Our Great Nation: The Epic Story of America
By Eric Stetson
(390 pages, published May 15, 2025, by Restored Christian Press)
What makes America great? Is it our dreams, our achievements, our highest principles and ideals?
For 250 years, the United States of America has been blessed richly by Providence and called to a unique mission. From the Declaration of Independence to the modern era, generations of Americans have sacrificed for the cause of liberty, equality, and our shared Judeo-Christian values. We spread freedom and democracy across a new continent, abolished slavery and segregation, and saved Europe from the Nazis and communists. We offered hope and opportunity to millions of immigrants, creating the world’s largest and most diverse middle class.
But after centuries of world-changing greatness, is the American story about to come to an inglorious end? Today, the United States is more divided than at any time since the Civil War. Torn apart by cultural decay and political extremism, we are a nation with an uncertain future. Can we find a way to reunite this once-great nation we share?
In this book, you’ll read the story of a land and its people that could inspire us to come back together — with a vision of American populism that respects the Constitution, uplifts our national conscience, and transcends our present-day divisions.
Eric Stetson has been a minister, author and editor, and technology entrepreneur. The son of a refugee from the former Czechoslovakia, and a descendant of a Reconstruction-era U.S. senator, Eric has had a lifelong passion for American history and politics. As unique as the country it describes, Our Great Nation is a people’s history and social commentary about the meaning and spirit of America.
Click here to buy the book on Amazon!
Excerpts from Our Great Nation
From Chapter 2 — A New World of Freedom:
Among these early settlers was one of my ancestors, a man named Cornet Robert Stetson. As “a young man, barely twenty-one years of age,” he crossed the sea from England and “came up the North River” of Massachusetts, “farther into the wilderness than any settler before him had gone, and here, where the river bends toward the upland he pitched his tent.” And in this place he chose for his new home, “A spring of pure, sweet water bubbled forth from the upland near the marsh line,” and “the soil was warm, fertile, easily tilled and responsive to intelligent cultivation … and the river was his highway.”
“And right here, all alone in the forest, he toiled for four long years, felling trees, clearing land, raising such crops as he could and preparing a home for the woman of his choice,” who later came to join him. And from the love and hope and determination of this man and his wife, whose name was called Honour, came forth a posterity numbering many thousands of descendants today, among whose number in history were the men who built the ships that are remembered of the Boston Tea Party; and one of the greatest U.S. senators and spokesmen for the liberty of all mankind; and a U.S. congressman, and a vice president of the United States; and an abundance of state legislators and civic leaders, successful businessmen and philanthropists, and visionaries who left their mark upon the land and in the dreams of all the world—even the man who became the inventor of the cowboy hat.
This heritage did not arise from the loins of a rich man, nor an educated man, but an ordinary man who made his mark with an “X,” and through hard work and determination, and more than a little imagination, became extraordinary. He rose from nothing to become a freeman and a leader among men. And so is the story of America.
Despite Washington’s victory in the Battle of Trenton, on Christmas Eve of 1776, when he led his troops across the Delaware River through raging snow and icy rain in a sneak attack on the British position, nevertheless, in the fall of 1777, the British captured the American capital of Philadelphia, and Washington’s army was unable to retake the city. So he led his beleaguered troops into winter camp at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, where they suffered unspeakable hardships and the agonies of defeated men. As the British General Burgoyne commanded his troops in New York, enjoying the pleasures of a mistress, and thirty carts of baggage, and quaffing with relish an abundant supply of champagne, General Washington and his men built rude barracks in the wilderness, where the shoeless feet of men left bloody footprints in the snow. A doctor remembered Valley Forge for its “Poor food—hard lodging—cold weather—fatigue—nasty clothes, nasty cookery, vomit half my time—smoked out of my senses—the devil’s in it—I can’t endure it. … There comes a soldier, his bare feet are seen through his worn-out shoes, his legs nearly naked from the tattered remains of an only pair of stockings, his breeches not sufficient to cover his nakedness, his shirt hanging in strings; his hair disheveled; his face meager. … He comes and cries with an air of wretchedness and despair, ‘I am sick, my feet lame, my legs are sore, my body covered with this tormenting itch …’”
“These are the times that try men’s souls,” said General Washington, reading to his demoralized troops from a pamphlet called The American Crisis by Thomas Paine. “The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it NOW, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. … Let it be told to the future world, that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive, that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet and to repulse it.”
The American army endured; the American people did not give up in their quest for freedom. “Soldiers composed of men of every age, even of children of fifteen, of whites and blacks, almost naked, unpaid, and rather poorly fed,” they nevertheless stood fast in the face of overwhelming odds. General Burgoyne’s champagne glass ran dry, and he was defeated in New York at the Battle of Saratoga. And in 1778, the mighty nation of France entered the war on the side of the Americans, tipping the balance against the British. Finally, in 1781, the British General Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, the last battle of the American Revolution—but the Earl Cornwallis, a British Lord, was too proud and embarrassed to surrender himself to an army of commoners, and sent a subordinate to perform the honors instead. According to legend, the British army band played a song called “The World Turned Upside Down” on the Yorktown common green.
