As a July 4th tradition, I’ve posted an excerpt from Stephen Vincent Benet’s poem Listen to the People. The title I originally used for these posts was It Shall Be Sustained, which is from the last line of Benet’s poem.
Narrator:
This is Independence Day,
Fourth of July, the day we mean to keep,
Whatever happens and whatever falls
Out of a sky grown strange;
This is firecracker day for sunburnt kids,
The day of the parade,
Slambanging down the street.
Listen to the parade!
There’s J. K. Burney’s float,
Red-white-and-blue crepe-paper on the wheels,
The Fire Department and the local Grange,
There are the pretty girls with their hair curled
Who represent the Thirteen Colonies,
The Spirit of East Greenwich, Betsy Ross,
Democracy, or just some pretty girls.
There are the veterans and the Legion Post
(Their feet are going to hurt when they get home),
The band, the flag, the band, the usual crowd,
Good-humored, watching, hot,
Silent a second as the flag goes by,
Kidding the local cop and eating popsicles,
Jack Brown and Rosie Shapiro and Dan Shay,
Paul Bunchick and the Greek who runs the Greek’s,
The black-eyed children out of Sicily,
The girls who giggle and the boys who push,
All of them there and all of them a nation.
And, afterwards,
There’ll be ice-cream and fireworks and a speech
By somebody the Honorable Who,
The lovers will pair off in the kind dark
And Tessie Jones, our honor-graduate,
Will read the declaration.
That’s how it is. It’s always been that way.
That’s our Fourth of July, through war and peace,
That’s our fourth of July.
And a lean farmer on a stony farm
Came home from mowing, buttoned up his shirt
And walked ten miles to town.
Musket in hand.
He didn’t know the sky was falling down
And, it may be, he didn’t know so much.
But people oughtn’t to be pushed around
By kings or any such.
A workman in the city dropped his tools.
An ordinary, small-town kind of man
Found himself standing in the April sun,
One of a ragged line
Against the skilled professionals of war,
The matchless infantry who could not fail,
Not for the profit, not to conquer worlds,
Not for the pomp or the heroic tale
But first, and principally, since he was sore.
They could do things in quite a lot of places.
They shouldn’t do them here, in Lexington.
He looked around and saw his neighbors’ faces…
The poem is very long, and is worth reading in full. The full text was published in Life Magazine; it is online here.
Benet’s poem ends with these words:
We made it and we make it and it’s ours
We shall maintain it. It shall be sustained
But shall it?
The probability that the American experiment will survive has seemed, over recent years, to have been on the decline. In the 2024 version of this post, I mentioned several disturbing news stories, a few of which were:
In Arizona, “F*** the Fourth” was the official July 4 message from the Pima County Democratic Party.
In California, a school board member called for July 4th boycott.
The city of Orlando, Florida apologized for a fireworks promo it had sent out, saying that people probably don’t want to celebrate because America is full of hate and adding “we can’t blame them.”
And, after 30 years. NPR cancelled its annual Declaration of Independence reading.
Particularly appalling was Biden’s denunciation of the country that he led (at least nominally led) in his address to graduates of Howard University, making the false assertion that these (black) graduates would have to be 10 times better to get equal consideration. Tribalism, undercutting national identity, has been on the march, and this has been very largely driven by the Democratic Party and by the educational institutions that are such an important part of its coalition.
Also particularly appalling, especially in the light of Benet’s poem, is the evident contempt that so many people in positions of influence and power feel toward the majority of citizens of this country–in particular, those without college degrees, those who work with their hands, those who are rural and/or southern, those who are believing Christians. See my post The Phobia(s) That May Destroy America for thoughts on this, also, Living in the Hate of the Common People and Living in the Hate of the Common People, continued.
There is a lot more at my linked post about the path of decline that America seemed to have embarked on, but also recognition of some courageous individuals who have been acting against that decline.
But on this Fourth of July, I am feeling a lot more optimistic about America’s future. Not yet optimistic enough to change the title of the post back to its original title of It Shall Be Sustained. But a lot more optimistic than I was a year ago. The vicious attacks on free speech by government and social media have been largely suppressed, and there is increasing pushback again ‘cancellation’ by institutions and online mobs. The vice-like grip in which academia has held so much of our society is being challenged, along with the acceptance of a credential-based aristocracy which need not demonstrate actual performance and merit. Ethnic and race-based tribalism is being challenged. US energy production is being enabled. There is going to be substantial growth in US-based manufacturing, and there is increasing recognition that this is actually A Good Thing. And the Midnight Hammer attack on the Iranian nuclear facilities demonstrates that America can still do things requiring not only very advanced technology but also great individual courage and skill.
There are plenty of problems with some of the Trump administration’s policies and approaches, and I will be writing about these in the near future. But for now, there is a feeling that a very dark and maybe unrecoverable path has been avoided: although continuation of this avoidance is by no means guaranteed.
Not everyone is in a celebratory mood this 4th of July. A recent Gallup poll asked respondents “How proud are you to be an American — extremely proud, very proud, moderately proud, only a little proud or not at all proud?” Among Democrats, the percentage answering “extremely proud” or “very proud” slipped from 87% in 2001 to 68% in 2016–and then fell precipitously to 36% in the most recent poll. Among Republicans, the ‘extremely proud or very proud’ number has fluctuated in the 84-99% range. For the sample as a whole, ‘extremely proud or very proud’ has fallen from 87% in 2001 to 58% at present. There is a huge generational effect, as can be seen in the table at the link.
We’re not out of the woods until the lines on these charts begin to show a significant upward trend and there is at least some reduction in the extreme divisiveness that now exists.
But on this Fourth, there are more signs of hope than there have been for quite a while, and it’s entirely appropriate to celebrate!
Yes
Thoughts on patriotism, from Stepfanie:
https://substack.com/home/post/p-167323920
The only constant in this world is Change. Something may indeed be sustained — but there will definitely be changes.
We tend to forget that there had been Euro-Americans for the better part of two hundred years before the War of Independence — and then there was the change to “self rule”. That was followed by other changes — the expansion to the west, industrialization, the Civil War, the foreign entanglements in Europe’s never-ending wars (Big Mistake there!), a period when America was the light of the world and reached for the Moon, and then the rise of lawyers, environmentalism, and bureaucracy (Another Big Mistake!), which takes us to today’s decline.
Will there be more changes in the future? Absolutely! Some of the changes will be driven by the obvious — the unsustainability of dependence on borrowing & imports, and the unavoidable impacts of generational population changes. Perhaps the Euro-Americans are destined to follow the indigenous Americans into irrelevance — but perhaps not. There is stormy weather ahead, but perhaps that will bring out the best in people? The future is still to be written — and it is ours to write.