Happy 250! - The Fabric of America
Note - in honor of our 250th, I’m repeating my first Substack post, which feels even more relevant today than when it was first written. Hope you all have a great weekend as we build on what we have in common to celebrate our past, learn from our mistakes, and look forward to our exceptional future.
The Fabric of America
So fight your battles, young and old
Knowing your stories may be freely told
But as you raise your verbal spears
Hold close the fortune that you do so here
For to cast our gaze around the globe
Is to reveal the riches within in our own robes
And to set our sights on history’s mirror
Is to gather strength from those who led us here
Atop the current or against the tide
Retain your grit and restrain your pride
For soon the storms in the night will hide
And we’ll stand again on the sunlit side
- Todd Sheets
See below for the story behind the story
The story behind the story
It was early November, and there was a bracing quality to the afternoon sunshine. I hadn’t been to Washington D.C. for many years, decades even, and what a time to return. I was in town for an event put on by the publisher of my book, 2008: What Really Happened – Understanding the Great Financial Crisis. Not surprisingly, given the recent election, the city seemed uncharacteristically unsure of itself. Perhaps a bit like a one-term administration now being unceremoniously ushered out of town.
Walking past leafless trees sketching harsh outlines on the autumnal twilight, it was a bit shocking how quickly the afternoon sunshine ceded territory to a gradually chilling darkness. I sensed that many of those passing by felt, as some of my friends and family did, more than a bit disquieted by the election, as if they had gone to sleep in a home they had worked years to make warm and welcoming …only to wake up feeling entrapped by cold and imposing walls.
But then again, leaving the quivering limbs and growing shadows behind for a cozy little coffee shop on a busy street corner, there were also faces which, like others of my family and friends, seemed abuzz with hope and optimism. In spite of their newfound energy, however, I couldn’t help but feel that, until recently, they too had harbored their own dark fears of the future.
Waking up the next morning, I had time to spare before the publisher’s dinner and, still feeling these crosscurrents, decided to take a long walk around the National Mall. I had seen one or two of the great monuments before, but only in passing, crammed between meetings or before rushing to the airport to get home to my family, maybe in time to read a bedtime story to my young children. Now taking it all in on this sunny November day, I couldn’t help but wish that, when my children were younger, I had brought them to experience this with me; to have walked hand in hand amidst the vastness of our history; feeling the power, the substance, and the durability of the journey we all share.
Walking toward the columned rotunda of the Jefferson Memorial framed in front by rippling waters and in back by a bristling blue sky is indeed a sight to behold. Climbing the marbled stairs, one is greeted by a towering bronze statue of the great man himself, perched atop a granite pedestal, a cloak draped ceremoniously over his shoulders, one hand clasping a copy of the Declaration of Independence. Remarkably, at just thirty three years of age, Jefferson penned the ideas that would guide us forever forward: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by 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.”
As with the Jefferson Memorial, the statue of Lincoln also casts its gaze toward the Washington Monument, as if drawing optimism for the future from the strength of the past in even the gravest of times. Faced with a nation more divided than at any other time before or since, Lincoln drew inspiration from our founding ideals, “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Over 600,000 brave men and women gave their lives for this proposition; adjusted for today’s population, the equivalent death toll would approach 7 million.
Like Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was also a great admirer of Jefferson; long before his own memorial was completed, FDR laid the cornerstone for and later dedicated the Jefferson Memorial. One is gradually drawn into and through the various red granite, open-air, “rooms” of the FDR Memorial. For me the maze-like structure elicited the feeling of being pulled into the puzzling array of issues that challenged FDR’s presidency. When he was first elected, the unemployment rate was almost 25% (today, it is about 4%). But Roosevelt’s determined optimism endeared him to the nation, in his first inaugural address he told his fellow Americans, “This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself...” Less than a decade later, during World War II, that same mix of steely determination and buoyant optimism would lead the free world in defeat of perhaps the greatest threat democracy has ever encountered.
Like the Jefferson and Lincoln memorials, Martin Luther King’s statue towers over his surroundings. King’s courageous presence emerges out of what is called the “Stone of Hope”, which itself has been drawn forward from two giant boulders known as the “Mountain of Despair.” Just as Lincoln held us together in the 1860s, Dr. King’s famous dream led us into and through the 1960s, a decade ravaged by assassinations, riots, and protest movements, all of which ripped at the fabric of our deepest beliefs about our past, present and our future. Even amidst recurrent death threats, King reminded us: “Let us not wallow in the valley of despair ….So even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”
That evening, I went to sleep with a mind at peace. Surely, a nation founded on these timeless ideals, one that has gone to war with itself to preserve and advance them, that has crossed oceans to defend them, that has withered assassinations and cataclysmic social revolt to fulfill them; surely such a nation will awaken again to endure and triumph over whatever challenges tomorrow might bring.
When I woke the next morning, the seeds of the poem set forth above came to mind.
- Todd
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If you’d like to learn more about me, please visit my website at http:toddsheetswriter.com
If you’d like to purchase a copy of my book, 2008: What Really Happened – Understanding the Great Financial Crisis please go to Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble.com, or to the publisher’s web site: encounterbooks.com