OUR AMERICAN INHERITANCE

JULY 4, 2023 – In commemoration of Independence Day, today’s post breaks from my individual “inheritance” to celebrate our collective American inheritance. But in the mix of dazzling fireworks, condiment-loaded hot dogs, and liberal servings of potato salad, we should take a sober and sobering account of that inheritance.

In my early school years, American history started in 1492, the year Columbus sailed the ocean blue. “Our story” progressed quickly to a paragraph about Jamestown, founded in 1607, before heading north to Plymouth Colony, established in 1620, which, for most of us children of the fifties and sixties, marked the real beginning of the Great American Experiment—so-called. (A superficial survey of the first half of the 20th century competed with June heat and humidity the last week of school.)

According to the records of the General Society of Mayflower Descendants, approximately 10 million Americans today can trace their lineage back to the religious separatists who stepped from the good ship (at least for those who survived the voyage) onto Plymouth Rock, thence to the soil of eventual bounty.

I’m one of those 10 million, but this statistical point affords me no greater honor, privilege or distinction—or scorn or condemnation—than does my membership in humanity generally. Each of us is an heir to history. Each of us is connected to a story that time weaves into a common fabric. By the time one’s story is traced to a “great” grandparent, the thread is already intertwined with billions of other lineages. Climbing further up one’s ancestral tree soon leads to a crown of leaves obscuring the countless branches and offshoots that bear the defining shape and color of civilization. In the end, each of us has dropped from the same ancient oak.

This perspective is what I took recently to the gravesite of an ancestor, one 1^st Lieutenant Ichabod Spencer, “An officer on [sic] the Revolutionary War,” as the defining experience of his life is inscribed on his time-worn tombstone. Shortly before every Fourth of July, a local veterans group places a fresh American Flag next to the headstone of every Revolutionary War soldier who was laid to rest in the hidden cemetery along Tinker Lane—a sleepy, country road in Lyme, Connecticut. Twenty-three such flags color the half-acre place of silent gravestones.

First Lieutenant Spencer was my four-times “great” grandfather. From my grandfather’s combination affidavit – application addressed (on behalf of my mother) to the “Board of Managers of the Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution,” I learned that our ancestor had “helped sound the alarm at Lexington” in April 1775 and was “one of Washington’s picked men in the assault at Stony Point” on July 15, 1779. From other records I learned that Lieutenant Spencer fought at Valley Forge, and perhaps most pointedly, that he was in the Battle of Monmouth (June 28, 1778), where a British bullet pierced his hat just above his scalp. If his head had been a tad higher or the bullet a bit lower, none of his descendants—including this writer!—would have walked this world[1].

This “what-if” reflection served to highlight the duality of my individuality: if “I think, therefore I am,” as Descartes observed, I “think” (i.e. have the physiological means, existence to ponder the world I occupy) by sheer randomness and a heavy dose of dumb luck. Moreover, my notions of personal freedom, liberty, and self-importance—even in a culture as historically individualistic as ours—are inextricably bound to the thoughts and actions of 330 million fellow Americans.

Which brings me back to the idea of our common inheritance. Each of us, whether leftie, righty, “Whoo-Hoo!” or ignorantly/cynically indifferent, is an heir—and therefore, a steward—of the principles and the pragmatism that drove the Founders—and the Ichabod Spencers—to chisel and assemble as they did, the stones of our national foundation.

If the work of our forebears is an imperfect union, it is our fateful duty to improve it—lest we lose it. The genius of America is its bedrock principles that self-criticism, enshrined in the First Amendment, and due process of law, embraced by the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments, are so superior to authoritarianism as to be worth fighting, even dying for. The marvel of America, in turn, is this: the quintessential American is not the person with the diluted and dubious distinction of Mayflower lineage but merely the citizen who understands, embraces, cultivates and hence preserves . . . America’s genius.

But for a host of reasons—many anticipated, many unimaginable by the Founders—we find ourselves at a dangerous juncture in our collective journey. Authoritarianism has gained disturbing ascendancy among 10s of millions of Americans. Often it is couched in the language of “traditional” patriotism (e.g. “Mothers for Liberty”; “Don’t Tread on Me”; “America First”) and wrapped falsely in an American flag, disrespected by commercialization and commandeered by political extremists—to the point of using it to attack the ultimate physical and figurative symbol of American representative democracy.

This time around, let the flash and boom of fireworks wake us to the threats we face. Each of us is an heir to priceless principles. None of us should squander our great fortune. If individually we fail to nourish democracy, authoritarianism will consume us collectively.

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© 2023 by Eric Nilsson

[1] “All history is local”: from a conversation I enjoyed recently with Professor Rolf Wolfswinkel, an NYU professor emeritus of modern European history (with an emphasis on the Holocaust), curator of a local history exhibition at the Lyme Town Hall. To the professor’s maxim I added, “. . . and personal.”