and a friend, and sometime critic, of President Lincoln.
On July 5, 1852, Douglass gave the keynote address at an Independence Day celebration organized by the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society.
“What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?
“I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy— a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages….
“Fellow Citizens, I am not wanting in respect for the fathers of this republic. The signers of the Declaration of Independence were brave men. They were great men, too, great enough to give frame to a great age. It does not often happen to a nation to raise, at one time, such a number of truly great men. The point from which I am compelled to view them is not, certainly, the most favorable; and yet I cannot contemplate their great deeds with less than admiration. They were statesmen, patriots and heroes, and for the good they did, and the principles they contended for, I will unite with you to honor their memory.”
As we celebrate our 4th of July this year, our 250th birthday, let us, despite the divisions in our country, remember all that has come before, and the love and sacrifice of so many of our forebears, who died to ensure that we would continue to enjoy the self-evident truth, that all men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Bonnie James – June 30, 2028
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NOTES
- The Declaration of Independence of 1776https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript
- The United States Constitution of 1787https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcript
