Happy Fourth, don't look ahead
The Column: 07.04.25
I look out our back door onto the rooftops of Manhattan’s Upper West Side and try to imagine it back in 1776 when Broad Way was a dirt road among truck farms, far from City Hall where the Declaration of Independence was proclaimed aloud on July 9. A small crowd of patriots stood listening to it being read, but most of the 20,000 city residents found other things to occupy themselves, including the farmers up our way. Their crops were in, there was cultivating to be done and livestock to tend, and revolution was not a priority.
They may have agreed about the unalienable rights but overthrowing the government was another matter. When the schoolteacher Nathan Hale went spying for George Washington on Long Island that September and was caught by the British and taken to the gallows and declaimed, “I regret that I have but one life to give for my country,” he didn’t speak for many. Most people preferred to use their one and only life to earn money, go dancing, fall in love, strip naked, and beget descendants. They mostly succeeded.
Boston and Philadelphia were hotbeds of revolution; New York was devoted to the pursuit of happiness. When Washington came to the city in 1776 to engage the British, his general Nathanael Greene, told him that two-thirds of New York was loyal to the king and so the city was not worth fighting for. The New York militia deserted by the thousands; they had better things to do. After the British defeat at Yorktown in 1781, a large chunk of the city’s population headed for Canada.
Nonetheless, New York became the new nation’s capital, Washington was inaugurated there, Congress convened, and the members were quite aware of the city’s indifference, and so Pierre L’Enfant was engaged to design a proper capital, with streets radiating from the Capitol on a hill, a grand stage for politicians. New York swallowed politicians and spit them out.
Now a New Yorker is bending government to his will, exercising executive power in behalf of his various obsessions about immigrants and diversity programs, his antipathy to science and higher education and humanitarian aid. Now he announces that he will deny federal funds to New York City if the Democratic mayoral nominee “doesn’t do the right thing.” His tolerance of dissent is somewhat less than George III’s and as the 2026 midterms approach, serious people speculate that Mr. Trump may decide to declare an emergency and overthrow the government all by himself. Interesting times we live in.
In high school history, we were taught a myth in which the American people rose up and defeated the redcoats, the Hessian mercenaries, and the loyalist traitors, but the truth was that a majority of the colonists were indifferent. They considered Nathan Hale a fool: a Yale grad should’ve gone into law and opened a practice, not be hanged by the neck with a hood on his head.
Ours is a history of divisibility. If Lee had routed the Union Army at Chancellorsville and then sent them running at Gettysburg and leaving heaps of bodies on Little Round Top and denying Lincoln his Address, the draft riots that fall in New York City might’ve resulted in a peace treaty and the Confederacy would stand today with some emancipated Blacks, some enslaved, and the vote reserved for white men. Liberal democratic culture is hardly an inevitability.
No, the Declaration is kept locked in a vault under glass and we live by the principle of Mind Your Own Business and Leave Well Enough Alone. Hamilton could’ve led an army against Jefferson, Hoover could’ve arrested FDR in 1932, Biden could’ve put Trump under house arrest after his 34 fraud convictions, but the country is not in favor of permanent revolution. It’s too much trouble. The 58,000 Nathan Hales who died in Vietnam are invisible and forgotten.
The MAGA crowd is about a third of the citizenry, who want to go trump-trump-trumping down the road to a white isolationist evangelical nation led by a commanding masculine figure with a big mouth, surrounded by compliant men and attractive women, happy to kill off research and drive scientists and great intellects to foreign countries, to favor middle-class pop culture and never set foot in the fine arts. A ferocious minority can achieve this. It needs to ignore its own contradictions but it can be done.
This country in 2050 could be unrecognizable to us old lib-labs and thank goodness we won’t be around to see it. We’ll still be loyal to the old indivisible nation with justice for all.
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Oh Garrison, I’m sitting here crying for the country I didn’t know I loved so much. True, I, now 79, will not be around in 2050 to see what this country has become, but my dear daughter and beloved grandchildren will. I weep for them. I used to say how glad I was to be born when I was, in 1946, to see such changes, such progress. But now I think I have lived too long; I had no idea that all that hard won progress could be crumpled, thrown away, dismissed as if it had never happened. At least there is you. Thank you for being. My husband and I look forward to seeing you in Tarrytown.
All of which is why we cannot be the indifferent masses of which you write. We must stand up. We must shout from the rooftops. Remember Dr. Seuss's Horton Hears a Who? Only the elephant Horton with his huge ears can hear the village of Whos that live on the dust speck Horton is protecting. They are about to be boiled alive if they can't prove their existence. All the Whos are shouting at the top of their lungs but still can't be heard. The Mayor speeds through the village to see if everyone is shouting. He finds one small boy silently playing with his yo-yo. The Mayor scoops him up, carries him to the top of a tower and tells him to shout. "Yop!" says the boy. And that one added sound makes the difference. They are heard. They are saved. Every voice counts.