Time Essay: The Morning After the Fourth: Have We Kept Our Promise?

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British Critic Sir Denis Brogan liked to tell about an incident that happened just after President Andrew Jackson died. A visitor attending his funeral asked one of Jackson's slaves whether he thought the general would go to heaven. The slave replied, "He will if he wants to." Brogan added the moral: General Jackson was and is a symbol of the typical American.

Perhaps not so typical any longer. The belief that America can go to heaven if it wants to, indeed that it has created a kind of heaven on earth, has been badly damaged lately. Last week's Fourth of July rhetoric was more resounding than ever. At Baltimore's Fort McHenry, where Francis Scott Key wrote the national anthem in 1814, President Ford said that in America's third century, "quality and permanence should be the measurements of our lives" and "mass production, mass education, mass population must not smother individual expression." Surveying the U.S. as it entered its 200th year, the President found "a free government that checks and balances its own excesses, and a free economic system that corrects its own errors, given the courage and constructive cooperation of a free and enlightened citizenry." In Stavanger, Norway, at ceremonies commemorating the 150th anniversary of the sailing of the first Norwegian immigrant ship to the U.S., Senator Hubert Humphrey lauded "these pioneers" who "brought with them no riches but skill, perseverance and confidence."

What with the Bicentennial, such rhetoric will probably continue unabated, instead of being put away for another year. Yet on the morning after the Fourth, perhaps we should ask ourselves just how free and enlightened we are, and whether the sons of those pioneers are as persevering as were their fathers. In short, just what are we celebrating—beyond mere survival, which in itself is no mean achievement?

The founding of America was not just a political event, the breaking away of some dissatisfied colonies from a shortsighted and selfish mother country. It was also an act of political philosophy and faith. It was a promise, as Archibald MacLeish put it, a promise to the colonists, to their descendants and to the world at large. The promise was contained in the Declaration of Independence: that people could govern themselves; that they could live in both freedom and equality; and that they would act in accord with reason—reason being a divine attribute, God's light for and in man.