The July 4 Speeches That Helped Define What America Is- Or What It Should Be, Lessons
- "The July 4 speeches that helped define what America is- or what it should be." By David M. Shribman, The Los Angeles Times, July 2, 2020. Excerpts, Ed.:
Generations ago, America’s leading political figures delivered many of their most eloquent orations not in the chambers of the Capitol but from local gazebos and bandstands on Independence Day. Before large crowds on town greens or in front of fire halls, they would harken back to the lessons of the nation’s Founders, often holding their audiences spellbound for an hour, perhaps even more. American presidents still deliver pro-forma July Fourth messages; last year President Trump, in a remarkable personal version of history and the capabilities of George Washington’s Revolutionary War forces, said that "our Army manned the air, it rammed the ramparts, it took over the airports."
But the grand tradition of the Independence Day oration has largely disappeared. Today’s audiences are unaccustomed to the patriotic rhetoric that once commanded attention.. “A politician’s Fourth of July speech may seem anodyne and clichéd," said Rutgers historian David Greenberg. “But it also contributes in some way to understanding and perhaps subtly redefining, in that moment and from that political perspective, what Americanism is or should be.”
And there are lessons in these orations of a long-ago age. They are period pieces, and yet they underline in the 21st century how the 18th century Enlightenment values embedded in the Declaration of Independence have not been redeemed or realized. “If democracy is America's civic religion, then its sacred text is the Declaration of Independence," said Martin Kaplan, a USC expert on media and society. “What better occasion for a secular sermon about our founding values than the anniversary of our birth certificate? The first time many Americans heard their unalienable rights proclaimed was with their own ears, listening to its text. In a way, every Fourth of July speech since then has been a reenactment of that first declaration, renewed and recommitted in the terms of its changing times.”
~ So as the 244th celebration of American Independence draws near, let us pause and draw inspiration, and perhaps wisdom, from this holiday sampler of Fourth of July addresses of the past:
- Daniel Webster, July 4, 1800: “It becomes us, on whom the defence of our country will ere long devolve, this day, most seriously to reflect on the duties incumbent upon us. Our ancestors bravely snatched expiring liberty from the grasp of Britain, whose touch is poison... Shall we, their descendants, now basely disgrace our lineage, and pusillanimously disclaim the legacy bequeathed to us? ”..At age 18, Webster consciously looked to the past (by invoking the greatness of Washington, who had died earlier that year) and eerily foreshadowed the future (by providing a direct antecedent to the message John F. Kennedy would offer when he bid Americans to “ask what you can do for your country'). These words also remind us that these moral principles are at the heart of the American creed, a theme that John Quincy Adams would return to on July 4, 1821, when he spoke of how the American Revolution “swept away all the rubbish of accumulated centuries of servitude” and “proved that the social compact was no figment of the imagination, but a real, solid, and sacred bond of the social union.”
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- Charles Sumner, July 4, 1845: “Nothing resembles God more than that man among us who has arrived at the highest degree of justice. The true greatness of nations is in those qualities which constitute the greatness of the individual..Sumner would become known as one of the Senate’s most ardent opponents of slavery.. ~~~
- Frederick Douglass, July 5, 1852: “The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me...
- Read More including speeches by Edward Everett, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Susan B. Anthony, Charles Francis Adams and John F. Kennedy...
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