America by Heart, Page 2

  I can’t think of a sadder prospect for Todd and me than our spending our sunset years telling our grandson, Tripp, and our grandchildren yet to come about what it was like in America when we were strong and proud and free.

  But maybe I can think of a sadder prospect: Tripp and our other grandchildren spending their whole lives working to pay off the irresponsible debt we have accumulated and are about to leave to them.

  Neither of these futures is one I want for my grandchildren. Fortunately, I have been given a great gift, the gift of seeing this amazing country up close and personal, in a way that few Americans can. When I began writing this book, I thought carefully about the many wonderful folks I’d met over the past couple of years, and I reread the articles, books, and devotionals they’d shared with me. I also asked some of the people I love and trust to share with me the stories, the characters, and the words that form their view of America. I’ve been amazed at some of the things I’ve learned, comforted by much of it, and challenged in my views more than once.

  And when I took these bits and pieces of Americana and blended them with my own experiences and views, I came up with this book. It’s my view of America and what has made her great. It’s the ideas our country was founded on. It’s the strength of our families. It’s the grit of our national character. It’s our faith in God, how it has shaped our nation and continues to fortify us as a people.

  President Reagan’s call for us to fight for, protect, and pass on to future generations the sources and meaning of our freedom is both a political and a personal call; it is a challenge, both for our country and for us individually. I take this challenge seriously. Passing on peace, prosperity, and liberty to the next generation requires a strong military, a free market, and a healthy constitutional order. But none of that will be sufficient if our children are not taught to have a reverence for the ideas, ideals, and traditions that are central to the American experiment.

  This is my America, from my heart, and by my heart. I give it now to my children and grandchildren, and to yours, so they will always know what it was like in America when people were free.

  One

  We the People

  When I was elected governor of Alaska in 2006, my friend Bruce, who’d helped out on the campaign, presented me with a black-and-white framed print of Jefferson Smith, the character played by Jimmy Stewart in the Frank Capra film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. It hung on my wall in the governor’s office in Juneau, and it hangs on my office wall in Wasilla today.

  Call it corny, but Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is one of my favorite movies. It’s a movie about hope. It’s a movie about good triumphing over evil and idealism defeating cynicism. Most of all, it’s a movie about the timeless truths of America handed down to us from our forefathers and foremothers.

  In other words, it’s a movie Hollywood would never make today.

  In case you’ve forgotten, Mr. Smith is about an American Everyman, Jefferson Smith, who goes to Washington to fill the Senate seat of a corrupt senator who died in office. The political machine chooses Smith because he is an ordinary man, a nonpolitician, and they think they can control him. But he holds fast to his ideals—the ideals of the American founding—and eventually defeats the machine. The movie was made in 1939, but its message is timeless: there may be corruption in politics, but it can be overcome by decent men and women who honor America’s founding principles, the way the American people do.

  No doubt, most of today’s Hollywood hotshots think movies like Mr. Smith are sappy and uncool, foolish sentimentalism about a country they seem to prefer to run down rather than build up. During the Iraq War, Hollywood produced a whole slew of movies that portrayed the United States (read: the Bush administration) as motivated by vengeance and oil, with the troops as mindless pawns. But almost all of them bombed at the box office, because most Americans don’t share this view of our country or our troops. The same cultural gap exists with Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Americans love this movie. More than seventy years later, we still watch it and judge Washington against it, because it is happily, unabashedly pro-American—not pro-government, certainly, but definitely pro-American. It celebrates the values that have come to us from our founding and that have made our country great.

  The wonderful thing about Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is that it doesn’t just cheerlead for America, or engage in a theoretical discussion of our founding documents, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. It puts these documents and their ideas into a human context. It shows us all the love, charity, and humanity that they embody when they are honored and adhered to.

  I shared a love of this movie with my maternal grandfather, C. J. Sheeran. One of our favorite scenes comes in the middle of Senator Smith’s famous filibuster. It is a scene that has not only inspired a love of democratic ideals in generations of Americans but also provided them a basic education in the nature of congressional debate. Smith is trying to get a loan from the federal government to build a boys’ camp on some land where the corrupt political machine in his state, headed by a Mr. James Taylor, is eyeing to build a dam. Taylor has bought off most of Senator Smith’s colleagues, but Smith refuses to back down. In the scene, Jimmy Stewart reads verbatim the opening words of the Declaration of Independence on the floor of the Senate. Then he challenges his colleagues to honor what these words mean in human terms, because, as he says, “you’re not gonna have a country that can make these kind of rules work if you haven’t got men that have learned to tell human rights from a punch in the nose.”

  Senator Smith doesn’t want to build a camp so that boys can discover their inner selves or learn to worship Mother Earth. He wants to build a boys camp to help produce young men willing and capable of living together in freedom in a country in which they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights:

  And it seemed like a pretty good idea, getting boys from all over the country, boys of all nationalities and ways of living—getting them together. Let them find out what makes different people tick the way they do. Because I wouldn’t give you two cents for all your fancy rules if, behind them, they didn’t have a little bit of plain, ordinary, everyday kindness and a little lookin’ out for the other fella, too.