From Chapter 3 — The Sin of Slavery:
The passing of Thomas Jefferson marked a special Independence Day for two of his children—the youngest sons of his mixed-race mistress Sally Hemings, who were raised on his plantation not as members of his family, but as slaves, to be freed in Jefferson’s will. The master of Monticello, who had so eloquently proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal,” reluctantly claimed ownership over hundreds of men, women, and children during his lifetime, according to the traditional way of life of upper-class men of Virginia. And after living beyond his means and accumulating mountains of debt, he was able to free only a handful of his enslaved workers upon his death—those who were fortunate enough to be his own offspring, and their relatives.
For many Americans, freedom remained merely a hope and a theory, not a reality of the new world. Indeed, millions of African Americans would have to wait nearly forty more years before they, or their descendants, would be loosed from the shackles of bondage. As the escaped slave Frederick Douglass asked pointedly during an Independence Day oration in 1852, “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.”
And thus, wrote Jefferson of the disgrace in which he himself took part, “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.”
Pious slaveholders believed in teaching religion to their slaves, but many thought it a bad idea, and were reluctant to allow them to learn the stories of the Bible, for religion could inspire them to seek deliverance from bondage—even as the Hebrews from pharaoh of the Egyptians of old—and so, there were “extensive districts” of America where astonished clergymen found that people of the black race were never allowed to hear “the glad tidings of salvation to perishing men,” being “shut out almost entirely from the privileges of the Gospel.” And where the good news was taught to African Americans in the South, there were rich and powerful men, such as James Henry Hammond of South Carolina, who resolved “to break up negro preaching and negro Churches”—and he was one of the wealthiest slaveowners in the nation, who became governor of his state and a member of the United States Senate.
For some who were taught a manner of religion, as recalled by a former slave, “the religious teaching consists in teaching the slave … that God made him for a slave; and that, when whipped, he must not find fault … And slave-holders find such religion very profitable to them.” But as for those slaves who were permitted to hear the fulness of the Gospel, a visitor to the South remarked on their intense religious faith, which they enunciated “with the purest joy”—indeed, “Their prayers burst forth into flame as they ascend to heaven.” For as a former slave recalled, he felt an ecstasy in his soul upon learning that God loves black men as well as white, and that salvation is “for every man” regardless of color.
From Chapter 4 — A National Reckoning:
It may be reckoned that the first battle of the Civil War was fought not on a battlefield, but on the floor of the United States Senate—and the weapon with which the battle was joined was not a rifle, but a politician’s cane. In 1856, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts—a descendant of the humble yeoman farmer Cornet Robert Stetson—gave a fiery speech against slavery, in which he denounced its spread into the contested territory of Kansas and attacked a senator from South Carolina who was among its most ardent supporters.
Congressman Preston Brooks, a cousin of the senator who was offended, considered challenging Sumner to a duel for what he perceived as an attack on his family’s honor, but decided instead to assault him. His weapon of choice was a gutta-percha cane with a solid gold head. Though a young man, Brooks had acquired the cane to assist him in walking, after being shot in the hip in a duel with another politician. A perennial hothead, Brooks was elected to Congress despite having been expelled from college for threatening local police with a gun.
Two days after Sumner’s speech, Brooks entered the Senate chamber accompanied by Laurence M. Keitt, a fellow congressman from South Carolina, with whom he had planned a vicious assault on Sumner. After the galleries cleared, Brooks confronted Sumner at his desk, where he struck him in the head with the gold-headed tip of his cane. Sumner was immediately blinded by the force of the blow, and collapsed, finding himself trapped under the heavy desk which was bolted to the floor. Savage blows from Brooks rained down upon him, and he struggled to rise to his feet, until finally, with a valiant effort, he succeeded in ripping the desk from the floor. But Brooks continued to beat him on the head, the face, and the shoulders, “to the full extent of his power.” Even when his cane snapped in two, he continued beating Sumner with the piece that was crowned with the solid gold head—as Keitt brandished a pistol to prevent other lawmakers who were present from intervening. “Oh Lord!” cried Sumner, “Oh! Oh!” as he staggered and struggled to escape from the murderous Brooks; until finally, as Brooks remembered, he “bellowed like a calf” and fell to the floor unconscious.
At Ford’s Theatre, where the assassin’s bullet pierced the head of the president, was a visitor to Washington from South Carolina—a Union man named Frederick A. Sawyer, who was my great-great-great grandfather. “It is such a tragedy as I never hoped to witness,” wrote the shocked Sawyer in his diary after returning to his hotel room from the scene of the shooting. “The assassin’s hand has cut off in the very highest point of his usefulness & honor that man who felt no desire but to bless & serve his country & civilization. … How many more martyrs to slavery!” …
Frederick Sawyer was a teacher who had moved from Massachusetts to South Carolina before the Civil War, taking a position in Charleston as the superintendent of the state Normal School, or teachers’ college. There he remained for most of the war, courageously advocating for the Union until finally he was compelled to depart to the North, for he refused to become a Confederate citizen. During the 1864 election campaign, Sawyer gave speeches throughout the North urging the reelection of President Lincoln. After the war, he returned to South Carolina, and was unexpectedly elected to the United States Senate in 1868 upon the readmission of the state to the Union.
