Never in the history of the world has the growth of a people in their social, political, technical, intellectual and entrepreneurial pursuits been so phenomenal as what has happened on this continent in the last 150 years, built on the four centuries previous to that and the 2000 generations preceding the time of a Genoan explorer. Whether Chian, Alexandrian, Egyptian, Greek or Roman, these cultures are mere sentinels in history, watching their very shadows eclipsed by the blossoming of a land, culture, and idea unique to our time and meant for the ages.
In that brief sesquicentennial, man has traveled from the speed of a horse relegated to terra firma to 22 times the speed of sound a hundred miles above the planet – and walked on a celestial body once believed to be a god. Communication has gone from the speed of that same horse on the Pony Express to instantaneously global. Comfort and ease have gone from candlelight and open flame to finite manipulation of light, heat, humidity and cooking.
The 1700s were the time of the smoothbore musket, accurate to maybe 100 yards in the hands of a marksman, who might be able to manually load and fire five times a minute, to the nuclear weapons that can be delivered precisely in a matter of minutes halfway around the world.
The efficient and conscientious use of soil, wind, plant and animal life, rivers, seas and fossil fuels has provided comfort and prosperity while requiring a deliberate plan to allow their harvesters to continue to have something over which to exercise dominion for time immortal. A task history shows this people uniquely qualified to accomplish.
Yes, other countries and cultures, in many forms, helped establish a foundation from which this people would emerge like a volcano from the foam, the most causative and impacting developments and creations of the last century and a half have occurred here.
How has this happened? Why did this evolution happen here? What were the threads that brought about this tapestry? There is no simple, pat answer for something so complex yet ordered, but there are identifiable forces and agents that have woven this canvas upon which we constantly paint the next scene.
Though the harsh, restrictive tenets of Calvinism promulgated by 17th century Massachusetts Bay Colony Puritans no longer hold sway, Puritanical adherence to the ethics of hard work and self-reliance remains an essential, foundational aspect of the American credo and ethos. The down-home sense of Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard in his Almanacks of 1732 – 1757 maintained and promoted the natural law that hard work would be rewarded. Popular writers of every time, Thomas Paine, Alexis de Tocqueville, Mark Twain and Horatio Alger extended this American ideal even further.
Out of the block, this was a land where idleness was disdained. Even a century after our birth as a nation and hundreds of centuries after our birth as a people (for what is the epitome of refusing idleness than to follow the herds across a great bridge of land over a forbidden northern sea?), the spirit of self-reliance was proclaimed from those with everything to those just starting out with freedom in our land. When General Gordon Grainger announced the physical freedom conferred upon slaves in Galveston in 1865, his words of emancipation ended with these:
The freemen are advised to remain at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness, either there or elsewhere.
Idleness disdained indeed! What better setting for ingenuity and risk, progress and development, growth and prosperity? This national self-confidence locked arms with the inbred infallibility and rightness of our national goals and aspirations, so often and correctly dubbed “The American Dream.” When the Puritans set foot on this land, they believed, unwavering, that this country and specifically they were the recipient’s of the divine intervention of Providence. They knew that this was their “City upon a Hill,” though canonized by John Winthrop, it was a jurisdiction protected, consecrated, and designed by God. Puritan historian Edward Johnson penned in 1650 the sentiment that God had “sifted a whole nation to plant his choice grain” in this continent’s fertile soil. Two hundred years later the refrain continued. Herman Melville declared that “we Americans are the peculiar chosen people, the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of liberties of the world.”
From its inception and the first steps of man on its soil tens of thousands of years ago, the irresistible force of human ingenuity would subdue a continent fueled by confidence, optimism…and faith in its destiny.
In the 1840s, Manifest Destiny was the cry of the citizenry. 1845 saw John K. O’Sullivan, a magazine editor, write that no nation on earth should be allowed to interfere with America’s “manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions,” echoing in popular sentiment the subtle but powerful Monroe Doctrine of two decades earlier.
It has been a prevailing axiom that as a tool of God, that which benefits America benefits the world and mankind. This had become an awesome and awe-inspiring prescription that begat results that were nothing short of miraculous reminiscent of divine intervention and divine right.
Belief was not hard to come by. Forensic evidence literally sprang from the soil, some of the best on the planet. Vast woods replete with wildlife, game, fowl and all forms of sustaining nutrients are prolific and inviting. Oceans and rivers overflow with fish, and what immortal hand or eye could give such to a land that encompassed Great Lakes in the Midwest as well as Northwest and Florida Peninsula, but the one that has endowed our land with ours? Mountains burst with coal and iron ore, oil lay in abundance beneath our feet, and gold and silver and other precious metals for show or for industry abound from the earth. This could be nothing less than a chosen land for a chosen people.
And the people came – and still do – for the bounty this land offers, and for the freedom its people demand.
The people, who came here first, over the land bridge, showed early European settlers how to plant and harvest strange new crops. This altruism and cooperation was short-lived as the historical timeline goes…but it was essential to the progress and survival of all peoples and the Idea. Immigration caused an ebb and flow of cooperation and conflict, as some people came with their fortunes to be made, while others came in shackles and manacles. But they came, and brought with them their language, celebrations, dance, music, art, industry, politics and culinary habits, as well as their religions. Together, as they built a nation and held dominion over a continent, they played, worked, and learned hand in hand. And they married each other not as former rivals from warring nations, aristocrats and peasants from a common land, or masters and servants in ours, but as Americans.
This hodgepodge of individuals with spectrum-wide skills, interests and perspectives wrought miracles from this land and the Idea it fomented – and credit for this success belongs to everyone, and each one, and no one, and Only One.
No single event, person, concept, justice or injustice elucidates the reason for why such apposite fortune fell to this land and its people, but a significant encouragement in these last 250 years has been our form of government. A government, which itself engenders those thousands of years prior to its inception – of the people, by the people, and for the people; a model which strikes a balance between the governed who accede none of their rights to the government and a government that exists at the pleasure of these people.
Should we Americans continue to hold to the Idea that everyone has equal rights to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, and that the single purpose of the government is to protect those rights of Americans everywhere, then “American” will rightly refer to those peoples who have throughout history and spanning continents striven for and craved that which this promised land has delivered. And we will justify the spirit on which Lady Liberty stands, whose first stones of her foundation were set by the migrants forty thousand years ago who followed their food to a land of milk and honey, and so shall her plinth encourage those within and without her patron’s borders to follow their hearts as free men have done for millenia to this paradise we call the Land of the Free and the Home of an Idea called America, secured by those who remain Brave.
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free;
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless,
Tempest-tossed to me
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
