II. “What Is It Then Between Us?”
No one participating in the debate over the Constitution could foresee the republic we have now. Today, the United States has a population of 330 million—eighty-five times greater than in 1790. The framers, the small number of leaders who assembled in Philadelphia to create a new Constitution, would likely be astonished that the nation has endured this long. Even as they looked to the future to guide their hopes, they were aware that most nations were short-lived. Certainly they would never have pictured a nation of this size, wealth, and strength; a nation that spans a continent; an economy that drives the productivity and wealth of the rest of the world; a military that can overwhelm all others.
Likewise, the framers could not have imagined the extent of our democracy. Their government guarded against—even more than it empowered—direct participation of the people. Under the Constitution, voters—almost entirely composed of white male property holders—directly chose only one-half of one branch of the government.3 The framers would never have conceived that we would directly elect senators or that states would ever yield to voters the power to elect the president. They particularly would never have imagined the extent to which the franchise is now shared by so many citizens, not just white men with property. Some would be astonished that we have abolished the inhuman cruelty of slavery, although others would be profoundly disappointed at how slow our progress has been in addressing racism and injustice. Inthis moment, the framers would be captivated by our continuing struggle to live up to the aspiration enshrined in the Declaration of Independence: that all people are created equal.
The framers shared a simple, revolutionary idea of what it meant to be citizens of the United States—an understanding that we can never take for granted and that suffers when we neglect or distort it. In other nations, citizens were subjects of a king, but the framers saw the citizens of the United States, through their vote, as the sovereign rulers.
Those who fought the Revolution and ratified the Constitution we properly call founders. But others who came afterward, who shaped our republic and through their enormous sacrifice and patriotism made it more democratic and fair, should also be called founders, along with everyone who has done the work of shaping these ideals—in our neighborhoods, workplaces, and union halls; our pulpits and congregations; our armed forces and emergency services; our classrooms, dinner tables, school boards, city councils, and state legislatures.
In moments of reflection, I often think of Thoreau’s defiant individualism in “Resistance to Civil Government.” He summons citizens to demand a morally accountable government:
But, to speak practically and as a citizen, unlike those who call themselves no-government men, I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government. Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it.
More often I think of Zora Neale Hurston’s chiding sense of humor in How It Feels to Be Colored Me:
I have no separate feeling about being an American citizen and colored. I am merely a fragment of the Great Soul that surges within the boundaries. My country, right or wrong.
Hurston shares with Thoreau an urgency for telling the truth, for feeling out the gap between what we wish for and what we tolerate. Her nuanced inflection on the patriot’s cliché—“My country right or wrong”—takes subtle ownership of even the most egregious forms of injustice as something to be made right. Every one of us must own our country’s wrongs, just as we take pride in what the country gets right. Ultimately, Hurston refuses to grant herself the privilege of withdrawing allegiance, no matter how wrong her country might be.
Above all, I return to Walt Whitman’s mind-clearing poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” His visionary description of his relationship with his fellow travelers reminds us how we as citizens should comport ourselves in a pluralist republic. Whitman, heading across the East River, surveys the crowd of men and women around him on the boat and asks, “What is it then between us?” Like him, they are all in motion, and that motion is not random and scattering. As they travel, they share the same experience, and they share it with countless others.
Others will enter the gates of the ferry and cross from shore to shore,
Others will watch the run of the flood-tide,
Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and west, and the heights of Brooklyn to the south and east,
Others will see the islands large and small;
Fifty years hence, others will see them as they cross, the sun half an hour high,
A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence, others will see them,
Will enjoy the sunset, the pouring-in of the flood-tide, the falling-back to the sea of the ebb-tide.
It is a shared experience that reaches beyond distance, beyond the present moment. However different, as travelers they are united with all others like them. And in this Whitman finds faith, not in a world greater than the one he shares with his fellow travelers, but in them, as people.
What gods can exceed these that clasp me by the hand, and with voices I love call me promptly and loudly by my nighest name as I approach?
What is more subtle than this which ties me to the woman or man that looks in my face?
Which fuses me into you now, and pours my meaning into you?
We understand then do we not?
What I promis’d without mentioning it, have you not accepted?
What the study could not teach—what the preaching could not accomplish is accomplish’d, is it not?
Whitman offers us, as people all on the same journey, now and in the future, a faith in one another to which we must aspire as citizens if we are to thrive together. When American citizenship is understood this way—which is to say when it is understood properly—we should have no difficulty grasping its powerful attraction. It unites us in spite of our vast geography, our myriad differences, and our tumultuous history.