Sawyer’s predecessor in the very same seat in the Senate was the infamous James Henry Hammond—the man who had staunchly opposed allowing black slaves to hear the gospel of Jesus Christ; who had declared that “cotton is king,” and that nothing could ever persuade the slaveholding oligarchs of the South to give up their tremendous wealth in enslaved human beings;—who had shamelessly claimed that Jefferson’s teaching that “all men are created equal” was “ridiculously absurd”; and that his own slaves on his South Carolina plantation, despite being literally bound with irons and chains to prevent them from running away, and facing up to one hundred lashes per day as a form of punishment, were “the happiest … human beings on whom the sun shines,” “into [whose] Eden is coming Satan in the guise of an abolitionist.”
The abolitionist Frederick A. Sawyer was elected as Hammond’s successor by one vote in the South Carolina state legislature—the vote of a black man, Robert Smalls, a former slave who had captured a steamship in a daring escape during the Civil War and joined the United States Navy, thereafter becoming one of the first African Americans to be elected to political office. Smalls would use his legislative position to help establish the first free public schools in South Carolina, for children both black and white; and later he would follow Sawyer to the United States Congress.
From Chapter 5 — The Call of the West:
In San Francisco one day in May of 1848, a man held up a flask filled with glittering nuggets and dust, and cried “Gold! Gold!” in rapturous excitement to all who would listen. “Gold from the American River!” he shouted with glee. The precious metal had been discovered a few months earlier at a place called Sutter’s Mill near Sacramento. So copious was the gold that the first prospectors found nuggets of half a pound or more, not just in one place but in streams all over the region. And once the secret was out, there was no stopping the rush of men seeking fortune with a pick and a pan. In a matter of weeks, the bustling new city of San Francisco was deserted—stores closed, streets empty, and ships abandoned in the harbor—for nearly everyone had gone to look for gold. As the newspapers described, “the whole country” up and down the West Coast “resounds to the sordid cry of gold, gold! GOLD!” …
And the mining boom spread all over the West, to places such as Nevada, Colorado, and Montana. Young men sought adventure in boom towns such as Denver and Virginia City—some of which became major cities, and others of which became ghost towns when the precious metals were no longer to be found. In Virginia City, Nevada, the speculative frenzy spread beyond the mining camps to a stock exchange that was founded in the burgeoning but short-lived metropolis, where men traded shares in three thousand potential mines bearing colorful names such as the “Branch Mint,” the “Let-Her-Rip,” the “Treasure Trove” and the “Grand Mogul”—less than a dozen of which were ever proved profitable—with mind-boggling profits for the few who bet on the right investment.
Indeed, the West was a place of wild and unrestrained experimentation, with all the triumphs and hardships and disappointments to be expected of such an unusual place. “When he left home he was a smooth-faced, good-looking boy, and he sends home the likeness of an ourangoutang with the upper part of his face shaved!” said a father upon receiving a photograph of his heavily bearded son who had struck out for adventure in a mining camp. “Had his name not been inside, we would not have known it.” But these adventurers were seeking for more than just gold; they were finding themselves. “Got nearer to a female this evening than I have been for six months. Nearly fainted,” wrote one such young man of the intensity of his cravings. For most of these men, their quest would not pan out as they desired; but although they failed to become millionaires, they succeeded in making the West a land of possibility and legend.
The Mormon Trail to the Great Salt Lake was filled with the most terrible hardships and lined with the graves of the dead—and in its tales of woe and miraculous survival, it ranks as one of the most dramatic and memorable mass migrations in human history. … Twenty-five thousand men, women, and children began the journey in 1846, and by the end of that year, only ten thousand were still alive—and the number remaining would have been even fewer had it not been for fortuitous events, such as a great flock of quails that descended and lingered around their wagons, providing the starving people with meat. As one migrant described, there were so many quails that “the sick knock them down with sticks and the little children catch them alive in their hands!” They took it as a sign “from the Most High that although we are driven by men He has not forsaken us.”
The next year, an advance party of explorers led by the new church leader, Brigham Young, continued over the Rockies on a trail that had been traveled by only two small groups of Americans before them, through lands that were vast and almost entirely devoid of people. They were “making a road for thousands of Saints to follow,” said one of the men of the party. And it came to pass that when their wagon train had crawled for many days through the treacherous mountain terrain, finally they looked down from the mountains upon the valley of the wide and shimmering Salt Lake—a scene which, in its stark and striking beauty, must have filled them with visions of the Holy Land, where with God’s grace, “the solitary place shall be made glad for them, and the desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose.” “We could not refrain from a shout of joy,” as one of the men reflected; “Hosannah!” they shouted three times. And when Brigham Young arrived, after being held back for a time by sickness, he saw the great valley spread out before him and was lost for a moment in a vision, and then, according to tradition, announced, “This is the place.”
