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NY Times Op-Ed, July 3, 2020
Let’s Finish the American Revolution
Our nation’s founding was a mess of contradictions. We must push America
closer to its ideals.
By Timothy Egan
As baffling as it is to find statues of traitors, slaveholders and
killers of Union soldiers ensconced in many a prominent square, consider
the historical discordance of Custer County, S.D.
The hard beauty of the Black Hills, sacred land to Native Americans,
overshadows the county, the main town and the state park, all named for
George Armstrong Custer. The hard history was shaped by the slayer of
those native people. Custer’s willful trespass into territory promised
by treaty to the Sioux set the stage for the last violent encounters
between New World and Old.
Just under 20 miles from Custer is Mount Rushmore, which President Trump
plans to visit this Fourth of July weekend. A mere seven miles from
Custer is the Native American Rushmore — a still unfinished carving of
the Oglala Sioux leader Crazy Horse, 641 feet long and 563 feet high.
Here is the American paradox in a grid of stark geology.
No country can last long without a shared narrative. You wonder, on an
Independence Day when the mood of the country is more angry and fearful
than it’s been in a long time, if this nation can ever have such a thing
again.
I think we can. But to make that happen, it will take an imaginative
projection of the best instincts of those four imperfect men whose
visages are chiseled into stone, as well as the Sioux warrior honored
just down the road.
Before we get to them, let’s talk about him. Trump wants a fireworks
display in the pine forest around Rushmore in the middle of fire season.
There will be no required social distancing for the crowd. And the
world’s most powerful narcissist will be projecting his dream to have
his face carved next to those of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson,
Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt.
There you have it — everything that is so awful about him in one
appearance, putting the lives of American citizens and a national
landmark at risk to protect his eggshell ego.
But what about them? Rushmore was created by Gutzon Borglum, a confidant
of leaders of the revitalized 20th-century Ku Klux Klan. Before Borglum
took his jackhammers to the Black Hills, he had started work on the
largest shrine to white supremacy in the world — the bas-relief
sculpture of Confederate leaders in Stone Mountain, Ga.
Still, few people think of Borglum when they gaze up at the four
presidents. Instead, the visitor is prompted to think of what those men
did for a fragile democracy.
Most revolutions don’t end well. From the kindling of the Enlightenment,
France was consumed by a wildfire of fratricide and state-sanctioned
beheadings in the late 18th century. Russia’s 1917 revolt eventually led
to an epic of mass murder rivaled by Hitler’s Holocaust. And the Irish
finally threw off centuries of British rule only to plunge into a bloody
civil war in the 1920s over the terms of that independence.
The American Revolution, birthed in part by the looting of British
merchant ships in Boston Harbor, was the exception, until our own Civil
War over the Original Sin that had been ignored in the founding
documents. The protests of 2020 are a legacy of rage dating to 1619.
Each of the Rushmore presidents furthered the ennobling sentiments of
men who tried to fashion a democracy from a revolution. Some may never
forgive Washington for his slave ownership. But among the nine
presidents who owned slaves, only Washington freed them all in his final
will.
He also kept the United States from becoming a monarchy when the
Trumpians of the day wanted to make him king.
Jefferson was a slaveholding racist who wrote “all men are created
equal” in the Declaration of Independence. The words outlive, and
outshine, the man.
Lincoln needs no defense, except to say that those who want to destroy
his statues now should read Frederick Douglass’s nuanced take. Lincoln
fought the anti-immigrant Know-Nothings, the Trumpians of his day, and
ensured that the radical truths of Jefferson would apply to four million
formerly enslaved people.
Teddy Roosevelt was no friend of the continent’s original inhabitants.
But he evolved. His Rough Riders were multiracial warriors. And as the
20th century’s most influential progressive president, he invited Booker
T. Washington to dine with him, the first time any president had broken
bread with a Black man at the White House. This, at a time when it was
difficult for a Black man to get a meal in a restaurant.
Each of them pushed the revolution closer to an ideal of true equality.
And Roosevelt was the first to add universal health care among the
truths we hold self-evident.
You can honor the work they started, and desperately needs to be
finished, by ignoring Trump’s ahistoric histrionics this weekend and
watching “Hamilton,” which is streaming to many parts of the world
starting Friday. This founder was an “orphan, son of a whore,”
Washington’s better half, and in the person of Lin-Manuel Miranda, he’s
a face of the American tomorrow.
At the core of the musical is the founding — reimagined,
re-mythologized, rough-edged. A mess of contradictions, like this nation
on its 244th birthday.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the
editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our
articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: lett...@nytimes.com.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter
(@NYTopinion) and Instagram.
Timothy Egan (@nytegan) is a contributing opinion writer who covers the
environment, the American West and politics. He is a winner of the
National Book Award and the author, most recently, of “A Pilgrimage to
Eternity.”
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