It avails not, time nor place—distance avails not,
I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence,
Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt,
Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd,
Just as you are refresh’d by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was refresh’d,
Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift current, I stood yet was hurried,
Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships and the thick-stemm’d pipes of steamboats, I look’d.
Citizenship becomes a generous and welcoming invitation to share a world bigger than any one of us.
… we plant you permanently within us,
We fathom you not—we love you—there is perfection in you also,
You furnish your parts toward eternity,
Great or small, you furnish your parts toward the soul.
Anyone who doubts the allure of full American citizenship should think upon the words of—or, as Whitman would prefer, look face-to-face at—someone who is denied that fullness. There you will encounter another founder. The list of these other founders is long and honorable. It includes those who sought the vote; those who expected the freedom of rule by law and safety from the vigilante justice of lynch mobs; those who knew they should share the same working conditions granted as rights to others; those who were the first to graduate from high school and college; those who were the first to be seated on a city council, school board, or legislative assembly; those who strove to see the lives of their children exceed the expectations and opportunities they themselves were afforded by their parents and grandparents. Their demand is fundamentally the same as that made by the hundred signers of the “Declaration of Sentiments” adopted at the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention—mainly but not entirely women seeking the same civil rights and liberties as men: “Because women do feel themselves aggrieved, oppressed, and fraudulentl
y deprived of their most sacred rights, we insist that they have immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of these United States.”
Should you ever question the urgency of a vigilant citizen’s demands, you should weigh the hard words that Frederick Douglass spoke to so many comfortable patriots celebrating the Fourth of July in Rochester, New York, in 1852.4 He addressed his audience as equals while asking them to consider a past they did not yet fully share with him:
Fellow Citizens, I am not wanting in respect for the fathers of this republic. The signers of the Declaration of Independence were brave men. They were great men too—great enough to give fame to a great age. It does not often happen to a nation to raise, at one time, such a number of truly great men. The point from which I am compelled to view them is not, certainly, the most favorable; and yet I cannot contemplate their great deeds with less than admiration. They were statesmen, patriots and heroes, and for the good they did, and the principles they contended for, I will unite with you to honor their memory.
They loved their country better than their own private interests; and, though this is not the highest form of human excellence, all will concede that it is a rare virtue, and that when it is exhibited, it ought to command respect. He who will, intelligently, lay down his life for his country, is a man whom it is not in human nature to despise. Your fathers staked their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor, on the cause of their country. In their admiration of liberty, they lost sight of all other interests.
They were peace men; but they preferred revolution to peaceful submission to bondage. They were quiet men; but they did not shrink from agitating against oppression. They showed forbearance; but that they knew its limits. They believed in order; but not in the order of tyranny.
Then Douglass turned the tables. At the moment when his audience would be happy to rest on history’s accomplishments, he warned them to beware complacency: Americans, who “are remarkably familiar with all facts which make in their own favor,” cannot let the liberty earned by their forefathers be their excuse to ignore present tyrannies:
Your fathers have lived, died, and have done their work, and have done much of it well. You live and must die, and you must do your work. You have no right to enjoy a child’s share in the labor of your fathers, unless your children are to be blest by your labors. You have no right to wear out and waste the hard-earned fame of your fathers to cover your indolence.
Having refused to let them off the hook by virtue of their history, he laid into their hypocrisy.
The existence of slavery in this country brands your republicanism as a sham, your humanity as a base pretence, and your Christianity as a lie. It destroys your moral power abroad; it corrupts your politicians at home. It saps the foundation of religion; it makes your name a hissing, and a by word to a mocking earth. It is the antagonistic force in your government, the only thing that seriously disturbs and endangers your Union. It fetters your progress; it is the enemy of improvement, the deadly foe of education; it fosters pride; it breeds insolence; it promotes vice; it shelters crime; it is a curse to the earth that supports it; and yet, you cling to it, as if it were the sheet anchor of all your hopes.
His criticism is a ferocious reminder, to us as much as to the people he addressed so long ago, that we will always be culpable for the injustices of our era, regardless of any justice that precedes it. That is why he told them, “My business if I have any here to-day, is with the present.”
So too is ours.
In 1958, Martin Luther King declared that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Although we find it a comfort to believe so, we should remember that in the whirlwind of national agitation, we are all too likely to look back on our past for unearned permission to let wrongdoing pass now—as something that will surely be resolved sooner or later. This delusion is fatal.
