In recent weeks, confidence in our America has been deeply shaken.
Previously, to those who feared the collapse of our democratic republic, I have responded that our political traditions are long and strong. But it has become increasingly obvious that the man of the moment does not believe in those traditions. He believes that he is who we are. As the weeks since January 20 have become increasingly chaotic, uncertain, and contradictory, he may be right.
Human history, from its earliest African roots to this very moment, has been defined by movement and change. We in America have evolved and changed. As a nation and a people, we are not who and what we once were, and that is a good thing.
Kingdoms and empires existed in Europe and Asia, Africa, and the Americas for thousands of years, but for us on the North Shore, our specific evolution started in 1620, about 50 miles south of here. Since then, immigrants from all over the world—some not of their own free will—have crossed the oceans, joining with and displacing others. But we, as a nation and a people, are not what we were in 1620…or 1720, or 1820, or 1920. We have evolved.
In 1776, we declared ourselves free from European domination and established the United States of America. In 1789, we created something entirely new: a constitutional republic that, through its amendment process, assumed that our evolution would continue and that we could and would become better.
Still, there were contradictions. Early on, not every person was a citizen, and not every citizen shared rights equally. Our greatest contradiction was resolved by the Civil War, but not entirely. Forms of slavery existed before the North American variety, and some forms exist to this day. The 14th Amendment ended slavery in the United States, but we finished out the 19th century without women’s suffrage, without protection for workers, and with persistent forms of racial and ethnic inequality, North and South.
For me, Abraham Lincoln is the spiritual father of our country. The historian Heather Cox Richardson, in her daily writing and podcast, Letters from an American, recently discussed Lincoln’s earliest preserved speech, presented to the Young Men’s Lyceum in 1838. He was 28 years old.
Richardson writes, “The trouble Lincoln perceived stemmed from the growing lawlessness in the country as men ignored the rule of law and acted on their passions, imposing their will on their neighbors through violence. He pointed specifically to two recent events: the 1836 lynching of free Black man Francis McIntosh in St. Louis, Missouri, and the 1837 murder of white abolitionist editor Elijah P. Lovejoy by a proslavery mob in Alton, Illinois.”
Some 25 years later Lincoln gave the Gettysburg Address.
I have lived in Nahant for more than 50 years. Every year, on Memorial Day, with moistened eyes, I’ve heard a beautiful young 6th Grade voice deliver the Gettysburg Address. The nation that Lincoln sought to create, and Ulysses Grant sought to preserve, never truly came to be until FDR was elected in 1932 and the process began in earnest.
Between Lincoln and FDR, we had allowed Jim Crow to rule the South, to the detriment of Black folks, Jews, Catholics and anyone else who wasn’t a Southern WASP. We flirted with imperialism, taking control of the Philippines, Puerto Rico and parts of Panama by military force. American capitalism created an economy described by Mark Twain (with the roll of the eye) as The Gilded Age and by Upton Sinclair (with the roll of the pen) as The Jungle. It all collapsed in 1929.
With FDR’s administration came Frances Perkins, his Secretary of Labor and the first woman to serve in a Cabinet position. She protected and enhanced the rights of workers. Social Security was created and comforted the final years of older Americans. At the time, American millionaires hated Franklin Roosevelt, but not much as Hitler and Tojo would by 1945. American industrial and military might evolved under FDR and led to their imperial demise. But the job wasn’t done.
As we entered the postwar era, European countries decolonized, and the United Nations was created. We and our allies also advanced the concept of the “Free World” and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO, was created to protect it.
President Truman desegregated the American military but, as the historian Jean Edward Smith has underlined, it was President Eisenhower who made sure desegregation actually happened. As a result, Colin Powell and Lloyd Austin, men of color, when called upon, served their country with distinction and led their fellow Americans into battle.
When President Eisenhower became the first Republican President in twenty years, over two terms he consolidated all that had been accomplished before him and positioned the United States as the leader of a threatened Free World.
Three years after Ike left office the new President, JFK, was assassinated. Two years after that, legislation that JFK had proposed, establishing basic Civil and Voting Rights for all Americans, was passed and signed under LBJ along with Medicare/Medicaid, basic healthcare for all senior citizens. But celebrations were brief.
The war in Vietnam expanded and in 1968 MLK and RFK were assassinated. Riots, smoke, and flame arose in cities across America. Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators flooded Washington. Nixon was elected. Antiwar student demonstrators were shot and killed at Kent State and Jackson State. The 1960s, a mixed decade of progress and tumult, came to an end.
In the following decade a criminal President was forced from office in disgrace. A Republican President, Gerald Ford, held the country together and a Democratic President, Jimmy Carter, brought warring sides in the Middle East to the table at Camp David. Fifty years later the Camp David Accords are among the few still in place.
Since 1980, we have gradually moved away from the world Roosevelt/Eisenhower created and consolidated toward something different. Repeated tax cuts for the wealthy have moved immense amounts of wealth from the working and middle class to the billionaire class. The Soviet Union came to an end. China emerged as a forceful presence. Following 9/11, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were pursued. Our ways of communicating with one another changed dramatically, sometimes in Orwellian terms. A Black American President was elected and then… Donald Trump.
Today’s Republican Congress under Trump looks more like the Russian Duma under Vladimir Putin. Executive Orders have replaced Legislation. Trump has announced that he will take Canada, Greenland, the Panama Canal, by military force if necessary.
Now he wants us to take over Gaza!
Are we in transition from a Constitutional system of checks and balances and a leader of the Free World to something very different? To a Trump/Musk state of Executive Orders, unqualified administrators, foreign adventures and a compliant Congress? Will Trump’s transition make “our” America just a transitory state, leading to a place previously unimaginable? Is that who we are. Is that where we’re going?
Jim Walsh is a Nahant resident.
