Home > About > Bill Peak's Library Column > Reflections on the Fourth of July
I was struck this year by the number of friends that wrote to tell me on the Fourth how proud they remain of our country, how proud they are to be Americans. Still, I sensed a certain hesitancy in these emails, the suggestion that things hadn’t turned out quite as well as they had expected.
My wife and I went out together for the first time in July of 1976, as the country was celebrating its Bicentennial. Gerald Ford was in the White House, the official reunification of North and South Vietnam after the Communist victory had taken place on July 2nd, and Saigon was now to be known as Ho Chi Minh City. However regretfully, America was beginning to turn its back on the trauma we had experienced in Southeast Asia, starting to look in new directions. We thought we had turned a corner, were hopefully embarking upon a different, a better future.
As Melissa and I celebrate our 50th anniversary, the nation celebrates its 250th, and the wars seem to keep on coming, I think my friends, in their emails, were reassessing their allegiance to our country. And, of course, those emails contained an unstated question for me as well: “How do you feel about America?”
I think that reassessing, that questioning, is a very American trait. Unlike the nations of the Old World that sit upon stalagmites of ancient, unchanging history, America remains young, an experiment, one we’re still tinkering with, one whose foundation we’re still defining and whose future remains an unsettled question. This makes us a hopeful nation, a nation capable of fundamental change.
But of course it also makes us a nation capable of miscues, possibly even fundamental error. If the countries of the Old World sit on muddy stalagmites, it can sometimes feel as if we sit on a racing, unpredictable comet—and at my age, and the age of my friends, the speed and uncertainty of that metaphor can be disorienting. Hence the emails. Where are we going? What will become of this country we so love?
And the Fourth of July in particular has always been a time for taking stock of ourselves, a time to decide how well, or how poorly, we’re living up to the ideals our Founding Fathers set forth in the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams spent the final years of their lives arguing over that point. And then, as if placing some ultimate period at the end of their dialogue, passed away on the same day—July 4th, 1826—precisely fifty years after they signed the famous document.
Asked to comment on our national holiday in July of 1852, Talbot County’s most famous native son, Frederick Douglass, replied, “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.” A quarter of a century later, again on the Fourth, Susan B. Anthony declared “…we cannot forget, even in this glad hour, that while all men of every race and clime and condition have been invested with the full rights of citizenship under our hospitable flag, all women still suffer the degradation of disfranchisement.”
America, in her steady (if occasionally stumbling) wisdom, has long since righted both those wrongs. But more were to come. Wounded Knee. Jim Crow. The Palmer Raids. Japanese-American Internments. The House Un-American Activities Committee.
I spent the summer of 1968 bicycling back and forth across Europe. I was 16-years-old. Lyndon Johnson was in the White House. American troops were in Vietnam. The Tet Offensive was raging.
That summer plunged me into a new youth culture—the European teens I met on trains and in hostels—an adolescent culture that, unlike the one I knew back in Kentucky, wasn't quite as sure as I was that the United States’ adventure in Southeast Asia was such a good idea. This was hard for me. I was used to belonging to, going along with, my age cohort’s views … and suddenly it was no longer cool to think I might someday join the Marine Corps and fight in Vietnam.
By July of that summer I was beginning to seriously question my faith in America—mostly, I’m sure, out of peer pressure, but also, I’d like to think, out of an honest desire to do the right thing. The Fourth found me in a youth hostel outside Copenhagen. A few Americans were among the fifty or so kids staying there. One of these, who had some sparklers, suggested we do something to celebrate our national holiday. A pretty girl from New Jersey dug a small American flag out of her rucksack. All these kids were strangers to me. I don’t think I even knew their names. But they were Americans. They were as close as I could get at that moment to home.
After dinner, our little group wandered out behind the hostel and sat on the lawn that sloped down toward a lake. Somewhat sheepishly—it was still daylight at that latitude—we lit a few sparklers and sang the first verse of the Star Spangled Banner. As I recall, we sang sotto voce, not so much out of fear of offending our European counterparts (they were, by and large, a pretty peaceful lot) as out of a desire to avoid inviting their unspoken censure.
And that was that—yet, for the rest of my life, whenever anyone has asked me how I feel about my country, I have remembered that little impromptu ceremony held on a grassy slope behind a nameless Danish youth hostel. I felt patriotic that day in a new way, a way that had nothing to do with nationalism or xenophobia. For the first time in my life I was, I think, taking adult responsibility for my country. In the midst of an alien culture, I was swearing allegiance to her. But I had been changed by that summer. I no longer swore allegiance blindly. I knew my country to be good and even great, but she was not flawless. Yet I loved her still. I took—and I take—pride in her many virtues.
One of which, of course, is her free public libraries. For libraries embody the very freedoms—the right to learn and advance unimpeded by the powerful few—that our Founding Fathers dreamt all Americans would enjoy when they signed the Declaration of Independence. I encourage you to take advantage of the opportunities provided by ours.