Help Wanted: Moral Leadership
In his Farewell Address, George Washington offered some "warnings of a parting friend." He pleaded for unity against "the first dawning of every attempt to alienate any portion of our country from the rest." Recognizing human nature could be selfish, he reminded the young nation that "[I]t is substantially true that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government."
In his First Inaugural, after an election that threatened to tear the nation apart, Thomas Jefferson urged the country to "restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things." He reminded them that "having banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled and suffered, we have yet gained little if we countenance a political intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of as bitter and bloody persecutions."
As the nation perched on the precipice of Civil War, Abraham Lincoln gave his First Inaugural. "We are not enemies, but friends," he said. "Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection." He looked toward the time when the nation would again be "touched . . . by the better angels of our nature." In his Second Inaugural he hoped that time had come, urging his countrymen to have "malice toward none, with charity for all."
When he assumed the presidency, Gerald Ford asked that "we bind up the internal wounds of Watergate," "restore the golden rule to our political process, and let brotherly love purge our hearts of suspicion and of hate." He asked the nation to pray for Richard Nixon and his family. A month later he pardoned Nixon, in an effort to heal the nation, to achieve the "greatest good of all the people of the United States whose servant I am."
In its times of greatest difficulty, America has eventually had moral leadership. It has not always come from presidents, of course. Susan B. Anthony, pronounced guilty for the "crime" of voting in 1872, by a judge who dismissed the jury before it could deliberate, told him "you have trampled under foot every vital principle of our government. My natural rights, my civil rights, my political rights, my judicial rights, are all alike ignored." She and other women would persist, until the nation recognized its moral mistake and ratified the Nineteenth Amendment.
In 1950, as Senator Joseph McCarthy violated the rights of Americans accused of being Communists, Margaret Chase Smith rose in the Senate to speak because "too much harm has already been done with irresponsible words of bitterness and selfish political opportunism." She urged "soul-searching . . . on the manner in which we are performing our duty to the people of America."
In a South mired in racial hatred, Martin Luther King, Jr., writing from his Birmingham jail cell in 1963, reminded us that "[I]njustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." He said that granting Black Americans their Constitutional rights was a moral, not just a legal issue. On June 11th, President Kennedy finally agreed. "We are confronted primarily with a moral issue," he said in a nationally televised address. "It is as old as the scriptures and as clear as the American Constitution."
America is again in need of national moral leadership. We think of ourselves, as John Winthrop said in 1630, as a "city upon a hill," but we have forgotten what else he told his fellow travelers on the Arbella before they reached Massachusetts. "We must entertain each other in brotherly affection," he said. "We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others’ necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality. We must delight in each other; make others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together."
America today has no dearth of political, business, and religious leaders, but it lacks moral leadership at the national level. Winning elections, enriching the bottom line, and filling churches amount to little without an underlying foundation of moral behavior. The gains are ill-gotten; the damage outweighs them.
Who can speak, with honesty and legitimacy, about who we need to be as a people? Who can we admire as a person of character and a voice of conscience? Who calls us to our better selves and reminds us of our patrimony? Who is willing to risk his reputation, as Washington did, to say what we need to hear? Who is willing to risk his life, as Lincoln did, to stop the hating? Who is willing to risk jail, as did Anthony and King, to remind us of the vision in our Declaration of Independence? Who is willing to risk his political future, as Ford did, to heal the nation? Who is willing to demand politicians, as Smith did, put America above party?
Americans yearn for such moral leadership. Without it, we remain a promise unfulfilled. With it, we can once again be good citizens as well as good people.
Photo Credit: Dean Franklin
