Greg Grandin, Pulitzer Prize Winning Author, Presents America, Ame'rica: A New History of the New World - Introducing A Book Which Needs to be Taught!

Have you ever learned something in your older years that was briefly touched on in your early school years, yet you were hearing an entirely different point of view about that particular "something" that was being discussed?

Or, have you ever talked with an individual from a different country and learn just how much different your life is from theirs?

Have you ever felt ashamed when you've met somebody new, or from a different country, who is totally confused by what we are saying or they are seeing?

I answered YES to all of the above questions. I had learned in my own life... But I had learned so much more just by reading the Introduction to this new book, which, hopefully, will become a textbook for public schools in the United Stats... I knew it before, but I'm saying it here, the United States has become and is becoming even more so, such an insulated nation, that we are becoming what we never wantd to be...

The type of countries that we, or our ancestors, had left, to come to a free land where we would have all that we had lost under tyrannical or authoritarian country leaders...

This new book is just out. 

I have already purchased his prize-winning book, The End of the Myth, as I am sure you can realize, ends when the border wall became the beginning of the present chaos in which we are now suffering... It is time we depend upon history and facts--and world-wide awareness-- to know what is right and truthful for our world...

Hopefully this will be a new beginning for a North America AND a South America... 

Yes, we worked to earn a reputation of being a free nation, welcoming the immigrants, responding to needs...but, in reality, there has always been an underbelly of unease... Those who lived it, wondered why it was... Or how did we get here? Or why we never heard at least a basic overview of issues in our public schools... I quickly want to say that it certainly was not the teachers who did not do their job... Let's begin by just reminding everybody that banning books has been a part of the issues for as long as I can remember. And that's a long time! Why is it that the United States, even while moving forward in so many ways, yet lack stability--that united front--that has never been totally accepted, or at least acknowledged, as a known accepted basis of Truth for the nation?

I'm not going to comment on this excerpt, other than to highlight what I learned... You will see that I had to acknowledge that I had never thought about the fact that we refer, naturally, to South America on a global basis...but, that, we never really understood what that meant to the people living there, versus, those who live in North America... At first, that was accepted, even while many things done by our early settlers, especially against the indigenous natives, was totally unacceptable... But, what it seems to have happened is that, whatever reason that drove people to leave their homes and move to North America, never really was forgotten. Rather those individual grievances and fears festered underneath or out in the open... We may have claimed our land and built our homes...

But we never really accepted that our (MY!) land was part of YOUR land as well...

As you read, begin to consider who you are as you consider who and where you live...

Introduction:  On the Utility of Magpies 

The traveler sat silently in Quaker meetings for hours during the day and visited brothels at night. In Philadelphia, he watched a raucous crowd welcome the arrival of George Washington, with men, women, and children as ecstatic as if “the redeemer had entered Jerusalem.” General Washington, the Venezuelan Francisco de Miranda wrote in his journal, was magnificent in his bearing and grace. He embodied virtue, and focused all the New World’s desires for independence into a single flame—a flame, Miranda said, that belonged to all America.[1] Miranda, as a colonel in the Royal Spanish Army, had already fought on the side of the North American rebel colonists during the bloody siege of Pensacola. He would later go on to defend the French Revolution and lead one of Spanish America’s first independence movements. 

Now, in the middle of 1783, he was beginning a yearlong tour of the new United States. Miranda wanted to see how the world’s first modern republic fared. He spoke with tradesmen, farmers, and Revolutionary War veterans. In New York’s Hudson Valley, he waxed lyrical about the sweet “grasses of the field” and mistakenly assumed the Catskills were North America’s highest point. He dined in gentry estates even as he noticed much hardship amid the wealth. Many of New York’s Dutch-speaking farmers couldn’t afford shoes, while the well-off, men and women alike, adorned themselves with silks, perfumes, pomades, and powders. The money spent on such “vanity,” he noted, would cover a year’s interest on the new country’s war debt. New York’s politicians and preachers professed abolition, Miranda noted, yet slavery still existed in the state. “The number of Negroes is large.” 

