July 2, 1976
Page 22245
THE BICENTENNIAL
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, as we begin the weekend of the Bicentennial, I would like to share some thoughts on the importance of this occasion.
For this is a time for reflection and self-scrutiny, as well as celebration. In fact, we would betray our revolutionary predecessors if we did not ask ourselves the question that they posed to themselves as they embarked upon history's greatest political adventure: What is the substance of a nation?
Is a nation its geography? Surely not. We profess this America to be the same in continuity as that original America. Yet this engulfs a continent and islands lying far beyond the continent. The first America was the eastern strip of a wilderness, unplowed and unexplored.
Is a nation its policies? No; our own experience tells us it is not that. In the 200 years of our age, Congresses, Governors and Presidents have conceived and pursued a myriad of policies both internal and international.
A few were works of genius. Some were the rankest sort of folly. All but a few are forgotten now.
Nor is a nation the sum of its leaders, its wealth, its poets, its generals, its commerce. Wealth, like Presidents, poets and soldiers, has a certain mortality attached to it. We are not to be defined by either men or moments — all of them pass on to some other place. America, as we profess it, endures.
The substance of a nation, from decade to decade, century to century, is made of two, inseparable parts. The first is the endless flow of its people, arising in the morning of each generation, pursuing until that evening which claims us all, leaving their imprints as new generations, new claimants to the national being.
The second part of a nation's substance is its intention toward its people — how it presumes to attend to their prosperity or despair, how it encourages them in their improvements and protects them from all real perils, including the peril of their own natures' darker impulse.
This combination — people and their government — is the true substance of a nation. Each era judges government in the light of how it deals with people — whether government is careless of the human condition around it or whether, overly inspired by doctrine, it smothers the generation it governs with outdated notions and practices.
And history, looking back, will ask this: How did those governments or administrations deal with their people's prosperity or despair? How did they attend to improvement and protection?
This, more than blood spilled and victories won by such sacrifice, more than wealth or glories that dim with time, is how a nation is judged. This is its substance.
We are not only celebrants this year, heirs to a great idea in its Bicentennial. We are also engaged in the appointed business of that idea — the election of a new President, Congress, Governors, councilmen and other officials of the Nation, its States, cities, counties, and towns.
Just as the Bicentennial symbolizes the history that ultimately will judge us, so the elections this year will — or should — bear the judgment of this era on the intent and quality of government.
It could be a harsh judgment. We could select those candidates who scorn our mature instinct for understanding the complexity of our times — who postulate lethal simplicities and the politics of discord.
Always, in the longer runs of election times, we seem to be spared that. We seem to have been spared it this time.
But that does not mean that we can suspend the great questioning that has characterized our history. We have lived through more than a decade of turbulence, of questions raised and still not answered.
What, in the end, was the civil rights movement all about? The antiwar movement? The meaning of those otherwise pacific citizens who marched for nature's just environment against the injustice of growth that was heedless of the soil in which it grew?
All of these movements and causes — be they for clean rivers or the due rights of women, the angry followers of George Wallace or those who protest big government — all of them speak to one, common theme.
The institutions of our national life have grown immense. They have grown remote from the individual lives whose sum is the national life. Business, big labor and above all, immense, intractable and inaccessible government stand apart from the citizenry of America — like monuments in some forbidden park, visible only through its locked iron gates.
In countless ways and movements, uprisings and appeals, the Americans, in our time, have celebrated that ancient scenario in which the people gather in the town square and cry upward at the windows of the council chamber where decisions are taken and made. "We are what it is all about." They say, "Don't forget us."
Those councils which heed the cry and consider it wisely will survive and remake that harmony with the governed without which good government is impossible. Those who ignore the cry achieve — and deserve — the ignominy of history. Such councils are not of durable life.
Today, in ways that are not entirely clear, Government has grown remote from the very people it governs. A terrible war was fought to no useful or explicable end. Unbridled expansion corrodes and threatens the American landscape. Corruption — not an American invention and certainly not unique to America — is now an American trademark in Government and commerce.
What has this dark growth in our national development to do with the people whose governance should be the genesis of all genius and resources at the command of government? To use an expression of our British parent, it has damn all to do with the American people.
It is the problem.
Rights forged at the hearth of our origins or won in the long skirmishes of our history are still, by design or circumstance, withheld from millions of contemporary Americans.
A fundamental premise with which we started — that it is a sham to provide people with a charter guaranteeing their happiness but not the means of achieving it — remains unfulfilled.
Just as Jefferson warned that slavery was a firebell in the night, so poverty and the cruelty that it inflicts and breeds, is the firebell in this particular American evening.
We profess to believe, still, that all men are created equal. Yet we do not sufficiently help insure equality in the creation of generations now being born or yet to come.
We insist still that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. Yet so wearisome, repetitive and insensitive are our politics that some chapters of our government derive from the consent of only that minority which cares or is persuaded to vote.
I stand here today not to argue for this policy or that, not to speak only to our familiar inflictions of injustice, poverty, and the economic imbalance that ignore our future.
I do not espouse big government or small government, expulsion of rascals nor the raising up of new, secular political heroes.
Today it is sufficient to see the basic problem — that remoteness which has so widened between government and those it governs.
A harmony between the two is possible.We are not grown so complex or ancient that a retracing to the logic of true democracy is beyond us. The remixing of our substance — people and policies designed to fit the needs and aspirations of people — is not beyond us.
Whatever President we choose, whichever party we elevate in the Congress, this must be the first task if, at its bicentennial, America is to accomplish itself. We must banish the remoteness that chills the air between government and the people whose consent gives it life.
If we fail to hear the Americans as they speak to their leaders in 10,000 tones from angry cry to beseeching whisper, then we who make government our craft shall deserve the ignominy earned by those councils that are heedless of the citizenry in the square below.
If we succeed, then everything else is possible. For we shall have restored that harmony which was intended at our beginning.