6/13/2022

Last week’s curation at RealClear’s American Civics portal begins with Kerry Byrne’s appreciation of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s D-Day prayer on June 6, 1944, which “was reported the next day on the front page of almost every newspaper in America” and was heard by over 100 million people around the world. “Roosevelt steeled frightened mothers and fathers, and a worried but determined nation, for the shocking human cost to come,” he notes. Byrne also highlights the efforts of the Christian Alliance of America in getting this prayer installed in a monument at the National World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C.

In his speech accepting a 2022 Bradley Prize, the eminent historian Wilfred McClay spoke about the “unserious” state of the country, arguing that our political and intellectual life has become problematic – especially in regards to how Americans view the morality of the American story. “Would a serious country so completely lose perspective on its own past,” he argues, “that it would entertain the idea that the nation was founded on slavery, rather than on the ideals that have made it a beacon to the rest of the world?” McClay told his audience that in order to “become a serious country again,” Americans need to “believe in ourselves again, believe in the reason we have been placed here, as a land of hope for a world that needs hope more than ever.” He continues: “We need to understand that a world without America will be immeasurably diminished, both in material and spiritual terms, and that we have no choice but to live up to the responsibilities that come with our many blessings.”

In a review of David Hackett Fischer’s “African Founders,” Walter Russell Mead writes that in this “landmark study,” Fischer “neither fetishizes American exceptionalism nor reduces the complex American story to a series of crimes.” Instead, he says that Fischer sees the United States as “an extraordinarily dynamic place that has undergone enormous change over a relatively brief history.” Mead argues that Fischer demonstrates the important truth of “how American black America is.” “Africans struggled for freedom and dignity, an expression of the American spirit at its best,” he notes, and remain “full co-creators of an American society that, whatever its flaws, has had an immense impact on the story of the whole human race.”