In Boston, he was introduced to Phillis Wheatley, a formerly enslaved West African woman who had won her freedom and became a celebrated poet only to die penniless. Miranda cited Wheatley as proof that all humans, regardless of color or sex, were rational beings. Miranda’s family in Caracas owned slaves, as did Miranda himself. They lugged around his famous library, many bundles of papers and an ever growing number of books. While in Philadelphia, he purchased the indenture of a Scottish boy who had arrived in port on a ship carrying over three hundred shackled Africans. But Miranda would soon embrace the abolitionist cause, as part of a broader belief that all the subjugated peoples of the Americas should be liberated, including Native Americans. When the New World was finally free, Miranda suggested, it might be called Columbia, with the English-language u instead of the Spanish o (as in Colombia), a spelling he picked up from Wheatley’s ode to Washington: “Celestial choir! enthron’d in realms of light, Columbia’s scenes of glorious toils I write.”[2] The Venezuelan thought both Native Americans and women were more oppressed in the new English-speaking republic than in colonial Spanish America. In the United States, the wives of revolutionary leaders were forced into a “monastic seclusion, and such submission to their husbands as I have never seen.” Boston’s General John Sullivan, who gained fame pacifying the British-allied Iroquois, kept “his wife and numerous children completely segregated from society and without giving the latter formal education.” Miranda, his journal pages full of detailed sexual encounters, was appalled when a Shelter Island parson refused to baptize a baby conceived prior to wedlock.[3] In New Haven, Yale’s president, Ezra Stiles, gave him a tour of the university. Miranda sat in on a Hebrew lesson, which he enjoyed, and was pleased that Optics and Algebra were taught “simply and naturally.” He was shocked, though, that the university offered no modern-language instruction, a bad omen for educating modern citizens, thought Miranda (who spoke English, French, and Italian, and read Greek and Latin). Nor was he impressed by Yale’s library: “nothing special.” He read Cotton Mather’s history of New England as “curious evidence of fanaticism.” And kept himself busy in Sunday New England with a pack of playing cards and flute practice, which violated strict Sabbath restrictions. No kite flying either. Stiles, in his own journal, called Miranda a “flaming son of liberty.”[4] Miranda took in the full variety of the new republic. He was welcomed everywhere he went, though he was often mistakenly introduced as a Mexican. Most men were polite but also, he thought, “unsocial,” or huraño, that is, aloof and disinterested in the wider world. Some of the people he met did ask questions about Spain’s American empire. Others proved stubbornly ignorant. In Providence, Miranda visited the estate of Esek Hopkins, who had commanded the rebel navy during the Revolution. Miranda made mention of Mexico City and was surprised to hear Commodore Hopkins respond by saying that there was no such place. A century earlier, New England Puritans had been entranced by Mexico City, the command center of New World popery, with its wide cobbled streets, many horses, and fine carriages. Now, when Miranda tried to correct Hopkins, the Commodore refused to believe him. “Very vulgar,” Miranda wrote in his journal of the encounter. He found most of the university presidents he met to be equally provincial and pedantic. Miranda admired the United States, its dynamism, and early steam power. He liked the psalm singing of Methodists and the organ playing of Episcopalians but was taken aback at how strictly religious most people were. He thought river baptisms absurd, that they indicated a stubborn literal-mindedness. There was too much pulpit “braying” of hatred directed at Jews, Catholics, and Muslims. Miranda singled out one parson for praise, James “Redemption” Murray, who preached that there was no such thing as damnation. “Salvation was universal,” Murray said, which Miranda found refreshing compared to Catholic and Protestant brimstone. Miranda was catching the first notes of the Second Great Awakening, a religious revival movement that went in many directions. There was the harshness Miranda criticized, but also a passion for political reform, for making the United States a vital, healthy, democratic, and energetic nation. He was repulsed by the return of Cotton-Matherism, but compelled by the energy, by the expectation, the scent of something new on the morning wind. And he shared with many of the leading figures in the Awakening the conviction that America, which for him meant all of America, was history’s redeemer.[5] One gets a sense from Miranda’s diary that he hoped the new United States would overcome the problems he recorded: poverty, slavery, the subordination of women, a tendency toward antisociability, and an occasional flash of unflattering self-regard. The diary also makes clear that Miranda wasn’t sure that it could. — “South America will be to North America,” declared the North American Review early in the 1800s, “what Asia and Africa are to Europe.”[6] Not quite. Europe’s liberal capitalist powers—Great Britain, France, and the Netherlands—would rule over culturally and religiously distinct peoples in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. British travelers to India made much of the impenetrability of Hinduism, with its jumble of noises, colors, deities. “There is no dignity,” said E. M. Forster after entering a temple to witness a celebration of the birth of Krishna, “no taste,” in what Indians call ritual. Only chaos. Forster was overcome by India’s mulligatawny metaphysics, the barrage of chants, ecstatic dancing, and indecipherable music. “I am very much muddled in my own mind about it,” he wrote. Forster worked the experience into his novel A Passage to India, writing that nothing the worshippers did seemed “dramatically correct” to the non-Hindu observer. It was, he thought, a jumble, a “frustration of reason and form.”[7] There was no frustration, not of reason nor form, when English and Spanish Europeans, Protestants and Catholics, engaged with one another in the New World. Miranda saw the differences separating Boston and Caracas society, but they didn’t muddle his mind. An indifferent Catholic, he didn’t like Protestant braying. But as a Christian, he understood the theology of the brayer. The republican insurgents who broke from Great Britain defined their system of liberties against what became known as the Black Legend, a compound of negative stereotypes that held the Catholic Spanish Empire to be especially cruel and corrupt. The Legend, though, was legible, emerging from Europe’s political rivalries and religious schisms, its scientific revolutions, renaissances, and enlightenments. When on one Sunday in 1774, future presidents George Washington and John Adams wandered into Philadelphia’s new Catholic Cathedral, they appreciated the priest’s sermon on the duty of parents to care for the spiritual and temporal well-being of their children. Adams, though, in a letter posted to his wife, Abigail, said that he was dismayed at the servility of the congregants, as they fingered their beads, crossed themselves with holy water, and chanted Latin incantations. A painting of “our Savior” in his “agonies,” blood streaming from his wounds, appalled him. So did the Church’s dominion over the senses: “Everything which can lay hold of the eye, ear, and imagination”—organ music, Latin prayers, stained glass, velvet and gold cloth covering the pulpit, the lace of priests’ vestments, candles, crucifixes, and statues of the saints—combine to “bewitch the simple and ignorant.” “I wonder how,” he wrote to Abigail, “Luther ever broke the spell.”[8] The freethinker Adams’s contempt for Catholic superstition mirrored the freethinker Miranda’s for Protestant fanaticism, and later, when Adams searched for some way to describe Francisco Miranda’s revolutionary enthusiasms, he reached for a satire that all literate people in the Americas, of a certain class, had read, either in its original Spanish or its many English translation editions: Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote. The Venezuelan, Adams said, was “as delirious as his immortal countryman, the ancient hero of La Mancha.”[9] There was an intimacy to such disdain, with both disdainer and disdained living in the same ideological village, sharing the same Savior, the same republican patois, reading each other’s books. Adams might have thought Miranda, and other Spanish Americans of his generation, foolish. But they were not inscrutable. They were not the incomprehensibles Forster found in Krishna’s temple. American insurgents, whether they spoke English or Spanish, inherited a set of common assumptions related to the dominance of Christianity and the fight against monarchism. They were mostly all republicans. Some were loosely deists, in one fashion or another, and most were Freemasons, some more anticlerical than others. And they all believed that the right to govern required the consent of the governed, even if that consent needed to be overseen by a caste of elites schooled in the virtues of civic republicanism. The men who would topple the Spanish Empire in the Americas felt they had a kindred spirit with their English-speaking counterparts. They looked to the North American revolution for inspiration, hoping that once Spain was thrown off they might replicate its system of liberties, representative government, and equality under the law. In any case, they shared a faith in the redeeming power of the New World, that America was more an ideal than a place. Simón Bolívar and Thomas Jefferson could at times sound as if they had fallen into a cataleptic trance as they prophesized the future. “It is impossible not to look forward to distant times,” Jefferson wrote, when the United States will “cover the whole Northern, if not the Southern continent with a people speaking the same language, governed in similar forms.” Bolívar imagined himself flying “across the years” to a moment when America had united the world under a system of rational laws, with the Isthmus of Panama a planetary capital, binding north and south, linking east and west. Greece and Rome had its laws and philosophies, but, really, asked Bolívar, what was “the Isthmus of Corinth compared with that of Panama?” 

