Another ‘Greatest Generation’
You may not realize how close this country came to destroying itself. Most Americans don’t. I didn’t, and I’ve been a student of American history much of my life. And yet, the America we think we know, the country for which we claim so much—superpower, world’s best hope for democracy, sweet land of liberty and all the rest—this remarkable country of ours with its promise of the American Dream for everyone could have died at the hands of its own people.
But it didn’t. It didn’t because the great Civil War threatening it turned out to be the most important event in American history instead of its last. It didn’t because the war and its aftermath proved that, ultimately, the “mystic chords of memory” (in Lincoln’s words) that hold us together are stronger than any force that tries to divide us. It didn’t because, in a struggle for the common good, ordinary people rose up to do extraordinary things, leaving their farms and offices and shops and schoolrooms and comfortable routines for lives of deprivation and danger, lives that sometimes ended all too soon.
And that made the men and women of the Civil War era one of our greatest generations. Tom Brokaw told us the Americans of World War II were “the Greatest Generation,” as if there was only one. That’s wrong. We’ve had more than one: the one Brokaw celebrated, of course, and, more than two centuries ago, the generation of Founding Fathers and their shirt-sleeved Minute Men (and remember the ladies!) who fought the world’s greatest empire to a standstill and won our independence. And—not all that long ago, in the deep mystery of time—those of our ancestors who fought and won a terrible civil war. That they shed so much blood and so many tears to keep this one nation, indivisible, makes their generation one of the greatest. That they did it to on behalf of liberty and justice for all makes it glorious as well.