In anticipation of the birthday of our country, I listened to a magnificent choral version of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” over the weekend.
My mind immediately flashed to the early 1860s, which some of us have come to think of as the glamourous mid-term days of the Civil War.
Had we lived through the War Between the States, no doubt the times would have felt uglier, angrier than the Vietnam War, a thousand times worse than the timid current reactions to Afghanistan.
Whether it is because I am a mid-level student of Lincoln and of his burden of the war, or there is a more esoteric reason, studying the Civil War always has felt like watching a tremendously elevating movie. I want to rise and salu
Even though he was but a child (b. 1854), I associate every day of the Civil War, the main defining moment in our country’s golden history, with the majestic John Philip Sousa and his marvelous array of spirited marches.
You mean Sousa’s fancy-stepping musicians did not march alongside Union troops, repeatedly belting out the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” to encourage our boys?
One of the magical interludes of my mature life was returning to my hometown in the 1990s and doing an interview with an elderly gentleman who had served as the City Manager when I was growing up. More interestingly, he conducted the Elks Band that performed weekly summertime concerts in Fountain Park all the seasons of my youth.
Only at the end did I learn that Mr. Hance had actually played with the Sousa band, briefly, when he was a young man. Since Sousa died in 1932, at age 78, Mr. Hance would have been in his 20s when he received the call.
War almost has a dirtier name today than Republicans — but the heroism of our brave boys in the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf Wars, Iraq, Afghanistan must never be diminished.
Not a Candle for Each Year
We are 235 years old today, and the other day I was reading lofty rhetoric pronounced by President Coolidge on our 150th birthday in 1926.
Who would have thought? Such a wretchedly undervalued man by the envious left.
He said of the Declaration of Independence that it “represented the movement of a people…a great mass of independent, liberty-loving, God-fearing people who knew their rights and possessed the courage to dare to maintain them.”
Mr. Coolidge, never associated with lofty rhetoric, and demeaned without relief by liberal historians, called the Declaration of Independence a great spiritual document. He said:
“Equality, liberty, popular sovereignty, the rights of man…are ideals. They have their source and their roots in the religious convictions…Unless the faith of the American people in these religious convictions is to endure, the principles of our Declaration will perish.”
Mr. Coolidge, who eventually died of a broken heart over the loss of a young son, also said, luminously:
From a Gifted, Patriotic Mind
“We live in an age of science and of abounding accumulation of material things. These did not create our Declaration. Our Declaration created them. The things of the spirit come first…If we are to maintain the great heritage which has been bequeathed to us, we must be likeminded as the fathers who created it. We must not sink into a pagan materialism. We must cultivate the reverence which they had for the things which are holy. We must follow the spiritual and moral leadership which they showed. We must keep replenished, that they may glow with a more compelling flame the altar fires before which they worshipped.”
Ponder and digest this splendid, diamond-encrusted patriotism.
July 4 — the three syllables silkily march off your tongue the way that Jan. 9 or Aug. 11 does not. The way that “God Bless America” does at a sporting event.
One of history’s most resonant footnotes is that 100 years to the day before Mr. Coolidge out-orated all but two of his predecessors and all but one of his successors,1826, the golden anniversary of the Declaration, two Presidents died, hours apart, our second and third.
Perhaps apocryphally, John Adams’s final words were, “Thomas Jefferson survives.” But Jefferson had died earlier in that pre-CNN day. James Monroe, No. 5, died on July 4, 1831.
And Mr. Coolidge, reversing the trend, was born on July 4, 1872.
Sadly, we are led today by a history-scorning President who would choke before placing “great” and “America” in the same sentence. Nothing should be expected from such an undereducated lightweight who forcefully denies American exceptionalism and America’s manifest destiny. Intellectually, he never has surprised, only disappointed.
Rather than allowing his depressing shadow to taint a date that should remain untaintable, I raise a toast to our great country’s history and, please God, future. Surely we have survived worse.