Miranda conspired with Alexander Hamilton to liberate all South America, believing their escapades would “save the whole world, which is oscillating on the brink of an abyss.” And yet. When Jefferson and Adams used the word America, they were referring to the United States. When Bolívar, Miranda, and other Spanish American republicans used the word America, they meant all the Americas. “Our dear Country America, from the North to the South,” 

Miranda wrote Hamilton. — Who is an American? And what is America? These questions go back a long way. “I that am an American,” affirmed Cotton Mather in the early 1700s. In 1821, the radical Catholic priest Servando Teresa de Mier—born in northern Mexico to a family that traced its lineage back centuries to the first dukes of Granada—also thought himself an American. Having escaped the dungeons of the Inquisition, Mier had set up a printing house in Philadelphia to publish books banned by Spain. He complained, in a letter he sent to a revolutionary compatriot, about the way English speakers used the word America. There were two problems, actually. The first was the constant equation of Spanish American with South America. Mier was tired of pointing out to his English-speaking acquaintances that North America was also Spanish America—that there were more Spanish speakers in Mexico (which at that point ran well into what is today the United States’ Southwest) than in all South America.[10] The second problem was that each European empire used the word America to refer only to their colonial or former colonial possessions. Great Britain called the United States America, Spain called its colonies America, Portugal referred to Brazil as America, France and the Dutch did the same for their Caribbean islands. It is as if, Father Mier said, “there is no other America other than the one they dominate.” “A thousand errors,” he said, lamenting how America was fractured by such usage. All the New World is America. Confusion was natural. America, for Anglo settlers before their revolution, was both the entire New World and their sliver of that world—both their narrow dominion of a thin slip of land between the Alleghenies and the sea and all the land west of those mountains. 

In 1777, the Articles of Confederation named the new country the United States of America, but also referred to it as just America. Europeans liked to point out that the “United States” wasn’t really a “proper name” but rather an adjective attached to a generic noun. Washington Irving agreed. Irving wanted “an appellation” of his own to ensure that he wasn’t confused with a Mexican who by rights could also call himself an American. He wanted a name that would identify him as “of the Anglo-Saxon race which founded this Anglo-Saxon empire in the wilderness.” He suggested Appalachian or Alleghanian. The New England social activist Orestes Brownson thought such ideas rubbish. The “name of the country is America,” he wrote in 1865, “that of the people is Americans. Speak of Americans simply and nobody understands you to mean the people of Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Peru, Chile, Paraguay, but everybody understands you to mean the people of the United States.”[11] Brownson was right at least about royal Canadians, who tended not to call themselves Americans to distinguish themselves from their English-speaking republican neighbors. But Mexicans, Brazilians, Peruvians, Chileans, and Paraguayans all thought themselves Americans, as did the Venezuelan Francisco de Miranda. Nosotros los Americanos—We, the Americans—was how early Mexican nationalists called themselves. Somos da América e queremos ser americanos, said Brazil’s republican leaders, who wanted to overthrow their monarch: We are from America and want to be Americans.[12] Proprietary claims to America became politicized over time, serving as stand-ins for struggles about more substantive issues. “We’ve lost the right to call ourselves Americans,” the Uruguayan Eduardo Galeano wrote in 1971. “Today, for the rest of the world, America means nothing but the United States. We inhabit at best a Sub-America, a second-class America of confused identity.” “We are more American,” goes a song by the Mexican norteño band Los Tigres de Norte “than the sons of the Anglo-Saxons.” Los Tigres are a favorite of migrant and borderland workers, suggesting the matter is not just a concern of literate elites.

