Civility and the American Spirit
By Jim Leach, Chairman, National Endowment for the Humanities National Endowment for the Humanities Chairman Jim Leach notes that our incivility has made the bonds of citizenship increasingly fragile. He holds that the problem is not argumentation, but rather debate filled with the vocabulary of animus and a failure to listen. He also shares his “two-minute courses in American governance,” (political science, literature, psychology, physics, etc.) to explore the ways in which current social realities undermine efforts to achieve a more civil discourse.
It is a privilege to celebrate the Fourth of July at Chautauqua. This is the day of the year to take stock, to remind ourselves of what each of us has in common, what we owe prior generations, what lessons can be gleaned from our history, and what obligations that history requires we embrace in these fractious times.
In the 235 years since our founders pledged their lives, fortunes and sacred honor to establish a union based on the precept that all men are created equal, Fourth of July addresses have been a barometer of our nation’s evolving challenges—from independence to emancipation to reconstruction to globalism; from women’s suffrage to civil rights; from public works and public welfare to concerns for governmental over-reaching; from reasons that propel us to war to concerns that cause us to secure peace. This year is the sesquicentennial of the first battles of a Civil War in which 620,000 soldiers lost their lives marching to the drums of two contrasting senses of patriotism.
Nine years before the attack on Fort Sumter, Frederick Douglass chose the Fourth of July to remind our young country that the “inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence” bequeathed by our founders was not shared by millions of enslaved Americans.
Four score and ten years after Douglas’s stirring oration—five months and three days before Pearl Harbor—Franklin Delano Roosevelt soberly warned that America could not survive as an “oasis of liberty” surrounded by a “desert of dictatorship.” Without 400,000 American patriots giving the ultimate sacrifice, most of Europe might today be under the totalitarian jackboot of the Third Reich and much of Asia could still be subject to Japanese imperialism.
As we take stock this Fourth of July, Americans face new challenges, some of our own making. We are at war in two Islamic countries and are dropping bombs in four others. Unemployment is disturbingly high. Income disparity is widening. Management of debt at various levels of government and in the family home has become the largest issue for many citizens. As a 38