So they ploughed several acres of land and planted it with seeds and potatoes, and they dammed up City Creek for irrigation, and began to plan in great detail what would become Salt Lake City, for in the words of their leader, “we will have a city clean and in order.” And by winter, more than two thousand migrants had arrived; and thousands more arrived the next year—and they all would have died, had it not been for a flock of seagulls from the lake that devoured a plague of locusts that had threatened to devour their entire crop of food.
And in the next few years, many more would come, including some fifty thousand immigrants to the United States who had joined the new faith and would join in what the Latter-day Saints called the “Gathering of Zion.” Most of them were poor, and could not afford wagons or oxen, so they pushed or pulled handcarts more than fourteen hundred miles across the prairies and mountains; and many of them died on the way. “We knew that we had not strength of our own to perform such hardships if our heavenly Father had not help us,” wrote the appropriately named girl, Patience Loader, whose father would perish on the trail. …
And for those among the people in those days who arrived in the new Zion of Utah, they found land available for free, and a society that cared for them and uplifted them. … For in those days, the people of that land believed they were creating the Kingdom of God on earth, wherein goodness and justice might prevail, rather than the exploitation of the land and the accumulation of riches for a few. And although their religious faith is but one thread in the tapestry of the faith of our nation, we would do well to reflect upon their story, for it tells much of the soul of America.
It might be said of the relationship between the indigenous Americans throughout this land and the immigrants from the East, that the dreams of one people died, so that the dreams of another might live. For the colonization of the West was for one people a nightmare, and for another people a dream of the boundless expansion of freedom. But even for the victors—for the homesteaders, and the gold miners, and the Americans fleeing poverty or religious persecution—that dream, in the form they had known, would also come to an end. For the frontier of the West had a limit, with the limits of the land itself; and so, perhaps it was no coincidence that in the same year of 1890, when the dream of the Indians died, the U.S. Census Bureau announced that for the first time in the history of our nation, there was no longer an American frontier. All of us, thereafter, were enclosed on one great and mighty reservation, where we must learn to live with each other together rather than flee.
The final act before the closing of the frontier—before the remaining public lands were declared off-limits to homesteaders in the same year—before the curtain fell upon the saga of the American West as it was in our dreams of old—was the opening of the Indian Territory of Oklahoma to settlement by the American people as a whole. In 1889, on April 22, at noon, guns were fired by government officials, signaling the last chance to claim free land where a poor man might gain a farm of his own—a day that marked the end of an era, and arguably, the end of the American Dream itself, in its most radical and original form. One hundred thousand people had surrounded the borders of the territory, waiting for the sound of the signal. And when the guns were fired, the greatest race in history began—the race to plant stakes in the soil, in some fertile valley by a river or stream, where with diligence and the smiling blessings of Providence a crop of food and a new life might be grown, free from bondage to inherited wealth and position; free from bondage to the past, looking hopefully to a future where anything might be possible—the spirit of America distilled purely, into one day, a magical day, when nearly two million acres of land were claimed within a few hours, and when Oklahoma City arose from nothing to become, by nightfall, a city of ten thousand tents, and within weeks with its own city government. America, in a day—the America that, like the dreams of its original people, would be lost in the realm of myth, as a heritage, like a frontier that we might learn again to discover.
From Chapter 6 — To Build a Nation:
Although the nature of life in America would keep changing, Theodore Roosevelt firmly believed in a philosophy of American vitality and vigor, which would animate his political mission to make America as great a nation as it could be. While on a buffalo hunting trip out West, he had met an immigrant who said he was one of fifteen children, and Roosevelt expressed his congratulations, saying, “The first essential of human progress is the perpetuation of the human race, and I admire the men who are not afraid to propagate their kind as far as they may.” Combining a surging national pride and a desire to create an ever-greater posterity with the imperative for national reform and improvement was the hallmark of TR’s populist-flavored progressivism—and it would become the dominant political philosophy of a transformative period of American history.
Roosevelt’s personality was perfectly suited for the bold and imperialistic spirit of the age. A contemporary described him as “a dazzling, even appalling, spectacle of a human engine driven at full speed.” As a journalist said of his explosive energy, “I felt his clothes might not contain him, he was so steamed up, so ready to go, to attack anything, anywhere.” Said TR himself, “Powerful, vigorous men of strong animal development must have some way in which their animal spirits can find vent.” After leading a storied cavalry regiment called the “Rough Riders” in the Spanish-American War, defeating the Spanish Empire in Cuba, he was elected governor of New York in 1898. Channeling his seemingly boundless energy once again into politics, he preached “not the doctrine of ignoble ease,” but of a strenuous striving for personal and societal betterment. “Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure,” said Roosevelt in a speech soon after the election, “than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.” And as for America as a whole, “If we are to be a really great people, we must strive in good faith to play a great part in the world. We cannot avoid meeting great issues. … If we stand idly by,” and “if we shrink from the hard contests,” he warned, “then the bolder and stronger peoples will pass us by and will win for themselves the domination of the world.”