In 1943, the diplomatic historian Samuel Flagg Bemis struggled to decide what adjective he should use to refer to the United States, reluctantly settling on American. It sounds better, Bemis wrote, than “the less euphonious adjective United States.” Latin Americans will occasionally refer to the United States as América del Norte, but generally use Estados Unidos and estadounidense, which in Spanish with all its rolling vowels is euphonious, mellifluent even.[13] 

— I’ve written this book not to fuss over names but rather to explore the New World’s long history of ideological and ethical contestation. Philosophers use the phrase immanent critique to describe a form of dissent in which challengers don’t dismiss the legitimacy of their rivals’ worldview but rather accuse them of not living up to their own stated ideals. It’s a useful method for considering the Western Hemisphere, for Latin America gave the United States what other empires, be they formal or informal, lacked: its own magpie, an irrepressible critic. Over the course of two centuries, when Latin American politicians, activists, intellectuals, priests, poets, and balladeers—all the many men and women who came after Miranda—judged the United States, they did so from a shared first premise: America was a redeemer continent, and its historical mission was to strengthen the ideal of human equality. One can’t fully understand the history of English-speaking North America without also understanding the history of Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking America. And by that history, I mean all of it: from the Spanish Conquest and Puritan settlement to the founding of the United States, from Indian Removal and Manifest Destiny to the taking of the West, from chattel slavery, abolition, and the Civil War to the rise of a nation of extraordinary power—from the First World War to the Second, from the Monroe Doctrine to the League of Nations and the United Nations and beyond. And the reverse is true. You can’t tell the story of the South without the North. But America, América is more than a history of the Western Hemisphere. It’s a history of the modern world, an inquiry into how centuries of American bloodshed and diplomacy didn’t just shape the political identities of the United States and Latin America but also gave rise to global governance—the liberal international order that today, many believe, is in terminal crisis. The book starts with the Conquest. The astonishing brutality that Spain, in the first decades of the 1500s, visited on the people of the New World shocked the Catholic realm—Europe’s realm—leading to a reformation within Catholicism, a dissent as consequential as Luther’s. The Catholic Church claimed to be universal, the agent of human history and bearer of humanitas, all the world’s wisdom. And what had that wisdom wrought? Carnage unprecedented. The slaughter, which inaugurated what scholars place among the greatest mortality events in human history, forced theologians to consider Catholic claims to universalism with new attention. Many of these clerics wound up defending Spanish rule, not so much dehumanizing America’s native peoples as refusing to admit they were human at all. Those who died by the Spanish lance, or by European diseases, were of a lesser kind than those people who lived in Europe—defective, not touched by the divine, but rising from the muck and mire. Their dispossession and enslavement were allowed.[14] Others dissented—first among them Father Bartolomé de las Casas—realizing that what had previously been called universal was but provincial, that Europe was just a farrago of fiefdoms whose princes and priests knew nothing about the fullness of the world, nothing of its hitherto undisclosed millions. The dissent of these theologians and jurists has rung down the centuries. Protestant England paid attention to the interminable Spanish debates, to the Catholic friars who insisted on the humanity of the New World’s people, and wondered if they might secure their settlements, in Jamestown and Plymouth, on more defensible principles. They couldn’t. They opted for evasion.[15] Then came the Age of Revolutions, when the New World broke free from the Old. The United States did so first—a republic alone, as many of its leaders imagined, an “Anglo-Saxon empire in the wilderness.” Spanish American nations, in contrast, came into being collectively, an assemblage of republics, an already constituted league of nations. They had to learn to live together if they were to survive. And they largely did so, with their intellectuals, lawyers, and statesmen elaborating a unique body of international law: doctrines, precedents, and protocols geared not toward regulating but outlawing war, not adjudicating conquests but ending conquest altogether. But how to contain the United States? The hemisphere’s first republic seemed more a force of nature than a political entity. More than one of its founders said they could see no limits to its growth, that once they drove the natives beyond the stony mountains they’d soon fill both North and South America with Saxons. What to do with a kinetic nation that believed itself to be as universal as Christianity, as embodying the marching spirit of world history? What Spanish and Portuguese Americans did was update the criticisms aimed earlier at Spain during the Conquest and directed them at the United States. In so doing they sparked a revolution in international law. The triumph of liberal multilateralism after the Allied victory in World War II (especially the nullification of the right of conquest, the prohibition of aggressive war, and the recognition of the sovereign equality of all nations) is often narrated as a transatlantic story, a fortuitous evolution of ideas. Concepts in their infancy during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries grew stronger in the nineteenth, matured in the twentieth century’s cataclysmic wars, and then found their moment in a series of meetings in the last years of World War II: Moscow, Tehran, Dumbarton Oaks, Yalta—onward to the establishment of the United Nations in San Francisco in 1945 and the UN’s ratification of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. Most scholars ignore, or pass quickly over, Latin America when considering the founding of the League of Nations, and then the United Nations. It’s a curious indifference, for the English-speaking statesmen involved in founding global governance, along with those who laid prior groundwork for such an effort—Woodrow Wilson, Andrew Carnegie, Nelson Rockefeller, Henry Wallace, Sumner Welles, and Winston Churchill, among others—openly and repeatedly held up the New World as what the whole world should look like. Wilson often said that Latin America was the model for what he had hoped to accomplish in Paris. FDR told Stalin that Pan-Americanism would be a good template for a postfascist Eastern Europe.[16] America, América argues that the New World’s magpie rivalry, its immanent critique, played a vital role in the creation of the modern world, shaping its economics, politics, and moralities. The Protestant settlers who colonized, followed by the republicans who revolutionized, North America looked to Spanish America not as an alien other but as a competitor, a contender in an epic struggle to define a set of nominally shared but actually contested ideals: Christianity, freedom, law, sovereignty, property, equality, liberalism, democracy, and, above all, the very meaning of America.

~~~

To My Readers in The Old World and the New World!

