The Need for American Jeremiahs
Fred Bailey was born into slavery on the Eastern Shore of Maryland in the second decade of the nineteenth century. He would never know who his slaveholder father was, the date, or even year of his birth. Yet he escaped to freedom in 1838, changed his name to Frederick Douglass, and became an internationally celebrated advocate for abolition and civil rights.
Douglass's power, as masterfully chronicled by David Blight in Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, came from his intellect, mastery of language, and call for the nation to live the values in its Declaration of Independence and Constitution. In the tradition of the Biblical prophets, Douglass held up a mirror to the nation's hypocrisy, through both the written word in his newspapers and the spoken word in his lectures.
Douglass helped shape the greatest reform movement of the nineteenth century, but he was not the only Jeremiah of his time. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton led the fight for woman suffrage, though it would take 72 years from 1848's Declaration of Sentiments to correct this founding failure in the Constitution.
The weapons of these Jeremiahs were America's core values. Douglass called the Constitution "A GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT," refusing to accept that it sanctioned slavery. He reminded the nation of the "common human nature of all men." He demanded freemen have the vote - a say in their own government - the Declaration's promise. Anthony, declared guilty by the judge for voting in 1872, 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."
Since John Winthrop told his Massachusetts Bay colonists in 1630 that they would be a “city upon a hill,” Americans have been called upon many times to occupy the moral high ground. Self-government without a foundation of strong moral values is bad government. This is what Douglass, Anthony, and Stanton so well understood.
The most recent Gallup Poll shows just 14 percent of Americans think the state of our moral values is good or better, and 77 percent think it is getting worse. But who calls out this failure? Who holds up the mirror to the behavior of those politicians, preachers, businessmen, talk show hosts, and social activists who twist the Constitution to their own ends and ignore or violate the core values upon which our common destiny depends? America needs Jeremiahs, not appeals to fear, self-interest and division. There are Jeremiahs in local communities but they have not broken through our fractured cultural and geographic landscape to produce the national voices we need.
As a people, our lodestone has been the American dream. The term was coined by Charles Truslow Adams in his 1931 classic, The Epic of America. Yet a key part of its original meaning has been lost. "It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely," Adams said, "but a dream of a social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position."
For Adams, the American Dream is principally a moral, not a material goal. Its achievement requires a supportive social order. "[I]f the American dream is to be a reality," he said, "our communal spiritual and intellectual life must be distinctly higher than elsewhere, where classes and groups have their separate interests, markets, arts, and lives. . . . We cannot become a great democracy by giving ourselves up as individuals to selfishness, physical comfort, and cheap amusements."
In this, Adams only reminded us of what else John Winthrop told fellow travelers on the Arbella as they prepared to disembark:
"Wee must entertaine each other in brotherly affection. Wee must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of other's necessities. Wee must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekeness, gentlenes, patience and liberality. Wee must delight in eache other; make other's conditions our oune; rejoice together, mourne together, labour and suffer together . . . "
If we have lost faith in the American Dream and have become cynics about the potential of progress to improve our lot, might it be because we have forgotten the messages of our founding? The solution is not at first a new program, policy, or political promise. Those only matter when they rest on shared values and faith in each other. A regeneration of our national soul is the prerequisite to helpful bills and budgets. That is what Jeremiahs do.
Photo Credit: Kristine
