Jon Meacham: Who We Are Now
The message seemed mixed. It was 3 o'clock on the afternoon of Sunday, Oct. 3, 1965, and President Lyndon B. Johnson had come to the foot of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor to sign the unsexily named Immigration and Nationality Act. It was a grand and sentimental stage for Johnson, who loved the grand and the sentimental. There he was, less than a year into a term he'd won in the greatest of landslides over Barry Goldwater, at the mythic gateway to America, Robert and Ted Kennedy in the audience, the eyes of the press fixed on him in the shadows of the nation's most fabled icon of freedom. "Our beautiful America was built by a nation of strangers," Johnson said, reaching for political poetry. "From a hundred different places or more they have poured forth into an empty land, joining and blending in one mighty and irresistible tide."
But the president was openly ambivalent, too. "The bill that we sign today is not a revolutionary bill," he said, defensively, almost as though to reassure white Americans that they had nothing to fear. "It does not affect the lives of millions. It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives, or really add importantly to either our wealth or our power."
To borrow an old line about Winston Churchill, when Lyndon Johnson was right, he was right, but when he was wrong, well, my God. (See, for example, War, Vietnam.) On reflection, the bill LBJ signed on that October day was one of the most significant of his momentous presidency, and the virtually forgotten legislation played a key role in creating the America that made this week's inauguration of Barack Obama possible.
Why exhume the long-dead Johnson on the occasion of one of the most engaging inaugurals since George Washington took the oath at Federal Hall in New York City in 1789? Because who we are now—a country in which traditional barriers of race and age and gender are crumbling—flows in many ways from what LBJ did then. His conflicting language on that October day, meanwhile, underscores the nation's occasionally wary view of the changes wrought by immigration. We like to say we love the new, but the familiar, come to think of it, is awfully comfortable, too. So which will it be in the coming years: the America of the melting pot, or the America of resentments? The America of Lincoln's better angels, or the America of Nixon's Silent Majority?
The answer is almost certainly that we will be one or another of these Americas at different times depending on different circumstances. One reason to think that we might find ourselves with Lincoln more often than with Nixon, though, is that the "we" is getting ever trickier to define quickly and easily in terms of race, ethnicity and religion. We the People of 2009 are not the We the People of 1959 or 1969 or even 1979. And that is because of Lyndon Johnson....
Read entire article at Newsweek
But the president was openly ambivalent, too. "The bill that we sign today is not a revolutionary bill," he said, defensively, almost as though to reassure white Americans that they had nothing to fear. "It does not affect the lives of millions. It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives, or really add importantly to either our wealth or our power."
To borrow an old line about Winston Churchill, when Lyndon Johnson was right, he was right, but when he was wrong, well, my God. (See, for example, War, Vietnam.) On reflection, the bill LBJ signed on that October day was one of the most significant of his momentous presidency, and the virtually forgotten legislation played a key role in creating the America that made this week's inauguration of Barack Obama possible.
Why exhume the long-dead Johnson on the occasion of one of the most engaging inaugurals since George Washington took the oath at Federal Hall in New York City in 1789? Because who we are now—a country in which traditional barriers of race and age and gender are crumbling—flows in many ways from what LBJ did then. His conflicting language on that October day, meanwhile, underscores the nation's occasionally wary view of the changes wrought by immigration. We like to say we love the new, but the familiar, come to think of it, is awfully comfortable, too. So which will it be in the coming years: the America of the melting pot, or the America of resentments? The America of Lincoln's better angels, or the America of Nixon's Silent Majority?
The answer is almost certainly that we will be one or another of these Americas at different times depending on different circumstances. One reason to think that we might find ourselves with Lincoln more often than with Nixon, though, is that the "we" is getting ever trickier to define quickly and easily in terms of race, ethnicity and religion. We the People of 2009 are not the We the People of 1959 or 1969 or even 1979. And that is because of Lyndon Johnson....