Sermons

Preacher: Lynn Parsons

For many years I have imagined a situation in which, the human race having somehow managed to obliterate itself through a nuclear disaster, or by ignoring the warnings of climate change, leaves behind a virtually unoccupied and deserted planet Earth. A few hundred years later, a research expedition arrives from a distant overpopulated galaxy, seeking information, with the intent of setting up a colony. The expedition arrives near once was known as the Black Hills in what was once the state of South Dakota. They sally forth in search of archeological information. The first piece of evidence they come across is the curious spectacle of four oversized human heads carved on a mountainside. What can this possibly mean?

Well, we know perfectly well what it means. The carvings on Mount Rushmore are the work of Gutzon Borgham and his son Lincoln, who started the work in 1927, and completed in 1939.

But it would not be unreasonable for the expedition to conclude that this was evidence of some sort of primitive totem-worship.

There is no similar spectacle anywhere else, unless it be the carvings of the Buddha in Syria, which was destroyed by the Taliban some years ago as a violation of the injunction against graven images. There is what is claimed to be the preserved corpse of Lenin in Moscow, but these examples of idolatry and hero-worship are not what we ordinarily associate with a democratic republic such as our own.

But it goes further than that.   More than any other political culture of which I am aware, we drag our past leaders into the arena of contemporary politics. This is particularly true of the Founding generation, in spite of Jefferson’s warning.  Would George Washington approve of our invasion of Iraq? Would James Madison support the right of every American to keep an AR-15? Would Abraham Lincoln support reproductive rights? Jefferson and Washington have already been invoked by the NRA in opposition to gun safety legislation. Ben Franklin has been enlisted on behalf of those opposed to increases in the minimum wage. Madison seems to be everywhere, from warning against encroachment by the federal government on our liberties, to the dangers of Obamacare. No other country invokes the memory of past politicians in support or opposition to contemporary politics.

I can’t be sure, but I doubt if the British are particularly concerned about what Winston Churchill might think about climate change. It rarely occurs to Frenchmen to worry about Napoleon’s views on marriage equality. Otto von Bismarck’s views on supply-side economics – if he had any – are of no interest to today’s Germans. If figures from the past are invoked in other nations, they usually are philosophers, artists, composers, or poets.

At the same time however, there has been a sort of backlash by some to disassociate ourselves from our barbarous ancestors.

Students and alumni at Yale University have demanded that the institution change the name of Calhoun Hall on campus to something else. John C. Calhoun was perhaps the most famous alumnus of that college in the nineteenth century. He served at various times as vice president for two different presidents, secretary of state, secretary of war, and United States Senator. But he was also one of the most effective defender of southern slavery of his time. His ideas were no different from most nineteenth-century proslavery thinkers, but he was far more effective than most, which is why some students and others would like to see his name go.

A similar controversy broke out a few months ago at Princeton, where students and others were demanding that Woodrow Wilson’s name be erased from the international relations center named for him. Wilson was not an alumnus, but he was a former president of Princeton and of course, president of the United States. As president at Princeton, Wilson converted the college from a second-rate institution to the first-class university it is today. As president of the United States he pushed through a number of progressive reforms that began the process by which the Democratic Party moved away from its nineteenth-century states-rights ideology to its present status. He led the nation in the Great War, as World War I was then known, and at its conclusion hoped that it would result in a treaty that would create an international body that would prevent future wars, the League of Nations. The League was indeed created, but his own country, to Wilson’s dismay, refused to join it. Wilson predicted that would lead to a second world war.

But Woodrow Wilson had a problem. He was a bigot. Born in Virginia in the 1850s, he never could take African-Americans seriously as part of the electorate. As president he re-segregated the federal civil service and thought the racist movie Birth of a Nation was a great film.

Even Abraham Lincoln has come under fire. Some years ago the African-American editor of Ebony magazine published his book Forced into Glory, which argued that Lincoln was a racist who had little interest in abolishing slavery until forced into it by circumstances, and on more than one occasion referred to American blacks as “niggers.”

So we here is the situation as I see it. We Americans want to be close to our barbarous ancestors, but at the same time we want them to be more like us, and when it turns out they are not, we are sometimes embarrassed. So let me suggest that it is a matter of deciding what is important, which gets priority, without concealing the rest.

For example, it is important to know that Thomas Jefferson probably fathered several children by one of his slaves. But it is also important to see him as the author of the Declaration of Independence and to accept the inherent contradiction between the two as typical of the era in which he lived.

