If you’re looking for a feel-good Fourth of July story, consider the Houston Zoo’s newest bald eagle, Mae, named for astronaut Mae Jemison. After finishing rehab for a life-threatening wing injury, Mae recently moved into the zoo’s Texas wetland.
She’s a living symbol of our nation, a thrilling sight for all Americans: and of all races, ethnicities and religions; for people of all sexes, genders and ages; for liberals, conservatives and people who don’t give a flip about politics.
We don’t see much of that these days.
Often this year it’s seemed that our national symbols divide us more than they bring us together. Consider the U.S. flag that a rioter used to beat a police officer dragged down the U.S. Capitol’s steps on Jan. 6. The surrounding crowd, many dressed in red, white and blue, chanted, “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!
Or consider Black athletes’ objection to the the “Star-Spangled Banner”: The song’s third verse rejoices that U.S. forces killed escaped slaves who, promised freedom and land, fought for the Brits in the War of 1812. (“Land of the free”: Ouch.)
Suddenly all sorts of American symbols seem like minefields, sure to offend someone somewhere. Is it still safe to assume that the immigrant-welcoming Statue of Liberty still appeals to all Americans? The Alamo? Mom and apple pie?
How, you wonder, did we get to this point? Have Americans ever before been so angry at each other? And most important: Besides Mae, what on this Fourth of July still unites us?
‘Created equal’
“We have a great shared history in the United States,” said author and Rice University history professor Douglas Brinkley. “That gets lost with the statues coming down and the finger-pointing about the past. We’re getting more and more in silos, picking the versions of history that we prefer.”
That history, it should be noted, includes plenty of arguments and divisiveness. In 1776, colonies’ delegates to the Continental Congress argued first over whether even to declare independence from Britain. Then they argued over how to reword the Declaration of Independence.
The Declaration is the colonies’ public explanation of why they were breaking up with England, with a long list of reasons why they could no longer tolerate British rule. The bit that many of us can recite — the part that we celebrate July 4 — is a relatively small piece of the larger whole:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
But that small portion captured Americans’ imagination, and in it lay the seeds of the country the U.S. would become. “One thing we still have in common — I think of it as the national religion — is the idea ‘all men are created equal,’” said author and Texas A&M history professor Elizabeth Cobbs.
The Declaration’s “all men” didn’t include everyone — not women or slaves or Native Americans — but in a world ruled by monarchies, it was revolutionary. And through the United States’ history, that revolution kept unfolding, as the country tried to live up to the crux of its founding ideal.
“The Declaration was aspirational,” said Cobbs. “That’s why everyone loves it, and why July 4 is such a lovely holiday.
“‘All men are created equal’ allows our country to grow,’” said Cobbs. “We say, ‘How does that idea square with slavery? With Jim Crow? With sexual discrimination? Or with discrimination against elders or transgender people?’
The aspiration for all people to be equal, she said, is what binds the U.S. “It’s a common language, one that allows us to talk back and forth. Other countries can rely on a longer shared history (“Remember King Arthur!”) or a shared religion (“It’s great that we’re all Lutherans!”). But in the U.S., it’s that aspiration that is our glue.
“That’s why holidays like the Fourth of July and Juneteenth are great,” said Cobbs. “They celebrate freedom and liberty.”
Annette Gordon-Reed, author of On Juneteenth and a professor of history at Harvard, agrees. She says that Juneteenth and the Fourth should be thought of together — and that all Americans should celebrate the two holidays as marking major developments in human progress.
There is, Gordon-Reed says, “the promise of July Fourth with the Declaration of Independence; and the reality of Juneteenth, which reminds you that the Fourth did not achieve ‘all men are created equal.’”
‘What air is to fire’
In Cobbs’ reckoning, Americans agree on freedom and liberty, just not how to serve those ideals. “But that’s natural,” she said. “We’ve always disagreed.”
After Americans won the Revolutionary War, they turned to fighting among themselves over how, precisely, the new country would be governed.
“Liberty is to faction what air is to fire,” James Madison wrote in The Federalist Papers: Freedom itself feeds disagreements. The freer the country, he argued, the greater the disagreements.
The question was how to govern anyway, and how to govern so that the minority — whoever had lost any given vote — felt treated fairly, respected and still part of the whole, not vanquished and oppressed. That doesn’t happen much today.
“Democracy is supposed to be a give-and-take,” lamented Rice’s Brinkley. “It’s not about being right. It’s about listening. There’s a lot of cynicism in the air now. We’ve lost our can-do-ism because we’re so busy partaking of this neo-Civil War.”
What unites us these days? “Our addiction to our iPhones,” he deadpanned. “Everywhere I look, I see people’s heads down, staring at their phones.”
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That means that Americans aren’t talking with their next-door neighbors, he said. They’re interacting less in the complicated real world, and more in the addictive, oversimplified realm of the web — reading news on partisan sites, using apps that connect them to the like-minded. People who disagree are not embraced as fellow Americans, but described with contempt: as “deplorables” or “libtards.”
The web, Cobbs agrees, has put Americans’ differences “on steroids.” But she believes that Americans will figure out how to control the internet, rather than being controlled by it.
“It’s parallel to the Industrial Revolution,” she said. “Smokestacks and new kinds of buildings required regulations — things like fire escapes and sprinklers in buildings over 10 stories. That stuff took decades to figure out.”
In the meantime, could anything bring us together? Perhaps a common enemy, Brinkley suggested, such as Russia during the Cold War, or terrorism after 9/11. Or maybe a grand project, such as John F. Kennedy’s call for Americans to go to the Moon.
There’s no shortage of urgent problems. “America is in a transitional moment,” Brinkley said. “We’re facing the challenges of tech, climate change and immigration. The best-case scenario is that this is a time of great reassessment. The worst case is, it’s the unraveling of America.”
He leans toward the best-case scenario. “Fireworks and the Fourth of July will go on,” he said. “Americans are marvelous people.”
lisa.gray@chron.com, twitter.com/LisaGray_HouTX
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