Martin Gurri, a Cuban immigrant from the early 1960s:
When I asked my five-year-old grandson what he knew about George Washington, all he could say was, “He owned slaves.” That’s how Washington is remembered today: slaves, bad teeth, and a face on the dollar bill. But he won the Revolutionary War by sheer force of character; the precedents he set as our first chief executive embodied the ideology of freedom and remain in effect today. Other great men of similar talents behaved quite differently. Napoleon began as first consul, then promoted himself to emperor. Simón Bolívar went from liberator to dictator. By contrast, Washington voluntarily and with much relief relinquished power and ended his days as a farmer at Mount Vernon. That was unusual, unlikely—and exceptional.
The Civil War could have resulted in nothing more than a brutal power play—the North and the West devouring the South much like Bismarck’s Prussia swallowed the German principalities. That didn’t happen because Abraham Lincoln gave the war a profound moral dimension. The “last best hope” for human freedom, he insisted, was at stake. It was Lincoln who defined our exceptionalism. He believed we were the first nation to rise above the accidents of history and be “dedicated to a proposition.” Yet an ideology of freedom couldn’t coexist with chattel slavery. The slaughter of war was the punishment for that monstrous contradiction. Lincoln’s second inaugural address, a towering moral document, reads like a combination of a Greek tragedy and a lost book from the Bible. He was, to put it mildly, an uncommon politician.
In times of need, other Americans have stepped into the breach with remarkable regularity. When the Great Depression shook our way of life to its foundation, Franklin Roosevelt rejected “fear itself” and restored faith in representative democracy. When the Cold War against the forces of unfreedom appeared eternally deadlocked, Ronald Reagan could conceive only of a single outcome: “We win, they lose”—and so it was.
When the disgrace of Jim Crow segregation needed to be atoned for and eradicated, we should have expected, and certainly deserved, rage and hatred for the oppressors from the black leadership. Instead, we got a magnificently eloquent preacher who practiced nonviolence and taught Christian forgiveness. As anyone can tell who has read “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King Jr. was nobody’s pushover. “We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor,” he wrote; “it must be demanded by the oppressed.” But he quoted the words of the Founders in front of the temple to Lincoln in Washington, D.C.—appealing to the American ideology of freedom and demanding a share of it for all Americans. And so began the long process of healing the nation.
