President’s Day Post — Presidential Messages on Interdependence and National Unity
Today is President’s Day, a day when we pause normal business and school activities to celebrate the leadership and inspiration contributed by the best of our Presidents to the citizens and progress of our country.
President’s Day combines the historic celebrations of the birthdays of two of our most notable Presidents: George Washington our first President and Abraham Lincoln our 16th President. I would like to offer a suggestion that in the divisive environment in our country today, we might consider adding four other Presidents to the list for remembrance this year. Those Presidents are John Adams, our first Vice President who served with George Washington; Thomas Jefferson, our third President; James Madison, our fourth President; and John Kennedy, our 35th President.
Together, the words and actions of these 6 Presidents may perhaps help us pause to consider the divisive state of politics in our country today, to help reinforce our commitment to the common values upon which our country was founded. Perhaps we can take inspiration from their words to help us bind the divisions and help us move toward that more perfect union, knowing that we do not strive to be a country without differences, but to accommodate those differences through wise and innovative collaborations.
President Washington: Among the many great contributions as the General of the Army during the Revolutionary War, the Presiding Officer for the Constitutional Convention, and then serving as our First President. One of the most important principals of our system of government he established was the decision to step down from the Presidency after 8 years and peacefully transferring power and authority to his successor. By doing so, he confirmed the value of the public’s loyalty to the Constitution rather than a specific leader as the foundation of the country.
In his farewell address to the nation in 1797, now citizen George Washington left the country with words of caution about actions that could undermine the new government that the people had won the right to establish. These are some of his parting cautions:
“If, in the opinion of the people, the distribution or modification of the constitutional powers be in any particular wrong, let it be corrected by an amendment in the way which the Constitution designates. But let there be no change by usurpation; for though this, in one instance, may be the instrument of good, it is the customary weapon by which free governments are destroyed.”
“However combinations or associations of (political parties) may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”
President Adams: John Adams shared a caution about the potential dangers of loyalty to political parties in a letter he wrote shortly after becoming Vice President:
“There is nothing which I dread as much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the largest political evil under our Constitution.”
President Jefferson: Thomas Jefferson served as President from 1801-1809. But in1776, he was a delegate to the Colonial Congress in Philadelphia called to debate the complaints of the colonists about the policies of King George and the unfair treatments he was inflicting upon them as British subjects. After agreeing unanimously to declare independence from England, Thomas Jefferson was chosen to draft the Declaration of Independence for debate and agreement. After several day of suggesting and voting upon changes, the delegates approved a final draft on July 2, 1776, and signing began on July 4, but signing was not completed by all 56 delegates until August 2.
There are many memorialized quotes in the Declaration of Independence attributed to Jefferson’s draft, with some editing, but among the most remembered by American school children is the following:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
But to me, the most important sentence in the Declaration of Independence is the last sentence, placed just above the part of the parchment where all 56 delegates attached their signatures:
“And for the support of this Declaration, with the reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.”
This quote has particular importance today, because it shows that our Founders believed that to support our Independence as a new nation, our citizens must pledge to support each other. In this sentence, the Founders bequeathed to us the truth that our Independence as a free country did then, and does now, depend on the strength of the interdependence between its citizens, our unity as a nation. I believe we must restore a commitment to that principle in both our elected representatives and our citizens, or we risk weakening the very core of our country. And we will pass on a very different country to future generations of Americans, that our Founders would not recognize.
President Madison: Before serving as our fourth President from 1809-1817, James Madison served as Secretary of State under Thomas Jefferson after completing his work as primary author of the Constitution during 1787-1789. Working with Gouverneur Morris, the primary authors of the Constitution, wrote the Preamble early in the drafting process. The language is recorded here:
“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
The National Constitution Center describes the written Constitution as the “Supreme” law of the land. The Center has provided the following interpretation of the important role of the Preamble in applying the provisions and powers of the Constitution to current policy issues, whether actions be initiated by the Executive, Legislative or Judicial branches. It describes the purposes for which that document was adopted, which the National Constitution Center states has implications for interpreting specific provisions of the Constitution.
Most Americans learn the Preamble’s language as students in school. But I have never heard the Preamble mentioned in any debates about the interpretation of the Constitutional validity of any recent policies or laws enacted during my lifetime. If the Preamble was written with the purpose in mind of the Founders that future interpretation of the Constitutional provisions in current policy debates must always be supportive of the purposes enumerated in the Preamble, then is it not reasonable to expect that current or past policies enacted under interpretations which are not supportive of any of those purposes, should be declared as inconsistent with the purpose of the Constitution and rejected as being unconstitutional? Might that help minimize the partisan divisions that often tend to dominate such debates today?
