America is still the best hope for the world

From the desk Chuck Fuller, CEO of The Results Company

If there’s a throughline on the American psyche from the revolutionary era to now, it’s this: fear and pessimism, followed by courage and resilience.

Today, as you celebrate our freedom with friends and family, I offer the below collage of stories – some historical, some personal – to put color to this dynamic. Hopefully a view of a bigger picture that spans generations will fill you with the same hope and optimism it does me.

One of my earliest memories is November 22, 1963. I was only five, but I can replay in my mind moments of that day even now. I remember standing in the front yard when my mother came running out the door. She yelled to the lady who lived across the street, “The president’s just been shot!”

Dallas was 1,200 miles away, but my mother rushed me off the street and into the house anyway. Why? Because she was terrified. Her fear was uncontrollable because it involved something so much bigger than her, like a child consumed by the shadows at sundown. I imagine the replay is scalded into my memory because her fear infected me, too. It’s the first time I saw her cry.

She related to me years later that she felt that fear only once before, on December 7, 1941.

I learned what she meant when I experienced it myself decades later. After I watched the second plane fly into the towers, I turned off the television at my desk four blocks from the White House and, after making sure my team was home safely, started walking to my D.C. home. I lived two miles away, up Pennsylvania Avenue, past the FBI headquarters and the U.S. Capitol. The only cars I saw that whole way were military and Capitol police, and the only people I saw wore full military gear and stood guard outside the seats of American government. I felt completely out of control, at the mercy of events larger than me.

What’s true of individuals is true of society’s mood generally, too. After all, “society” is just a collection of all of us together. And Americans have experienced collective fear many times over.

In colonial Boston, shortly before America would formally declare her independence from Great Britain, the streets were awash with anger, fear, and, on occasion, blood. One incident recounted in detail by Stacy Schiff in The Revolutionary Samuel Adams:

Under a slim moon early on the evening of March 5, parties of soldiers could be seen prowling the streets. According to Adams, to make himself an authority on the next hours, they carried bludgeons, bayonets, and cutlasses. The town’s winding lanes crackled with tension as, amid drifts of fresh snow, Boston came alive. Blows were exchanged in several neighborhoods.

A crowd collected on King Street, near the customs house; they hurled snowballs, oyster shells, and chunks of ice at a sentry, taunting him and creating a commotion. Earlier he had tangled with a few boys, whom he attempted to strike with the end of his gun. Whistling and shrieking, they returned with friends. The sentry cried out for assistance. Thomas Preston, the regimental captain, rushed to his side, accompanied by eight men. They, and their bayonets, electrified the crowd.

Preston ordered his soldiers to level their guns. . .Their backs to the brick customs house wall, the soldiers found themselves surrounded on three sides by jeering Bostonians, pushing and shoving, the ground slippery underfoot. ‘God damn you, fire and be damned, we know you dare not. . .’

Moments later, the soldiers fired on the crowd. Fear gripped the would-be nation and her inhabitants as war loomed against the world’s superpower.

In some cases, that fear overcame soldiers in battle once the Revolutionary War began: “To the inexperienced troops who faced this well-disciplined army, the shock had been devastating. All along Sullivan’s line, entire units simply melted away, some without firing a shot. The men who stood their ground discovered they could not reload quickly enough to hold away the terrifying sight of so many bayonets coming toward them, and when the fight became face-to-face, it was the steel, not the musketball, that did the horrible work.” (Robert Middlekauff, The Glorious Cause)

In Ways and Means, Roger Lowenstein recounts the precariousness of the Union’s situation in 1861: “The cash register was empty. The Treasury had a nominal balance of barely $2 million, and unpaid bills were mounting. . .The budget was awash in red ink and government employees were going without pay. . . In a financial sense, there was no Union.”

A war was upon us, and we had no money to fund it. Imagine the fear and pessimism.

Consider the bread lines and dust bowls of the 1930s, as fathers watched their family’s savings disappear overnight and mothers wondered how they’d feed their children. Consider the 1940s, when Americans did not know whether brutal autocrats would control the balance of the world.

Or 1957, when the Soviets launched Sputnik. Or October 1962, when nuclear holocaust seemed not just possible, but probable.

I could go on, but the point is this: Pessimism and fear about America’s prospects as a going concern are not rare. They mark every period.

Which brings us to today. Even at the pinnacle of human progress, it seems that division might now tear us apart. In short, we have problems. We’ve had them in the past and we’ll have them again in the future.

But in times of national stress, we have always – always – found it within ourselves to persevere through action. A band of farmers and visionaries defeated Great Britain to birth the United States. We survived the Civil War, in no small part due to the vision and leadership of Abraham Lincoln. We suffered through the Great Depression, defeated not one but two expansionist empires, caught and surpassed the Soviets in space, enforced a world order that minimized nuclear expansion and enjoyed relative peace…The list goes on.

I expect this period will be no different. We don’t face an existential external threat, as we have before in the past. Our problems lie within, but the prescription – perseverance and action – remains the same.

What might that action look like?

I’ll leave you today with the words of a communicator who always captured the everlasting optimism that spans our country’s long arc. In this speech, he even anticipates the natural response of his listeners to his spur toward action – “what you’re talking about seems bigger than me, and I can’t affect it” – and resolves it for them. You’ll see what I mean.

The lesson of all this was, of course, that because we’re a great nation, our challenges seem complex. It will always be this way. But as long as we remember our first principles and believe in ourselves, the future will always be ours. . .
 
But now, we’re about to enter the nineties, and some things have changed. Younger parents aren’t sure that an unambivalent appreciation of America is the right thing to teach modern children. And as for those who create the popular culture, well-grounded patriotism is no longer the style. Our spirit is back, but we haven’t reinstitutionalized it. We’ve got to do a better job of getting across that America is freedom – freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of enterprise. And freedom is special and rare. It’s fragile; it needs protection.
 
So, we’ve got to teach history based not on what’s in fashion but what’s important – why the Pilgrims came here, who Jimmy Doolittle was, and what those 30 seconds over Tokyo meant. You know, four years ago on the 40th anniversary of D-Day, I read a letter from a young woman writing to her late father, who’d fought on Omaha Beach. Her name was Lisa Zanatta Henn, and she said, “We will always remember, we will never forget what the boys of Normandy did.” Well, let’s help her keep her word. If we forget what we did, we won’t know who we are. I’m warning of an eradication of the American memory that could result, ultimately, in an erosion of the American spirit. Let’s start with some basics: more attention to American history and a greater emphasis on civic ritual.

And let me offer lesson number one about America: All great change in America begins at the dinner table. So, tomorrow night in the kitchen I hope the talking begins. And children, if your parents haven’t been teaching you what it means to be an American, let ’em know and nail ’em on it. That would be a very American thing to do. – Ronald Reagan, Farewell Address, 1989.