11/18/2024

Last week’s curation at RealClear’s American Civics portal begins with a piece by Jack Miller Center fellow Timothy Hemmis at RealClearHistory. Hemmis covers two holidays that are sandwiched between Halloween and Christmas: Veterans Day and Thanksgiving. Both holidays can be understood as being linked to the theme of thanksgiving -- one focuses on the veterans who have served on behalf of the country and the other on the blessings God has given the United States. Known as Veterans Day since 1954 (before that it was Armistice Day), Hemmis notes that it originally “commemorated the Allies’ victory in World War I.” After World War II, however, “Dwight Eisenhower pushed to expand the holiday to honor all veterans.” Hemmis points out that Thanksgiving, of course, has been celebrated in America in one form or another for centuries. “President George Washington issued the first national day of thanksgiving on November 26th, 1789 as a day for prayer and giving thanks to God ‘for his kind care and protection of the People of this Country previous to their becoming a Nation.’” Hemmis counsels Americans that “There is nothing wrong with putting up your Christmas tree early, but hopefully you and your family can pause and celebrate the two days of thanksgiving this November.”

At Ford Forum, John Wood argues that American society, by and large, “has largely lost its capacity to think in terms of the values and virtues of republicanism.” Wood argues that we need to reinvigorate the republican imagination, which he defines as being “rooted in a larger conception of popular participation in government, and beyond this, ideas of the intrinsic dignity of the common man (and woman).” The republican imagination, Wood says, rests upon “the careful craftsmanship of a self-governing people to raise up from the flawed clary of human-beings the more perfect edifice of rules, systems and institutions by which men and women can live together, their prosperity, security and their liberty assured.” He contends that “This grand project of the Republic is one that deserves romanticizing. It is one that deserves the creative invocation of its body of ideals.” Although Wood says he doesn’t “see that in America today…perhaps the very possibility of the faltering of the republic will cause such imagination to rise.”