No matter what country or nation or location where you now reside, I have learned much from just the Introduction, together with other earlier books. I believe this book is meant to be the future History Book for our Schools... Therefore, I highly recommend that you get a copy if you are a planner, like me, and start thinking about how and who you want to be in the future... The history begins in the 1700s... Right now, yes, right now, I see that the world is even worse than in the 1700s...Indeed, in the United States, there is an effort to return our nation into a century where slavery was still allowed... where women continued to die in birth because there was no medical miracles that had been developed that allowed family planning... As we see how many millions are being killed through what started out as minor attempts for help, for freedom, they soon loomed into major losses when greed, pride and power looked for new possibilities for fulfilling personal desires... Some of those who moved into North America because of cruelty and a desire for freedom, soon got just like their former leaders--greedy--and, right from the beginning, started forcing the occupants of both North and South America to abide by their beliefs, or to take what they had, as selfish actions, not caring that they were now doing exactly what had happened to them in the old country! 

Will anything happen to move us back on track to move forward in working to live together in peace? Across the World?! 

I will be working toward that for the rest of my life... Decide today, only working together--learning together will allow each of us, not just those that make money by destruction, hate, and violence, may learn that we can once again dare to reach our hands and arms out to others, in peace, and God's Love...

God, Hear Our Words... It is said that YOU are inside each of us... We are listening... Let us not turn aside for greed and become those who use violence and hatred to think "they" are now in control of that tiny or large world... For surely, right now in today's world, especially in where we had gone--where we had come so far--that we now willingly turn aside our neighbors for some grand scheme--for some mandate that only a few have created--with their millions--only to punish the rest of us? This is where we are. This book takes us back centuries to only now begin to realize just how far we are walking, slowly, backwards.

Will each of us help bring Love Back to This World?

Or will our history be created by machines that go back to this time, Today, and discover that many are dying by other men's hands...and explaining that this is for entertainment only...those people are...GONE

DESTROYED BY GREED, HATE, BIGOTRY, OR FEAR

Writing the Constitution... Completion Stalled - Continuing Discussion of Eric Metaxas' If You Can Keep It!

 

The Promise: 

Nothing is more wonderful than the art of being free, but nothing is harder to learn how to use than freedom.

—Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

In the heart of Philadelphia, in a Georgian brick building that still stands, one of the most extraordinary events in the history of the world took place. There, in what is today called Independence Hall, over the course of about one hundred days in the summer of 1787, some of the most brilliant men of that or any other era created what would become the Constitution of a new country. They were creating the legal foundation for a form of government that had never been tried before; and they were creating the possibility—and the golden and glorious promise—of something called the United States of America.

The key to the entire book is given to readers on the very first page! Did you pick it out... Did you think to yourself, "I didn't know that..." I did, and so did the author. In fact, my guess is that the majority of Americans don't know. And those that do are into history--big time! The United States is the first-ever democracy in America!

One person knew--Martin Luther King, Jr., in his "I Have A Dream" speech spotlighted it... the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence before it constituted a “promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.”

Centuries have passed and much had been accomplished. However, the fact is that that promise had not been accomplished immediately. Dr. King did not see it... And it has still not been accomplished, has it?

I didn't know, because as far as I am aware, it was never highlighted in public schools.  So, what about our country was different? It was a simple fact that never sunk in to most of us. Yes, we are the first country to have actually established a democracy! By now, we all know that a democracy means freedom--freedom for all... But, really, Metaxas confirms that the goal, freedom for all, has not yet been accomplished. In fact, could it be that we are now in danger of ever accomplishing complete freedom for all? Or, can we say that there has been a major stall...

Each of us--each American is given the responsibility for creating, and sustaining freedom... So, how did the Founding Fathers determine that now was the time to begin to formalize and create a government that would oversee what was largely expanding and already had been governing ourselves at the local, colony level? Indeed, there were already power struggles by those who wanted...more... 

One key factor was that the Founding Fathers gathered... believed...

It was a nation held together by an idea and by citizens who bought into that idea. They were of different backgrounds and different religions. Some of them lived in Maine and others in Virginia and others in Georgia—and others in all the colonies in between. But they all were Americans because they voluntarily believed in that idea. That a nation could be held together by people believing in an idea was unprecedented, as I have said. It had never happened before... And the idea in which they believed was...

Liberty

And one of the reasons they believed was that they had gained experience... Decade upon decade showed that no matter that there were different ethnic groups, or religions, still there was no real division within the colonies established by that time. Self-governing became routine. To me, that was important. We needed the time to watch and see what was to happen in America. Would it fail? Or, would it succeed... And, the entire world was watching...

Still, there were so many issues and so many people who had immigrated from other countries.  What would enable a group of people to be trusted to govern themselves and then actually to do so? I wasn't surprised, but had not really considered the ramifications of what Metaxas carefully pointed out... Maybe that's why each citizen needs to learn what he says? For, perhaps, these days, as we ask the question, can democracy survive? We must undoubtedly turn to the present division among America... And we must also look as Ukraine, a democracy, is facing an autocratic leader of another country who is waging war on it citizens...simply because of power and greed. We all know it; we see it there. But do we also think, is this where America might end up? Fighting for a democracy that is no longer able to say that we are all self-governing...together...

So what enabled the Founding Fathers to trust we could be self-governing?

Religion

...Religious freedom was paramount. It was always understood that one’s religion was truly free, which is to say not coerced nor mandatory nor affiliated with the power of the state in any way. This was also unprecedented...