The most prolific period of immigration was in the late 1800s, such that in 1890, nearly one-third of the U.S. population were either immigrants or children of immigrants. At its peak, Ellis Island, where immigrants entered the country, processed five thousand people per day. In New York Harbor, greeting the multitude who were flowing like a swelling human tide into the land of opportunity, stood the Statue of Liberty, “The New Colossus,” as the poet Emma Lazarus called it:
… A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; …
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
And oh, did they come, and how they marveled! As a Jew who fled pogroms in Russia wrote home to his family: here in America “The cobbler and the teacher had the same title, ‘Mister.’ And all the children, boys and girls, Jews and Gentiles, went to school!” After making the journey, he saved money for months until he could buy tickets for his family to set sail across the Atlantic and join him. Mary Antin, his daughter, never forgot the feeling she had when they finally received the tickets for the steamship: “At last I was going to America! Really, really going, at last! The boundaries burst. The arch of heaven soared. A million suns shone out for every star. The winds rushed in from outer space, roaring in my ears, ‘America! America!’” On the ship, she recalled, she marveled at “the immeasurable distance from horizon to horizon …” And “We crept nearer and nearer to the coveted shore, until, on a glorious May morning, six weeks after our departure from Polotzk, our eyes beheld the Promised Land, and my father received us in his arms.”
Younghill Kang, a Korean immigrant who arrived in the United States in 1921, wrote that “It was in New York I felt I was destined really ‘to come out from the boat.’ The beginning of my new existence must be founded here. In Korea to come out from the boat is an idiom meaning to be born,” as the Korean word for boat is the same as the word for womb. And for many immigrants like Kang, it was as if they had been born into a new world that emerged like a vision from beyond a mystical horizon—a vision both alluring and savagely overwhelming. “‘New York at last!’ I heard from the passengers around me. And the information was not needed. In unearthly white and mauve,” he described, “the city rose, like a dream dreamed overnight, new, remorselessly new, impossibly new… and yet there in all the arrogant pride of rejoiced materialism. These young, slim, stately things a thousand houses high … a tower of Babel each one, not one tower of Babel but many, a city of Babel towers, casually, easily strewn end up against the skies—they stood at the brink, close crowded, the brink of America, these Giantesses, these Fates, which were not built for a king nor a ghost nor any man’s religion, but were materialized by those hard, cold, magic words—opportunity, enterprise, prosperity, success … How far my little grass-roofed, hill-wrapped village from this gigantic rebellion which was New York! And New York’s rebellion called to me excitedly, this savagery which piled great concrete block on concrete block … with crowns as delicate as pinnacled ice …”
As the land of America was eroded by the winds of change, would our country and its ideals blow away with it? That was the danger—the specter of a fascist or communist revolution—in reaction to the catastrophic collapse of middle-class capitalism. In that dark time for America, we were fortunate to be blessed with a leader who combined wisdom with courage, and boldness with moderation—a man so seemingly essential to the rebirth of American greatness that people speculate that were it not for his leadership during an unprecedented four terms as president, Nazi Germany would have won World War II. That man was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, known as FDR, who, following in the footsteps of his distant cousin Teddy, was a “traitor to his class” who saved capitalism, the United States, and the world.
But he almost never got the chance. Just before his inauguration in 1933, FDR miraculously escaped being assassinated, because the shooter was standing on a wobbly chair when he fired his gun, thus missing his intended target. The vice president-elect, John Nance Garner, was skeptical of much of Roosevelt’s program to get America out of the Depression, and so history would have been very different if that chair hadn’t wobbled, perhaps touched by the hand of God.
Franklin D. Roosevelt was born into a family of privilege, regarded TR as his hero, and married TR’s favorite niece, Eleanor. After a promising early career as a New York state legislator and Assistant Secretary of the Navy, at the age of 39 he was stricken with polio and was paralyzed from the waist down. Confined to a wheelchair, he would never walk unaided again. In those days, such a disability would normally end one’s political career, and even Roosevelt’s own mother suggested that he should retire from politics; but undaunted, with the encouragement of his wife and a close friend, he pursued a grueling regimen of physical therapy with the goal of ascending from his wheelchair and returning to public life.
Several years later, in 1928, he was elected governor of New York. With steel braces strapped to his legs, supported by a cane on one side and an aide, or one of his sons, on the other, he had gained the ability to stand up and walk a few paces to give speeches while standing—an essential achievement in the eyes of the voting public. The next year, when America as a nation found itself suddenly paralyzed, FDR was the man for the moment. “If you’ve spent two years in bed trying to wiggle your big toe,” he later noted, “everything else seems easy.” With Roosevelt determinedly standing at our side, America would overcome our disability and rise out of the Great Depression.
From Chapter 7 — With Liberty and Justice for All:
Across the sea, in the wee hours of the morning, when the night was yet inky black and young men would have to call upon every ounce of their courage for the fight of the day ahead, they began disembarking from great naval vessels into small landing craft that would bring them ashore at Normandy. On the bluffs above the shore were great fortifications of the Nazis, raining fire down upon them as they approached the beach, first in boats and then wading the last five hundred yards. “They must be crazy,” declared a German sergeant observing the scene. “Are they going to swim ashore? Right under our muzzles?”