President Lincoln: Abraham Lincoln, our 16th President, is sometimes referred to as the “second” father of our country, after President Washington, the “first” father of our country. The election of President Lincoln triggered the secession of the southern states for his opposition to the expansion of slavery into new territories that were not yet states. The division between the northern and southern states regarding the expansion of slavery was a division in the country that was unresolved by debate and collaboration, and thus resulted in actions that set out to dissolve the Constitutional bonds between the states.
In the speech at the Republican Presidential nominating convention of 1858, after Lincoln was chosen as the new party’s nominee for President, Lincoln delivered a speech to define the basis for his Presidency upon which he would run. Of course, the determination of slavery policy in the new territories was to be the key issue. Here is an excerpt from that speech regarding the unsettled division between the states at that time:
“If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could then better judge what to do, and how to do it. We are now far into the fifth year, since a policy was initiated, with the avowed object, and confident promise, of putting an end to slavery agitation. Under the operation of that policy, that agitation has not only, not ceased, but has constantly augmented. In my opinion, it will not cease, until a crisis shall have been reached, and passed.
‘A house divided against itself cannot stand.’ I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved -- I do not expect the house to fall -- but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.”
While slavery is not the divisive issue that challenges us today, we are no less divided on the basis of party loyalty today. An extension of that speech might also today begin with the Biblical quote, “A house divided against itself cannot stand”. The speech might then proceed as follows:
“This government cannot endure, permanently divided” by party loyalty, with partisans treating each other as enemies rather than as fellow citizens. This division may not cease, as Lincoln believed, “until a crisis shall have been reached, and passed”. The house, which is our country, may not survive the next crisis, unless the citizens can agree to unite and end the division, not by becoming all one party or the other, but by agreeing to collaborate with each other, following the commitment to interdependence reflected in the last sentence to the Declaration of Independence written by Thomas Jefferson so long ago: “… we mutually pledge to each other, our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.” As it was then, it is now: the core strength of our liberties and independence as a country depends on the strength of our interdependence.
Then in 1863, at the end of the crisis of the Civil War, President Lincoln recited perhaps his most famous speech at Gettysburg, the site of one of the most deadly battles of the Civil War. In that speech, he sought to inspire the country to continue to work on the “unfinished business” that we then faced at the end of the conflict:
“That we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
President Kennedy: President Kennedy came to the Presidency when the country was seeking to rebuild itself and the world, to establish the basis for a lasting peace after two world wars, and to contain the expansionary intentions of the Soviet Union. Within this conflict of ideologies between nations was the growing risk to mankind of the escalating race to build more and deadlier nuclear arms. President Kennedy addressed those goals for his Presidency in his inaugural speech. But perhaps the most important part of the speech was his call to the country not only to this
“In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility--I welcome it. I do not believe that any of us would exchange places with any other people or any other generation. The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it--and the glow from that fire can truly light the world.
And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you--ask what you can do for your country.”
Today, the role of defending freedom, and democracy, in its hour of maximum danger has once again fallen on the citizens of our country. Around the world, democracies are struggling to fulfill the promise of securing freedom for all their citizens and providing for their prosperity. In our country as well, we are similarly struggling with the challenges to democracy in fulfilling the promise of balancing personal liberties and the key purposes of the Preamble, to “insure domestic Tranquility” and to “promote the general Welfare”.
That remains an unfulfilled purpose of the government bequeathed to us by our Founders. It now falls to us in this generation to, in President Kennedy’s words, “not to shrink from this responsibility, but to welcome it.” He also inspires us to realize that “the energy, faith and devotion we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it – and the glow from that fire can truly light the world.” This reflects his belief that the survival of democratic governments around the world based on the principles of freedom depends on America providing the example to the world through addressing the unfulfilled expectations of democracy in our country. And for that role to be fulfilled, President Kennedy calls upon us today, as he did in 1960, to put country over party, to be willing to accept some sacrifice, some compromise of our own absolute personal liberty, and to “ask not what our country can do for each of us, but to ask what each of us can do for our country.”
I close by asking readers to consider HOW we as a country can fulfill the unfulfilled expectations of democracy in our country: to review a summary of proposed changes that can minimize the challenges to democracy we face today, called “The Citizen Rules”, and the road map to implement them. These are detailed in a book entitled “American Turning Point: Repairing and Restoring Our Constitutional Republic” and summarized on the book’s website at www.citizenrules.org. I hope you might spend a few minutes on this holiday to considering the call to service from our past Presidents, and how to support that service in the coming days, weeks, months and years.