Let's look at this subject as it, first, relates to what happened.  What we know is that many who fled their countries for America was for religious freedom. It was the norm at that time that most countries named a specific religion for its population. What we also know, though, is that all religions in the world have a basic form of accountability. It is that which had already developed in us to love, to care for our neighbors, to be trustworthy, to follow the words of that religion to which we belong. So, while we as a nation wanted liberty, we also, in our religious lives, answered to a deity. Indeed most of our moral training came from gatherings and teachings of our religious groups. 

Here's my first "yes-but." The reason is very clear, at least for me, that we no longer have those basic moral beliefs. At this time in America, we have many who escaped for freedom from murder or worse, enslavement, and have been turned away. We know that all religions are no longer given liberty to worship... Muslims, Jews, and those with Eastern religious backgrounds are now being personally attacked... We know that groups such as Proud Boys, the KKK, White Supremacists, QAnon--specifically all those who conducted an insurrection on the United States Capitol, and many others, no longer are willing to share liberty, freedom... or especially religious liberty... in our democracy. Fortunately, they are not the majority of citizens in America, as evidenced by the last election. But politics for political power's sake is now running rampant in America, again, in my personal opinion...

So what happened when the Founding Fathers work stalled... The document had been written, but consensus could not come...

Next: A Stalled Body of Founding Fathers Moves Forward...

Hi Again, I hope you will feel comfortable enough to question, to respond, to share your thoughts about this book (or my interpretation of what was happening or is happening)! Jot them down, or leave thoughts or questions as comments!

God bless,

Glenda

Guest Blogger Adolph Caso Shares Article on Voting... We the People... A Reprint with Added Narrative

WEALTHY VOTERS—
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Adolph Caso

Thomas Jefferson had it right when he rejected the recommendation to give special privileges, in the form of pardons, to the clergy and to the nobility. He believed that no special distinction should be established and no special privileges granted by the legislature to individuals of the clergy and those of the nobility—that no distinction should be allowed between and among the citizens at large.

All citizens were to be considered citizens at large, each to have the same standing in the eyes of the law. Jefferson was loath to distinguish between individuals of one grouping from named individuals from the general population. “…when laws are made as mild as they should be, both those pardons are absurd… Let the legislators be merciful, but the executors of the laws inexorable.” In addition, Jefferson reiterates that the role of the legislators is to make laws; and, the role of the executive is to uphold those laws.

According to Jefferson, the clergy and the nobility have to be responsive to the laws as any other citizen. America’s society, therefore, could not be based on Europe’s society whose people were automatically under the leadership if not the ownership of the King or Queen. Whatever the Europeans’ social classes—nobles and plebeians belonged to a given monarch for the duration of their lives.

Jefferson and Adams, on the other hand, rejected that entrenched practice and turned the political world upside down when they proclaimed that government officials had to fulfill three main responsibilities:

1) They had to exist for the people.

2) They had to serve the people.

3) They had to guide (not restrict) the people to achieve maximum (not minimum) happiness for each individual citizen—male or female, rich or poor, heterosexual or homosexual, no matter one’s racial, or ethnic background, and regardless of groupings, or sexual orientations.

The new American government was going to be achieved by its citizens in the voting booth where each named individual was to have the same level of power as his other fellow citizens. But Jefferson also knew that any system, no matter how well regulated, could be vitiated to the benefit/detriment of one group over another. Maintaining the integrity of a democratic governmental infrastructure, therefore, would remain the biggest challenge for all elected and appointed individuals as well as for each citizen at large. If the citizen is corrupt, so will his representative, and not necessarily the other way around.

The inspirational rationale behind, We the people…, came from Cesare

Beccaria, especially through John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Paraphrase:

If society were based on associations of unions of families, there would be 20,000 men and 80,000 slaves. If the associations were based on unions of men, there would be 100,000 citizens and not one slave.

This became the guiding principle of Jefferson and Adams in establishing their American society in which every individual would be free to enhance his/her right to live in a socio-political environment based on freedom made possible mainly through local self-government. Jefferson projected that Americans would not live by terms dictated by those in government; rather, that government officials were to be entrusted to fulfill the terms dictated by the citizenry at large.

Literally, therefore, We the people represents a consent-agreement in the new American society wherein all named individuals agree to assume for themselves, through their conditional consent, to be governed and to be represented accordingly:

a) With direct responsibility and accountability for their personal actions, and,

b) With indirect responsibility and accountability for the actions of their representatives.

The reality was and continues to be that the specific responsibility and accountability of each member can neither be transferred to other named entities, nor to corporate-type organizations, nor to other representative individuals.

When individuals have a direct and indirect role of representing themselves and their constituent entities at the same time, they run the risk of committing reverse double jeopardy. Worse, when foreign entities maintain addresses within the US, their executors (foreign or American citizens), in acting on behalf of their entities, they enjoy the benefits of reverse double jeopardy, especially in civic situations related to voting.

The vote of the citizen is diluted through powerful campaigns mounted by entities having uncontested abilities to sway the voters one way or another to gain an upper hand.

Individuals cannot, nor should not be able to act--at the same time--on their own behalf and on behalf of entities or corporations.

In civic life, named individuals should not have the power to act in two roles because in acting in two roles they would only act for their own benefits, against the benefits of fellow citizens. Un-named individuals belonging to entities would act on behalf of their entities, and/or on behalf of foreign interests--and not on behalf of the private citizen. Individuals within those entities that are allowed to receive subsidies, have undue degrees of power over the voter at large that does not receive such subsidies. They would enjoy an edge much as the nobility in monarchies..

