This sounds about right. We should ask hard questions. But we ought not allow that healthy reflection to elide or obscure our bounteous blessings. Mike McShane and I discussed this at length last year in our book, Getting Education Right. I shared an extended passage in a Thanksgiving post last year and, with your indulgence, I’m inclined to do so again. We wrote:
If you ever find yourself in Washington, D.C., on a crisp fall afternoon, take a walk around the National Mall. Now, it is easy to grow jaded, to see all the monuments and museums as decoration adorning the corrupt, self-dealing, and self-important “swamp.” But try to set that aside for a few hours and focus on recalling the dreams, struggles, and triumphs embodied in those edifices of marble and bronze.
On a perch above the Potomac River’s Tidal Basin sits the Jefferson Memorial, with a portico featuring Jefferson’s uncompromising proclamation, “I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” Among the cherry blossoms and deep blue sky, we are simultaneously reminded of the grandeur of the third president and his staggering accomplishments but also his too-human frailties and hypocrisies. It was the slave-owning author of the Declaration of Independence, after all, who intoned, “Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever. Commerce between master and slave is despotism.”
Around the river’s bend, anchoring one end of the National Mall, stands the Lincoln Memorial—a temple to the man who led our union when justice would no longer sleep. Etched into its marble walls one can find, in their entirety, two of the greatest speeches ever given on American soil: the Gettysburg Address, “That we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain. That this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. And that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the Earth,” and Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, “With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds . . . and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.”
Walking the path between these two icons, one encounters the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial, with Lei Yixin’s towering granite statue flanked by a majestic river vista and a massive granite wall studded with King’s timeless prose. It is easy to pause and get lost in the words. The eye cannot help but catch the steadfast pledge from his bus boycott speech: “We are determined here in Montgomery to work and fight until justice runs down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream.” However unsettled our times may seem, we are struck by King’s admonition from far more troubled ones: “Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.”
What a heritage. Standing in the shadow of their legacies, one’s heart quickens with thankfulness that we are the ones fortunate enough to inherit the nation they helped to build. One is reminded of the debt we owe to these men and the countless thousands honored by memorials to the veterans of World War II, Korea, and Vietnam who gave their lives so that we might live in a more free, equal, and just world.
Today, our public discourse too rarely acknowledges that we’re the fortunate heirs of an extraordinary legacy, one produced by centuries of flawed Americans grappling with the privileges and burdens of citizenship. Our forbearers sold slaves and abolished slavery; they defeated the Nazis and imprisoned Japanese-Americans in internment camps. Our nation has weathered virulent anti-Catholic sentiment, the reign of Jim Crow, the rise and fall of the KKK, the Great Depression, devastating wars, the Soviet menace, the schisms of Vietnam, urban riots, pandemics, and assassinations. We’ve survived all of it, learned and grown, and turned to confront new challenges. Ours is a tale of sacrifice, reflection, courage, deliberation, patience, magnanimity, and even civil war.
We do a crude disservice to this complicated legacy when we reduce it to caricature. That was true back when schools reduced American history to a hero’s tale of manifest destiny, Paul Bunyan, and George Washington’s refusal to tell a lie. But, with an energetic assist from Howard Zinn and his disciples, that narrative was pushed to the margins more than a generation ago. Today, the one-dimensional caricature tends to lean the other way, depicting our nation as a menagerie of bad acts and bad actors.