It is important to know that Woodrow Wilson was a product of the proslavery culture into which he was born, and was never able to break free from it. But it is also important to know that he had a vision of a peaceful world order without war that became the inspiration for today’s United Nations, for which he received the Nobel Prize for Peace.

It is important to know that Abraham Lincoln’s views on race would not qualify him for membership in today’s NAACP, but it is also important to remember that in the end he recognized that preserving the Union and destroying slavery were inextricably linked together, that Americans could not have one without the other, and that in time Jefferson’s Declaration applied to all Americans.

So I agree with James McPherson, the Civil War historian who wrote many years ago that what is significant is not the degree to which figures of the past are typical of their times, but the degree to which they are not typical of their times. Certainly that is true of Jefferson, of Lincoln, and of Wilson.

I’m not sure about Calhoun. I’ll leave that to the Yalies.

So when Kent inquired if I would be interested in providing some remarks befitting the eve of the Fourth of July, I agreed to do it. I thought I might take the occasion to offer some thoughts on the Founders, or the Founding Fathers, as we used to call them. That is, I suppose, an example of what some would call “political correctness”, a term derided these days by one of our presidential candidates as an attempt to muzzle the truth, or at least the truth as he sees it. It is often used to accuse liberals and others of timidity in their unwillingness to offend ethnic minorities, women, or indeed anyone else who does not conform to the traditional conservative vision of America. It also gives license to men and women with political aspirations to appeal to racial, ethnic, or religious stereotypes and get away with it.

But it does touch upon some legitimate issues having to do with the language we use in describing ourselves, both in the present and the past. Changing from “Fathers” to “Founders”, for example, is not an attack on American masculinity, but rather an acknowledgment that the achievements of that generation were not limited to those with the “xy” sex determinate in their chromosomes. Abigail Adams would have agreed (although she would have absolutely no idea of what we were talking about).

I’m told that one of our two major political parties this month will again declare and support the idea of American “exceptionalism,” that is, that of all the other peoples on the planet, the United States stands apart. We are unique. We are special. Our history and our culture are unlike that of any other, and the rest of the world had better understand that. There may be some truth to that claim, although some cynics might argue that our exceptionalism lies in our talent for promoting buffoons and charlatans in our contemporary political arena.

Nonetheless, on this, the eve of the Fourth of July, I’m willing to agree that the cluster of merchants, lawyers, and slaveholders who helped to create the American Republic in the late eighteenth century were indeed remarkable, even exceptional, in their day. Their writings, including the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist essays, the Bill of Rights, and even the Constitution itself, are brilliant expressions of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment.

There was nothing particularly original in their ideas. But as the great American historian Robert Palmer has pointed out, it was one thing to express those ideas on paper; it was another to put them into practice. Americans were the very first to specifically proclaim that government’s power should rest upon consent of the governed, that its purpose is to protect and defend the rights of individuals, that citizens should by equal before the law, and that, to use Jefferson’s words again, there should be “a wall of separation” between church and state – and then seek to implement them through laws and constitutions.

But these are eighteenth-century ideas.   There may be some, perhaps some sitting on the Supreme Court of the United States, who believe that all progress in political wisdom somehow stopped in 1789, and that subsequent scholars and judges have only to consult the Founders of the eighteenth-century republic for guidance in a twenty-first century democracy.

The notions of community, the idea of the greater good, and the conviction that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, seldom occurred to the Founders       . These are not radical ideas. They can be found, for example, not in the eighteenth century, but in the seventeenth, in the words of Governor John Winthrop, quoted here only recently by our friend, the Rev. Scott Jones. Winthrop urged the future citizens of the Massachusetts Bay colony to consider, in his words, that

“. . . . we must be knit together, in this work, as one man. We must entertain each other in brotherly affection. We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others’ necessities. . . . We must delight in each other; make others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body.”

This notion of community is absent from most eighteenth-century thought. So too is the notion of popular government.   The idea that propertyless men (to say nothing of women) could have a direct role in government would have made them extremely uneasy, to say the least.   That citizens should be able to organize themselves into political parties was even more abhorrent. And people from non-European backgrounds were not even considered.

Some have tried, the Supreme Court to the contrary notwithstanding, to move beyond, and improve upon those eighteenth-century limitations. Years ago, Garry Wills, in his book Lincoln at Gettysburg, maintained that that is what Abraham Lincoln did there, that he had a hidden agenda, so to speak, which was to move American political values away from the eighteenth-century republic into the nineteenth-century democracy. And that is why another UUCC friend, the Rev. Duncan Newcomer, was correct in emphasizing a few weeks ago the importance of “the people” in the Gettysburg Address. It should be read, in his and my view, with emphasis on the nouns and not the prepositions: “For the people. By the people. Of the people.” Not only that, but better emphasis, in my opinion, should on the word “new”, as in “Our Fathers brought forth a new nation, conceived in liberty, etc.”   (We shall gloss over the awkward question of how the fathers are doing the conceiving in the eighteenth century, and not the mothers.)

