Two examples of events in American history, both at once inspiring and cheering
The philosopher George Santayana’s gloomy aphorism about how the failure to learn from history ensures that it will repeat itself also contains a silver lining. Knowing some history, it would seem, can come in very handy beyond enabling one to ace a round of Trivial Pursuit.
When the going gets rough, when the present seems hopeless and the future even bleaker, past experiences in which we succeeded in emerging from difficult straits can buoy us with an optimism grounded not in wishful thinking but factual reality. Here are two examples of events in American history — one from two centuries ago, the other of only two decades’ vintage — both of which are at once inspiring and cheering.
In a recent column, Jeff Jacoby writes:
Like a lot of Americans, I worry about what is happening to our nation’s social fabric. The loss of civility in public life is alarming, and I watch with dismay as countless figures on both right and left continually crank up the anger and the decibel level, jeering and smearing those they differ from ideologically as traitors, haters, and fools…. We are heading in the wrong direction, and it cannot end well. Or can it?
Jeff goes on to survey the political landscape in the first years of the 19th century, which he says, “were pretty toxic, too.” He describes how the presidential campaign of 1800 between Federalist John Adams and Democratic-Republican Thomas Jefferson “was replete with hateful smears that are shocking even by today’s standards.” The Adams camp warned that if Jefferson were elected, “murder, robbery, rape, adultery, and incest will openly be taught and practiced,” while the Jefferson people called his opponent “a rageful, lying, warmongering fellow.” So much for longing, in this current heated political moment of ours, for what apparently were the bad old days.
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