At one of the landing sites, designated as Utah Beach, General Theodore Roosevelt Jr. was in the first boat to approach the shore. The late president’s son led his fellow infantrymen through machine gun fire and landmines exploding all around them—more than 15,000 mines were later removed from the area—and for his bravery, he received the Medal of Honor.
At Omaha Beach, another landing site nearby, Private John Barnes remembered somebody shouting “Take a look! This is something that you will tell your grandchildren!” But of the more than two hundred men of their Company A, only a couple dozen of them survived. Sergeant Thomas Valance was one of the survivors, taking several serious wounds and spending the whole day collapsed on the sand. “The bodies of my buddies were washing ashore,” he remembered, “and I was the one live body in amongst so many of my friends, all of whom were dead, in many cases very severely blown to pieces.”
Private Harold Baumgarten, a nineteen-year-old soldier of Company B, got a bullet through the top of his helmet while jumping off his landing boat, but survived and waded through the waist-deep water as his buddies fell beside him. On the beach, he saw a fellow soldier who was hit in the chest, calling out “Mother, Mom,” with his last breaths. Another soldier, who was hit in the forehead, got down on his knees with his rosary beads and prayed—but then “the Germans cut him in half with their deadly crossfire.” Private Baumgarten had drawn a Star of David and written “The Bronx, New York” on the back of his field jacket, to let Hitler know who he was. Now, he took aim at one of the Nazi riflemen on the bluff and returned fire, hitting his target. As shells were bursting around him, “I raised my head to curse the Germans when an 88 shell exploded about twenty yards in front of me, hitting me in my left cheek. It felt like being hit with a baseball bat only the results were much worse.” Baumgarten’s upper jaw was shattered and loose teeth and gums and blood filled his mouth. He washed his face with the icy ocean water and struggled not to pass out—and then a bullet hit him in the leg. Crawling across the beach to a medic, he was wounded five times that day; but Harold Baumgarten survived, and went on to medical school and became a physician—one of the many ordinary people who became extraordinary heroes of D-Day.
Lyndon B. Johnson, known as LBJ, was in many ways a stark contrast to JFK. Unlike the refined and eloquent John F. Kennedy, who was from the liberal Northern state of Massachusetts, Johnson was a rough-spoken man from a hardscrabble background in the South. Known for his vulgarity and unquenchable political ambition, few expected LBJ to follow in the footsteps of his enlightened predecessor on civil rights. But what many had failed to appreciate was that in 1957, when he was Senate majority leader, Johnson had already shepherded a civil rights bill through Congress, frustrating many of his fellow Southern politicians.
When Kennedy was shot and Lyndon Johnson ascended to the presidency, at first it may have seemed like an eerie repeat of the tragedy of a century earlier, when Abraham Lincoln was assassinated and succeeded by another vice president named Johnson, a Southern Unionist from Tennessee. Upon becoming president, Andrew Johnson undermined Lincoln’s commitment to equal rights for people emancipated from slavery. Would the second President Johnson likewise undermine, ignore, or weaken the civil rights bill of John F. Kennedy?
On the contrary—for the night after JFK was assassinated, LBJ said to his aides at his bedside, “I’m going to pass the civil rights bill and not change one word of it. I’m not going to cavil, and I’m not going to compromise.” Whether black or white, all Americans would be treated equally in Lyndon Johnson’s vision of America.
Less than a week after Kennedy’s assassination, President Johnson addressed a joint session of Congress. “In this critical moment,” he said, “it is our duty, yours and mine, to do away with uncertainty and delay and doubt and to show that we are capable of decisive action; that from the brutal loss of our leader we will derive not weakness but strength, that we can and will act and act now.” Eulogizing the beloved president whose life had tragically been taken, he said that “John Kennedy’s death commands what his life conveyed—that America must move forward.” And to do that, said LBJ, “no memorial or oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy’s memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought so long. We have talked long enough about equal rights in this country. We have talked for one hundred years or more. It is time now to write the next chapter and write it in the books of law.” At the end of his speech, the new president received a standing ovation.
Reflecting later on the remarkable thing he had done, Lyndon Johnson recalled that he knew already then that “as President and as a man, I would use every ounce of strength I possessed to gain justice for the black American. My strength as President was then tenuous—I had no strong mandate from the people; I had not been elected to that office. But I recognized that the moral force of the Presidency is often stronger than the political force. I knew that a President can appeal to the best in our people or the worst; he can call for action or live with inaction.” And indeed, he said, there is nothing that “makes a man come to grips more directly with his conscience than the Presidency. … The burden of his responsibility literally opens up his soul. … In that house of decision, the White House, a man becomes his commitments,” said Johnson. “He understands who he really is. He learns what he genuinely wants to be.”