Regulations have to be clear in maintaining that distinction in roles. Unfortunately, that distinction becomes blurred when laws, the likes of McCain and Feingold, allow corporations to donate huge sums to specific political parties. There’s no way that, in executing their civic duties, private individuals can compete with un-named individuals operating within entities having the financial clout of their treasuries. The best example is seen in the recent decision wherein the Supreme Court further diminished the power of named individuals having civic values by shifting it to named entities having commercial and political values. The question to be asked is whether McCain and Feingold enhances the two-party system that has served America for so many decades or diminishes the balance between them to the point that each party becomes a means for its own sake--with one goal in mind: to destroy the members of the other party.

When commercial-type entities make large-size donations to specific politicians or to parties: Are the recipients beholden to those entities or to the people at large?

It is doubtful that the Founding Fathers would have wanted a government for corporations. If they had wanted a government for corporations (nobility), they would not have established a government for the people!

The issue above has nothing to do with the First Amendment in that this Amendment does not grant the people the right to exercise their religions; rather, it says that the government cannot take away that right. Likewise, the government cannot take away from the people the right to reveal their opinions--in private or in public, through a free press; nor can the government reduce that right, or transfer it away from the people to incorporated private or public entities. In view of the power wielded by today’s press, one has to admit that the press functions as a vehicle on behalf of corporations and political parties to facilitate the attainment of political and commercial goals, and to limit, at the same time, the individual citizen from expressing his or her opinions and ideas.

Literally, it is the people who have the right to speak, and not the entities!

In exercising their civic responsibilities, the citizens have one voice each; and, the same citizen, belonging to entities, also has one voice, except that the latter has clout. The former is limited in receiving the stimulus while the latter is empowered in imposing that stimulus under the guise of a free press and protected by the judiciary. When the rights of certain individuals are more confirmed than those of others, voters should see that their America may practically be coming full circle--to a situation tantamount to when only white wealthy males--incorporated into groupings, could vote. Thus, those rights inherent in We the people, in our modern environment, if not dashed--those rights are at the very least vitiated.

In recent times, California citizens voted on, and the Legislature passed a law relating to the status of same sex marriages. Whether one is in favor or against it, the sexual preference of any individual should not be the concern of lawmakers; otherwise, there would be laws for all other kinds of private groupings—like the clergy or the nobility in Europe, whose social structures were rejected by Jefferson and others.

With Proposition 8, Californians voted into law a prohibition forbidding individuals of the same sex from marrying one another: Men could not marry other men; likewise, women could not marry other women. Only men and women could marry each other--a tradition based on ancient customs with a relevancy to the well being of societies going back across the ages.

The institution of marriage is long-standing and sacrosanct in many if not all surviving cultures. In the United States, however, if two, three, or more individuals want to live in their private lives fulfilling their personal sexual predispositions, laws cannot and must not interfere with those preferences unless the activity be criminal.

Having the freedom to practice our sexual preferences in an open society, individually, or as individuals of a distinct group, when we join a group, do we do so to gain more government benefits at the expense of those individuals who adhere to traditional marriages? The overriding question is the following: What is the end goal of two men marrying each other as opposed to a man and a woman marrying one another, other than to gain additional but un-earned benefits?

Without procreation, society would already have gone the way of the Shakers. If the former were to gain the same benefits as the latter, would both groupings fulfill the goal of procreation? It is a legitimate question because of the implications in the form of responsibility and accountability prescribed for the individuals in both groupings.

With no dependent children to provide for in one grouping and similar benefits provided for in the other groupings, which grouping would gain more advantages and benefits? Here we need to assess the ratio of responsibility and accountability between the two groupings? One has children; the other does not. In addition, the mother, in becoming pregnant, becomes indisposed for three or more months in bearing the child. These mothers are also unable to work and to earn wages. But, males or females that marry in the same gender are neither indisposed nor lose their wages.

The responsibility and accountability of raising one child is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. The only consideration given to parents with children is in the form of exemptions averaging about 2,000 (or whatever) in deductions per child, per year, possibly over 26 years, totaling about 52,000 dollars. The media has been reporting that an average middle class family spends about 300,000 dollars to raise one offspring (food, clothing, health care, lodging, education, recreation, etc). On the other hand, couples (male/female, male/male, female/female) without children do not have such expenses. Who has the advantage, therefore, is obvious. But, how did the individuals of two groupings get such advantages over those in the traditional grouping?

The fact is that the named individuals (from marriages between males/males or females/females) continue to amass all kinds of wealth, which translates into increase in power for that grouping, not to mention their massive lobbying capabilities. Individuals from traditional marriages, on the other hand, who are forced to pay for raising children, continue to lose wealth and power. In the short and the long run, the government grants more benefits to those who are passive--who do not produce, and penalizes those who are active--who do produce. If the role of government is to engineer society according to the wishes and designs of the elected or appointed officials, by all accounts, they have succeeded.

The government, unconstitutionally, is also granting equal benefits to children born within the continental boundaries of the United States of mothers who were neither born nor naturalized in America. As it stands today, any non-US citizen mother, coming to America via water, air, or land, on delivering her baby—the baby automatically becomes a US citizen. Contrarily, if a similar woman, be a refugee in a boat from Africa, or an outlaw in her native land, or simply one visiting Greece, Italy, or Germany, if she delivers a baby, that baby is not bestowed that country’s citizenship. But, the American government (despite its 14th Amendment, which clearly states who is or can become a citizen) grants citizenship to any woman’s baby, whether she comes into America illegally or as a visitor for the purpose of gaining citizenship for her child. In these situations:

What Wall would be high or low enough to keep these people away?