So it is Wills’ contention that the folks who walked away after the ceremonies at Gettysburg in that November of 1863 walked into a different nation from that in which they had grown up, that they had had – to use Wills’ delightful words – their intellectual pockets picked.   Indeed, Lincoln, the pocket-picker, may have picked more than even he knew.

For many Americans the Founders are often seen historically as a unit, even a family, united in their determination to write a new chapter in history. Historian Joseph Ellis believed the term “Founding Brothers” is a better metaphor. But this can be misleading also. The politics of their day offers us examples of a dysfunctional family: quarreling, backbiting, slander, and in one well-known case, fratricide, both symbolic and literal.

There are many cases to be cited. Perhaps the best-known is the on-again, off-again, on-again relationship between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, about which I had some fun with the help of Ralph Chapman in out play reading a year ago. Both signers of the Declaration, they were pulled apart, not so much by personal ambition as by the partisanship of their followers. Their eventual reconciliation through the mails, brought about by intermediaries, is one of the happier stories of the Early Republic.

Less happy is the story of the relationship between two of the finest minds of that generation, the Virginian James Madison and the New Yorker Alexander Hamilton. They cooperated closely in developing strategies for getting the Constitution adopted by the several states, and the Federalist essays are part of that strategy. But no sooner had the new President Washington appointed Hamilton as his Treasury Secretary than the Virginian became suspicious of the New Yorker, coming to believe, not without some justice, that Hamilton was attempting to consolidate both economic and political power in the hands of bankers and merchants at the expense of the farmers and plantation owners in the South and elsewhere. That ended their friendship, and contented themselves with pelting one another with diatribes and attacks in the public press.

Even less happy is the story of Thomas Paine and George Washington. Paine’s writings in 1776 idolized the general as the leader in the American war for independence, but twenty years later differences over the proper American response to the French Revolution drove them apart, so much so that Paine would observe of his former hero that history could only speculate on whether Washington had betrayed his original principles, or whether he ever had any in the first place.

During the war, Washington was assisted by two ambitious young men, Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, each of whom would play significant roles in the early republic, one as treasury secretary and the other as a United States senator and the nation’s third vice president. But that is not what Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton are remembered for, certainly not these days. Hamilton, of course, is the central figure in the hip-hop musical currently to be seen on Broadway, and is sold out, I’m told, well into next year and will eventually tour the nation. My wife and I took out a small mortgage on our house so we can see it in New York sometime in December.

Full disclosure here. My doctoral dissertation in 1967 was about Alexander Hamilton, and my youngest son Jonathan’s middle name is “Alexander,” as a consequence. The dissertation was not a biography, of which we have more than enough, but about his image among historians and in popular culture in the years after his death.

But like everyone else, I ignored the very aspects of his life that made him so attractive to Lin-Manuel Miranda and his multicultural cast. Hamilton was an outsider, born in the Caribbean. His parents never bothered to get married – the “bastard brat of a scotch pedlar” – John Adams sneered, more than once. Unlike most of the rest of well-born Founders, he was self-made. And he was the only one amongst them to forthrightly and unequivocably denounce American slavery.

The “Hamilton”, the musical, has sparked renewed interest in his life, offering the most recent example of how we still try to relate to “our barbarous ancestors.” Almost overnight Alexander Hamilton has been transformed from the “Dead White Male” stereotype, the staunch conservative, the aggressive capitalist, the power-hungry militarist feared by Jefferson and Adams, into the epitome of the American success story, long before Horatio Alger thought of it.

For awhile he was in danger of being kicked off the ten-dollar bill until Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical rescued him.  Originally the plan was to follow through with Abigail Adams’ plea to “remember the ladies” by placing one or more of them on our currency – something long overdue, most of us would agree. Who the “lady” will be has yet to be determined, but it is likely to be a woman of color. Hamilton is no longer in jeopardy, but rather Andrew Jackson, the hot-tempered. dueling, slaveholding, Indian-killer. This is not “political correctness,” it is a step toward diversity, toward historical inclusivity for women and minorities, something well worth observing tomorrow, as Abigail’s husband wrote, with pomp and parade, with bells and bonfires, from one end of this continent to the other.