In early 1942, shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, calling for the newly formed War Relocation Authority to wrest Japanese American citizens from their homes and exile them to prison-like camps. Some were located in rural Colorado. Some Coloradans in communities near the camps voiced a groundless and shameful fear of their fellow citizens and objected to their presence. The response of the Republican governor of Colorado, Ralph Carr—who opposed the internment policy—helps demonstrate what “our business with the present” actually looks like when people of principle take it in hand. Speaking to an audience of angry citizens, Carr explained first:
I am talking to … all American people whether their status be white, brown or black and regardless of the birthplaces of their grandfathers when I say that if a majority may deprive a minority of its freedom, contrary to the terms of the Constitution today, then you as a minority may be subjected to the same ill will of the majority tomorrow.
He went on to say of the Japanese Americans wrongfully held in captivity:
They are not going to take over the vegetable business of this state, and they are not going to take over the Arkansas Valley. But the Japanese are protected by the same Constitution that protects us. An American citizen of Japanese descent has the same rights as any other citizen … If you harm them, you must first harm me. I was brought up in small towns where I knew the shame and dishonor of race hatred. I grew to despise it because it threatened [pointing to various audience members] the happiness of you and you and you.
At this moment the moral arc of the universe bent toward justice only because Ralph Carr chose to pull it in that direction. His example should also make us wonder what would have happened had he not been there.
Carr reminds us that one duty of citizens is to be strong when others are vulnerable. Another Coloradan, Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales, in his bilingual poem “I Am Joaquin/Yo Soy Joaquin,” conveys the same message. Speaking back to us from the future, in the voice of his son Joaquin, Gonzales asserts that one way to live life as a founder is to persevere in the cause of justice:5
I have endured in the rugged mountains
Of our country
I have survived the toils and slavery of the fields.
I have existed
In the barrios of the city
In the suburbs of bigotry
In the mines of social snobbery
In the prisons of dejection
In the muck of exploitation
And
In the fierce heat of racial hatred.
And now the trumpet sounds,
The music of the people stirs the
Revolution.
Like a sleeping giant it slowly
Rears its head
To the sound of
Tramping feet
Clamoring voices
Mariachi strains
Fiery tequila explosions
The smell of chile verde and
Soft brown eyes of expectation for a
Better life.
I SHALL ENDURE!
I WILL ENDURE!
Joaquin’s final exclamation—shouting to us, his forebearers—can be understood as a rallying cry for young Dreamers, who, like him, want nothing more than to be citizens of the United States. In many ways, Joaquin’s demand is no different from the revolutionary call of America’s founders in 1776.
The ties of citizenship are as demanding as they are lovely. Citizenship always balances between a generous approach to our aspirations and the temptation to keep the benefits for ourselves. The necessary give-and-take of citizenship is enacted now, not later. It is enacted now, on this passage of the ferry. It is not something that happened once upon a time, and it is not a burden that we can simply ask the future to bear. Citizenship in a republic always occurs in the present.
III. Opposite Day
In his book on the fall of Rome, Montesquieu describes the obligation of republican governments to repair themselves. “In a word, a free government, that is, one always in a state of agitation, cannot surviv
e if it cannot correct its faults by its own laws.” For most of our history, because we are a republic, the United States has been in “a state of agitation.” Over the past decade, our central failure has been our inability to correct our faults by our own laws.6
As I look back on a decade in the Senate, I can’t help being haunted by a profound sense of lost opportunity. Instead of figuring out a bipartisan way to pay our bills—the only way we will pay them—we posted record deficits during years of economic growth and yet at the same time we underinvested in the next generation. Instead of perpetuating a bipartisan tradition of confirming nominees to the Supreme Court, we chose to adopt a purely partisan process, risking that the court will become just another partisan institution. Instead of adopting policies that would ensure America’s leadership in the new energy economy while playing our part in diminishing the threat of climate change, we championed the benefits of coal and other fossil fuels—and stood alone in the world, denying that climate change is real. Instead of preserving Americans’ faith that they have a means to influence their government’s agenda, we created a campaign finance system that transformed money into speech and allowed those with the most money to pursue the power to call the shots in our democracy. Instead of passing a bipartisan bill that secured our border, gave us the ability to detect who was here illegally and who was not, and provided a tough but fair pathway to citizenship for millions of people—almost all of whom are contributing in one way or another to our economy and our country—we elected a president who demonized immigrants and called for reducing legal immigration by half. Finally, instead of upholding our end of a negotiated arms control agreement which involved many of our allies and with which an enemy was largely complying, we overrode the advice of our own intelligence agencies and scuttled the deal. At the same time, the administration heralded an illusory nuclear deal with the North Korean dictator and denied that Russia relentlessly interfered with our 2016 elections.
The Land of Flickering Lights Page 25