OF TREE, NEVERTHELESS, I SING:
McCarthy, Abigail
ABIGAIL MCCARTHY OF THEE, NEVERTHELESS, I SING With his book of this title pub-lished in May this year, William Lee Miller gave me back the Fourth of July. In the small town of my child-hood the...
...Many who shared the rancid anti-Americanism of the Vietnam period came suddenly to appreciate the nation's constitutional foundations when Senator Sam Ervin appeared on the television screen...
...But not with much heart...
...He gives two reasons...
...Why, of all the "radical" books, was Charles Reich's The Greening of America so popular...
...The moral and intellec-tual substance in the population is at least as important as the shape of in-stitutions...
...Beneath those rituals we felt the affirmations which underlay our lives-of self, faith, family, country...
...We have not always done it so badly...
...Contradic-tions multiplied, and, finally, there was Vietnam...
...no, as Miller puts it, "speaking up for America...
...We had been reas-sured, year by year, by the annual rituals-of Thanksgiving, Christmas, birthdays, the Fourth of July...
...It is not auto-matic...
...Among times when the choice was made he lists those of our response to the Depression, our role in the defeat of Nazism, our alliance with the free world as opposed to a new isolationism, the civil rights movement and legislation, our final resistance to McCarthyism, and the outcome of Watergate...
...There were things wrong with all this, things having to do with danger and bombast, but, like every true cele-bration, it was the symbolic expression of a shared belief deeply held and so basic, that it added to the shape and worth of life...
...We believed that we lived in a free country "dedicated to the proposition that all men are creat-ed equal," a country with "liberty and justice for all...
...There is much more that is clear, and simply put, but reflecting thorough-ly digested hard thought: "The democratic polity is not.easy, but difficult...
...The elements in the cultural heritage are there...
...Such feeling, which we all shared, was the result of our defective political culture -"even the nation itself, let alone a particular political movement, should not pretend to provide the sources of value and the springs of cultural re-newal...
...these should not give men and women the symbols of ultimate mean-ing and evoke their final loyalty...
...He examines these dispassionately, wittily, and with such matter of fact common sense that it is almost easy to miss the insights...
...Why did the mourning for President Kennedy go so far beyond "the grief and sorrow one feels for a slain statesman...
...And this moral enterprise has an intellectual component...
...Finally, at night, in our own front yard, our own fireworks- skyrockets, Roman candles, and, in my memory the best of all, the magical circling sparklers...
...Because "the public attachment had a larger component of sheer cele-bration: of 'spiritual employment.' (Here he is using a phrase from a Schlesinger memo to Kennedy...
...One is that we do have free insti-tutions under the law...
...And the Fourth on which people close to me argued when I wanted to hang out the flag...
...Its characteristics are the results of choice, which in turn are rooted in the values of the citizens, and in the sharing of those values in the culture...
...We knew what that some-thing good was...
...Free institutions perform well only if free men act responsibly . . . The choice is there...
...Because it mixed a ferocious indict-ment of the consumer society-radi-cals prefer a monolithic evil-with "optimistic evangelism" by promising a revolution which did not require violence or organized effort but which would "seep" by the spreading of a change of consciousness...
...He is well aware of our failures, our lapses and our confusions...
...Or was...
...The first sound we heard that morning was the far-off bang of a Minnesota limit-the largest firecracker allowed -set off by someone who couldn't wait a minute longer...
...And that in turn requires that one genera-tion pass on to the next its effort to understand how justice and the public good are served by the institutions of the society...
...We woke on those mornings with the sure sense that something good was going to happen...
...Later,- after the satisfaction of the noise and the wonderful acrid smell that went with it, there was the parade moving slow-ly between the flags on standards all down Main Street, once or twice a balloon ascension, and always bands and speeches...
...The Fourth was part of the freedom and glory of summer when we ran barefoot under the maples, swam in the river, and climbed the bluffs...
...Such loyalty and meaning should come from the realms of freedom, truth and mys-tery that lie beyond the social ordering that is the task of politics...
...This book is no apologia...
...But it was still my flag, and 1 wanted to say with William Lee Miller, "Of thee, nevertheless, I sing...
...It does not arise out of mechan-ical historical forces...
...I knew that the flag was flaunted then to symbolize the approval of racism, imperialism and the suppression of dis-sent...
...Then we were up and into our own store...
...It heartens me, now, that Miller acknowledges all our faults and defi-ciencies, but that he can conclude flatly, "This now not so new nation, despite its particular defects, does have still the continuing possibility of being the kind of society 'our fathers' conceived and brought forth on this continent...
...It is a moral enterprise...
...By an intricate combina-tion of the integrity of particular in-dividuals, the viability of several in-stitutions, the gradual moral under-standing of the public, and luck, we made our way out of the threat to the constitutional system represented by the Nixon scandals...
...In a compli-cated arena of choice, one needs the intellectual work of interpretation...
...This body of ideals is more widely under-stood and appreciated than similar ideals anywhere else...
...He sees them as stemming from "a defective political culture" of which our most recent history gives a series of object lessons...
...All this re-quired a common ethos, a "body of ideals," and he cites Gunnar Myrdal: "America, compared to every other country in Western civilization, large or small, has the most explicitly ex-pressed system of general ideals in reference to human interrelations...
...We can keep trying...
...We learned, of course, as the years passed, that there was a great deal of work to be done before liberty and justice was a reality for all, and that every bit of past accomplishment in attaining equality had to be vigilantly guarded and maintained...
...The society has been open enough and free enough to correct many of its own errors, and to make possible the continuing humane improvement of its social arrangements, if the citizenry decides to do it...
...We can earn our Fourths and do as we did this year- picnic, parade and break out the flags...
...It rests upon a culture that is freely formed out of the values and ideas and interests of the persons who make up the society...
...Italics mine) The other reason, he says, is that the citizens sometimes have decided to do just that...
...In the small town of my child-hood the year was punctuated by mornings of wild expectation-some giddier than others but all joyous...
Vol. 102 • July 1975 • No. 9