From Chapter 8 — After the End of History:
In Youngstown, Ohio, in 2019, I saw what had become of the glory days of America. In a city where proud union workers had built a middle-class life making rock-hard American steel, there was nothing left but painful memories and desperate hopes of a restoration. On a road trip across the country that year, I decided to visit the iconic city to see one of the most storied symbols of our nation’s decline. Upon arriving in the area, a sign informed me that I had entered a town called the “Center of the World.” Maybe that’s how the place had once seemed, but now, just past the sign, was a rotting leather couch with a sign that said “FREE.”
… Facts and statistics can tell the tale, but deep in our guts, we know and feel that something is profoundly wrong. One way or another, we’ve seen the evidence all around us. Now it’s time to connect the dots.
But before we do, I invite you to come along with me as I share one more story from my road trip—this time, a positive one. For all is not dark and gloomy in America today, and I would like to offer a reminder of some of the good that we are and can be.
I was in New York, New York—the Big Apple—for how could anyone write a book about America without some impressions from the biggest city in the country?—and already then I intended to write this. But the main reason I was there was to speak to some business school students about my experience as the founder of a tech startup, and to pitch to yet another venture capitalist. After my business was done, I decided to spend the rest of the day walking around Manhattan. “Let us raise a standard to which the wise and the honest can repair,” proclaimed a quotation from America’s first president, chiseled on a monumental archway at Washington Square Park. “The event is in the hand of God.”
So indeed, I thought, as I walked onward through the city, down Broadway, passing a sign with the face of a dark-skinned woman, asking passersby the enduring question of “Poverty or Potential?”—past gorgeous tulips and cherry trees, bursting with pink, red and yellow, and a group of adorable Chinese American children out for a stroll with their caregiver on a beautiful spring day; and a flock of pigeons of all colors, feeding together on the sidewalk, including black, white, brown and gray, and the mixed and multicolored among them. I stopped to watch the impressive acrobatic feats of a group of African American performers, around whom a crowd of tourists had gathered, until they ended their show by saying, “There is only one race in the world today: the human race.”
This was New York, a place that is at the beating heart of the American Dream. It is also the place where the Twin Towers fell on September 11, 2001, brought down by the forces of terror and an appetite for destruction. …
Today, at the site of the World Trade Center stands Freedom Tower, and a block away is The Oculus, an immense and magnificent shopping mall that I thought seemed fitting to call the “Cathedral of Capitalism.” A marvel of modern architecture, its all-white superstructure encloses a vast and soaring space into which daylight enters through a long slit of skylights on the ceiling, and in the lower levels, the multitudes browse and buy clothes, shoes, jewelry, cosmetics, and electronic devices, along with all manner of food and drink. Another block away is an old historic church called St. Paul’s Chapel, where I saw a sign stating its values of Faith, Integrity, Inclusiveness, Compassion, Social Justice, and Stewardship. Two sides of America in close proximity, just as one might expect to see in one of our greatest and most diverse of cities.
I had seen New York, and I was “On my way home,” said a mural nearby—perfect timing, I thought. But I had one more place to see before my journey’s end: the place where for so many Americans it all began. I walked several more blocks to the end of Lower Manhattan, and from Battery Park I looked out across the mouth of the Hudson River to Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty in the distance. And as I sat there, at the end of the day, I reflected on all that I had seen, and all that we are; and I felt the power of the incredible story that is America flowing through me—and I didn’t want that story to die.
In my grandparents’ house there was a room above the garage, like an attic but with ceilings high enough to permit walking around without stooping. It was filled with historical artifacts—old military uniforms, books and magazines, photographs and other relics from the early 1900s and perhaps even earlier—and the smell of rough-hewn wood, dust, and mothballs permeated the air.
As a child, I was fascinated by this makeshift museum of American history, and it reached deep into my psyche as a symbol of the past from whence I had emerged—like a dim-lit womb filled with mysterious and ancient treasure. … As far as I know, there is no money under the floorboards, but the treasure was right under my nose all along. For the treasure in my grandparents’ attic was the treasure of knowing your history and learning the lessons it can teach us.
I had come to appreciate this by the time I made my final visit to the house I had visited so many times in my youth—this time in August 2017, the summer after my grandfather died. I was getting older, already in my late thirties. My aunt was clearing everything out of the house and everyone else in the family had already gone through it. She said I could keep any relics I found that I wanted. So I climbed the steep stairs to the attic one last time, to find whatever treasures spoke most deeply to my heart.
And in this room I found treasures indeed. What I found tells a story of a time when America was filled with hope and with pride, when our nation believed in itself, its people and institutions—a time when we were still a nation on the rise, with our hearts imbued with a sense of purpose and mission—a time when merely the average American carried him or herself with a dignity that puts later generations to shame. We were not ashamed a hundred years ago, or even fifty years ago, despite the many flaws that existed in our society, because we knew we were getting better. Today, we feel we are getting worse, and that makes all the difference.
From Chapter 9 — To Save the Union:
Throughout history, most people have lived under the autocratic reign of kings, tribal chieftains, and tyrants. Most people have been poor and oppressed. Men have been enlisted to fight in war after war, in most cases for causes no more noble than territorial aggrandizement of one particular ethnic group and its ruling aristocrats over another. Women have borne the cannon fodder of such wars and the grief of their consequences, having few rights of their own until the advent of modernity.