By facilitating the entry in a single incident into America of more than 60,000 illegal non-Americans: How can any other obstacle be erected to keep those people from coming in? Is the government providing Trojan Horses as well?

Why does the Judiciary enhance the role of another set of Human traffickers?

Here’s the 14th Amendment: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside…” The Amendment grew out of the need to clarify the status of emancipated slaves, previously classified as property, and now needing to gain citizenship on equal par with his/her fellow citizens. The Amendment has nothing to do with either immigrants or migrants. Case in point:

An immigrant from Europe, around 1900, having gained admission to the US, remained a citizen of his native country. Having traveled back and forth from the US to his native country, and having had children with his wife, those children remained citizens of their country. Back in America, that citizen decided to apply for citizenship, and succeeded in becoming naturalized. On returning to his native country once again, he and his wife had another child, who automatically derived his US citizenship directly from his naturalized father. Thus, when the whole family of five children came to America, only the youngest came through with an American passport; the others had to go through Ellis Island. Then, if either of the four had had children while in America, those children could not become American citizens. For obvious reasons, therefore, they all and quickly became naturalized citizens so that their children would be guaranteed citizenship similar to regular citizens or emancipated slaves. There was no such thing as bringing into America a pregnant woman for the sole purpose of delivery a child to gain citizenship. The Judicial system would not have stood for it.

When the American government, notwithstanding the 14th Amendment, therefore, automatically grants to children of non-US citizen parents under the jurisdiction of their native countries--at the very least our very government vitiates the law, and creates another entity whose members (depending on the largesse of the same Government) become the political tools of whatever party—all at the expense of the citizen at large. In the end, unfortunately, the chickens come home to roost for the benefits of a few empowered individuals at the expense of the citizen at large. When our Government allows criminals into the US, who kill or maim Americans, the harm reverberates across America and endured by every citizen.

Although the government has created federal subsidies on behalf of the poor, shamefully, there are more people who are poorer. Due to reduced funds, NASA has been cut down to limited significance, and the Defense Department has been downsized to a 1941 era. Yet, the national debt is the highest ever, and China’s economy is number one. Is this good for America? But what has happened to the people themselves in that process? The dissolution of the family has become baneful to everyone, regardless of grouping.

With power transferred to individuals from one grouping to another, by doing it legislatively, our American society has devolved to the time when the citizens existed for the government, and not vice versa. When individuals of one group hold sway over the people at large, devolution replaces evolution. The best example is provided by David Boyes, in the case of California's Proposition 8 which banned gay marriage, (Perry v. Schwarzenegger).

The people of California voted to ban marriages between men/men, and women/women. Mr. Boyes, by his own admission and with limited bravado, told his television audience how he, as the leading counsel, was able to convince the Supreme Court Justices to strike down the law that banned the traditional marriage, even though the right of civil union remained unchallenged.

Having become a powerful lawyer of the rich and famous, though dyslectic, he served on many prestigious law firms until he created his own firm with influence extending overseas.

He admitted that he deployed this powerful firm to work in behalf of his specific grouping of individuals at the expense of the citizenry whose votes, as a result, were abrogated by the justices themselves. The implication is this: individuals in groupings—clergy, nobles, gays accrue more privileges and gain more power over individuals not belonging to special groupings. This is being done by individuals such as Mr. Boyes with the effective participation of the judiciary whose members have arrogated a legislative power belonging to Congress. By so doing, legislators and judges are replacing the Preamble of We the people… to We the corporations…

In our democracy, everything emanates from the people.

In despotic governments, everything emanates from its tyrants.

In the former, every individual has standing.

In the latter, no one has standing, not even the tyrant himself.

When lawyers probe our system in order to garner more power for individuals of one group against those of another, they do so at the expense of every single individual. In a government which allows for real standing, the people enjoy democracy; in a government which allows for contrived or controlled standing emphasizing groupings, the people are made to endure repression.

The road from enlightenment to absolute oppression can be a very short one; indeed, when standing is based on attributes of social groups rather than on the attributes of the individual voter, standing becomes ineffective. Legislature is needed to abolish political contributions and to allow a range of limited contributions only by the citizens themselves. By so doing, Americans will achieve true standing. First step? Repeal McCain and Feingold.

With individuals like Mr. Boyes, whose goal is to guarantee that everyone has standing, through his type of practice, he guarantees standing for the wealthy at the expense of the citizen at large.

Americans are represented directly through the Legislative, and indirectly through the Executive and the Judiciary. The role of the latter two is to ensure, among others, that the Legislature passes laws that are constitutional and in the best interest of the American people. When the Executive, therefore, chooses to uphold only one part of any law, the Judiciary should act against that practice and not in concert with it. Likewise, when the Judiciary makes decisions that effectively become laws, such as establishing same sex marriages, the Legislature should act to prohibit that power with replacements of proper laws addressing the issue. In every state where same sex marriages are allowed, the majority has emanated from the Judiciary and not from the Legislature. Should the three branches of government all have legislature power? Where every branch of government intrudes into another, how can one check on the other?

Question 1: Are the bantering victories (by the Judiciary and by the Executive) done to enhance the principles inherent in our Constitutional Democracy or, are those victories to reduce those very principles that created and sustained America?

Question 2: Can House of Representative members, who represent you and me,--can they pass bills without bipartisan deliberation or without seeing or reading the bill, and/or to the exclusion of members of the opposite party? Should they pass bills on behalf of the citizens and the citizens kept from seeing those bills?

In, We the people,

Each person is a human being,

As defined by Dr. King.

Are our elected and appointed representatives on the way to replace, We the people…, with, We the entities…?

That seems to be the trend!

Adolph Caso, Publisher, Editor, Author, Poet, Photographer Routinely Contributes to Book Readers Heaven.