The past in light of the present, the present in light of the past

It’s a beautiful day in northern Vermont but, holy cow, the wind is muscular, tipping over pool umbrellas, toppling tomato plants, ripping furniture covers off sofa and chairs, whipping up the wind chimes into a gaudy symphony that’s verging on ear splitting. Even the dogs look a little alarmed. But I’m not going inside.

The fourth of July is one day away, and though I am rather looking forward to the fireworks tonight, there is a sadness inside, not unrelated, I am sure, to the July 1 Supreme Court decision (Donald J. Trump v. United States) that seems to be taking one more step in turning the presidency back into just the kind of regime we are tomorrow celebrating the end of. I just saw on Instagram: “America does not deserve a birthday party this year.” Ugh.

Speaking of which, have you read Heather Cox Richardson’s “Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America”? Author of the newsletter, “Letters from an American,” Richardson is the keenest, most engaging, clarifying and compelling historian I have ever come across.

“Democracy Awakening” has its origins in 2019, when Richardson began posting daily Facebook essays explaining the historical roots underlying today’s politics and goings on. These essays morphed into a nightly newsletter which now has a readership of upward of two million. “Democracy Awakening” is dedicated: “To the people who have joined me in exploring the complex relationship between history, humanity, and modern politics. This book is yours as much as it is mine.”

The frontispiece is from Walt Whitman: “We have frequently printed the word Democracy. Yet I cannot too often repeat that it is a word the real gist of which still sleeps, quite unawaken’d.” (Hence, the title.)

I have always been interested in history, but during my years in school was consistently disappointed to discover that “history” was little more than an endless series of wars and dates and white men doing things like starting wars, fighting wars and getting elected, all of which I was supposed to absorb and remember. But that’s not “history” with Heather Cox Richardson, whose essays, newsletters and recent book illuminate the past in light of the present and the present in light of the past with tremendous clarity and insight. Her work tells how, in the last few decades, a small but determined group of rich and privileged Americans have eroded American ideals. Through the weaponization of language, the promotion and promulgation of false history and disinformation, and a bunch of other shenanigans, they have led us, basically, into authoritarianism.

And yet somehow Richardson’s work doesn’t depress or make me feel defeated — her newsletter is the first thing I read upon waking every morning — or like a helpless victim of political villains I can’t touch, see or influence, but rather, inspires me to pay attention, to stand up for and to continue to believe in the ideals embodied in the Declaration of Independence. Writes Richardson, in her newsletter, “For my part, I will stand with the words written 248 years ago today, saying that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain 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 the Guardian puts it, “Democracy Awakening” is “an excellent primer for anyone who needs the important facts of the last 150 years of American history — and how they got us to the sorry place we inhabit today.”

One of the gazillion things I learned from reading this excellent book is about President John Fitzgerald Kennedy; how his assassination on Nov. 22, 1963, had a good deal to do with his stance on desegregation. Richardson tells of black veteran James Meredith of Mississippi, who decided to “test the resolve of the young president who talked so inspirationally about the torch being passed ‘to a new generation of Americans’ whom Kennedy descried as ‘unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed.’” The day after Kennedy took office, Meredith applied to the whites-only University of Mississippi. With the help of Medgar Evers, the head of the NAACP in Mississippi, on May 31, 1961, Meredith sued for admission.

It was decided by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit that Meredith had the right to enroll. Which put Kennedy, says Richardson, in a tough spot. “He would have to pick between northern urban Democrats who embraced the liberal consensus and southern white supremacists.” Kennedy’s attorney general, and brother, Robert F. Kennedy, told JFK that the government had no choice and must enforce the decision of the Supreme Court requiring racial desegregation.

Despite violent resistance and protest by white supremacists on the Ole Miss campus (they killed two men, wounded others and destroyed property), the military intervened, and on Oct. 1, Meredith registered.

Because “Kennedy had put the muscle of the federal government behind desegregation,” he was accused of being a communist sympathizer and revolutionary. And because of “that conflation of Black rights and communism” in the southern right wing, Kennedy decided to travel to Dallas, Texas, in November 1963 to “mend some fences in the state Democratic Party.”

On the morning of Nov. 22, there was a flyer in The Dallas Morning News announcing that the president of the United States was wanted for “treason” for “betraying the Constitution” and “giving support and encouragement to the Communist-inspired racial riots.” Kennedy warned his wife, Jacqueline, that they were “heading into nut country today.”

“They were,” writes Richardson, “and he paid with his life for that attempt to enforce the liberal consensus.”

Such a good, good-hearted, brilliant, illuminating book. I would say it is a must read for every American. (Though I am aware there are many of our countrypeople who would rather hurl it into a bonfire than read it.) I listened to it on Audible but bought the hard copy so that I could reread certain parts. I also highly recommend subscribing to Heather Cox Richardson’s newsletter, which will fall daily into your inbox and make everything so much clearer, and better, and more … well, understandable, and even bearable, somehow.

OK, well I’m off to see the fireworks. God help us. Happy reading!