Until America, the dreams of most human beings were narrowly circumscribed. True liberty was merely a fantasy. At its birth, the United States of America was imperfect, but from its inception it was filled with ambition to become a special place where “all men are created equal,” impelled with the drive to “form a more perfect Union.” As our country evolved, the dream of liberty was extended to more and more people. Slavery was abolished; immigrants from all corners of the earth were blessed with free land upon which, through the sweat of their brow, they might rise from their former station; workers gained the right to a living wage; children were granted a free public education; women attained the right to vote, to hold public office and aspire to all manner of professional careers; and people of all races, ethnicities and religions began to mix freely together, enjoying equal rights in a pluralistic society.
This form of society has given rise to an unprecedented degree of prosperity. And Americans are eager to share our blessings, being some of the most charitable people in the world. Moreover, when other peoples have been unjustly threatened, we have projected our power to restore peace and a just order among nations.
Truly, our country is something to be proud of. Despite its flaws and its failings—for no country ever perfectly lives up to its highest ideals—the United States of America is one of the greatest nations on earth.
It is important to understand that unlike most nations, America is built on an idea. We are not a people who live under one government because we are members of the same tribe; our nation does not arise from “blood and soil.” What unites us, if anything, is our belief in the creed of liberty. Freedom, democracy, self-government of individuals and communities. Human rights that are guaranteed to all. The rule of law—of the laws we make together through our elected representatives—and that no one is above the law, no matter how wealthy or powerful. The liberty of each and every one of us to think our own thoughts, speak our mind freely, and pursue our dreams—as long as our own pursuit of happiness does not infringe on the rights of others.
Most countries are not established upon this creed. They may embrace it to varying degrees, and mostly this has come about through American influence. Yet more than half of the world’s population today lives under an authoritarian government. The world’s most populous country and second-largest economy is the powerful and increasingly aggressive dictatorship of China. What we have in America is rare in the world and still rarer in human history. Liberty is precious. It cannot, it must not be lost.
There was a time when America found such a balance: the time I call “peak America,” in the mid-to-late twentieth century. In that period there was an emerging national consensus for a society that took care of its people, gave equal rights to everyone, and did big things together—a vision which could be described as a populist nationalism. There were liberal and conservative versions of this philosophy, and I don’t endorse all the details of either one, because the federal government grew too big and too powerful and exceeded its constitutional limits during that era. But what Americans at the time got right was the basic idea of a positive and patriotic story about our country, its people and goals.
That story was told to schoolchildren in the 1950s to teach them about our national aspirations—about what it means to be an American. A generation of kids sat in their classrooms and watched Coronet Instructional Films, developed to socialize them into good habits of thinking and behavior. Some of the films, such as “How to Be Well Groomed,” may seem corny by today’s standards; and some of them, like “Shy Guy,” about a teenage boy whose father suggests that he try to fit in with his peers like a part in his transistor radio, have been mocked as an illustration of the conformity of the era. But other Coronet Films are poignant and beautiful, evoking memories of a time when Americans were a proud people, unburdened by national self-doubt and despair.
In one of these films, called “Who Are the People of America?” the children of our country were taught that “In the cities, in the towns and country, we work together. We are many races and religions and nationalities. … We are the people of America—a mixture of the people of the world.” The narrator explains that “As the people of the world have filled our nation, they have contributed to it,” highlighting the contributions of various immigrant peoples in fields such as architecture, sports, literature, and cuisine. “Yet from all these, we have developed things which are uniquely American … The movies, the juke box, an ice cream cone, hot dogs, the Fourth of July, Thanksgiving Day, Mother’s Day. These are some of the things we share as Americans, for we have become Americans through this process of sharing. We Americans are something new, and new generations of us are developing—playing together, growing together, learning together. …” The video shows black and white children together on the playground. “… We share our many races and religions and nationalities, and we come out the people of America.”
It’s a vision of our national motto, E pluribus unum—“Out of many, one”—which appears on the coins in your pocket, and it sums up a big part of the essence of the United States as our ancestors dreamed it. Quaint though it may seem, this is what Americans just a few short generations ago were taught in school to believe in—and many of them really did believe it, with pride. When it hits you how much things have changed—the innocence lost, the hopeful vision ruined by our present divisions—maybe it’s hard not to cry.
The film goes on, recounting the reasons why so many people have left their native lands and come to the United States. “We share the things the people of the world have come here to find—things we cherish: our form of government, our justice, our elective system, the abundance of food from the fertile soil, the opportunities for jobs and businesses, freedom of speech … freedom to worship as we choose. These freedoms we share as Americans.” In our cynical time, it’s a powerful reminder of the things we should be proud of.
This is just a small selection of what you’ll find in Our Great Nation — stories from American history and the present day that will make you laugh, make you cry, and make you think. Including specific ideas for what we can do to save our country and to “make America great again” — for real.
- Buy Now on Amazon.
More:
- Learn The Story Behind the Story about how and why this book came to be written.
- Questions? Contact us for more information.