  That’s pretty important, all that. It’s just the blood and bone and sinew of this democracy that some great men handed down to the human race, that’s all!

  Jefferson Smith loves the words of the Declaration of Independence, not because he’s mindlessly pro-American, but because, as he says, “behind them, they . . . have a little bit of plain, ordinary, everyday kindness and a little lookin’ out for the other fella, too.” He understands that those words are a gift, not just to Americans, but to all humanity. But that gift is being corrupted by special interests and forgotten by Washington.

  That’s what I think so many of the people who make the big laws, run the big corporations, write for the big newspapers, and make the big movies today have forgotten. Americans love this country because it means something, and it has since the beginning. That meaning, many of us feel, is being lost today.

  Americans love Mr. Smith Goes to Washington because it’s about an ordinary man who stands up to power and says, We’re taking our country back.

  It seems like ancient history now, but I remember it vividly. I was a young mother—Track had just been born—and I was watching a revolution on television.

  It was 1989 when it began. First in Poland, then in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, East Germany, and Romania—the dominoes of dictatorship fell. And then, soon after the decade turned, the Soviet Union—the dictatorship that was responsible for all the other fallen dictatorships—met its fate. I watched in August 1991 as Boris Yeltsin stood on a tank outside the Kremlin and faced down a coup by Communist hard-liners. By New Year’s Day 1992, the Soviet Empire was no more.

  It was a dizzying moment to be free. For my entire life
, Americans had been told by the propaganda mouthpieces of the Communist regimes—not to mention plenty of others in the free world—that Soviet communism was the way of the future. We had been told it was a more just and democratic form of government because it guaranteed the equality of all. We had been told that it was Americans, not the Russians or the Poles or the Chinese, who were living in an authoritarian society. After all, the Soviet constitution promised its citizens dozens of rights, including the right to work, the right to leisure, the right to health care and housing, and some rights that sound very familiar to Americans, such as freedom of speech, press, and religion.

  None of these rights meant anything in the Soviet Union, of course. They were words on paper and nothing more. The reason, I think, is important for Americans to understand. It speaks as much to the wonderful uniqueness of our Constitution as it does to the hollowness of the Soviet document.

  In 1987, just a few years before the Soviet Empire began to fall, America celebrated the two-hundredth anniversary of our Constitution. That year, in his State of the Union Address, President Reagan talked with his usual courage and clarity about the special magic of the American Constitution:

  I’ve read the constitutions of a number of countries, including the Soviet Union’s. Now, some people are surprised to hear that they have a constitution, and it even supposedly grants a number of freedoms to its people. Many countries have written into their constitution provisions for freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. Well, if this is true, why is the Constitution of the United States so exceptional?

  Well, the difference is so small that it almost escapes you, but it’s so great it tells you the whole story in just three words: We the people. In those other constitutions, the Government tells the people of those countries what they’re allowed to do. In our Constitution, we the people tell the Government what it can do, and it can do only those things listed in that document and no others. Virtually every other revolution in history has just exchanged one set of rulers for another set of rulers. Our revolution is the first to say the people are the masters and government is their servant.

  History has borne out the truth of President Reagan’s words. In the USSR, the government used its constitution to tell the people what they could do—to grant them so-called rights. It said the Soviet people had a “right” to just about everything. But of course, if a government can grant you a right, it can also take that right away. And that’s what the dictators of the Soviet Empire did: they promised their people the moon, but in the end it was the government, not the people, that had the power. It could choose to give its people rights or not, and it chose not to, so the people finally rose up.

  It’s different here, and the reason is our Constitution. I remember memorizing the preamble to the Constitution when I was a little girl in Alaska, watching Schoolhouse Rock at a friend’s house. What I was just beginning to learn about our Constitution is that it doesn’t give us rights—it describes a government that protects our God-given rights. It puts us in charge. As Newt Gingrich likes to note, our Constitution doesn’t begin “We the government of the United States . . .” or “We the federal bureaucrats of the United States . . .” or “We the special interests camped out on Capitol Hill of the United States . . .” It begins like this:

  We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

  As usual, the Gipper absolutely hit the nail on the head. The difference, with our Constitution, is those three little words: We the people.

  What has struck me most in traveling around the country in the past two years is the tremendous, unshakable love Americans have for their country, even when times are tough, and even when we are most definitely out of love with Washington, D.C.

  It says something interesting about Americans that this love of country so often takes the form of love of our Founders and our founding documents. Everyone claims to love the Founders, of course. But so many of our so-called academic and cultural elite talk out of both sides of their mouths when it comes to the founding. They pay lip service to revered American figures such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson at the same time that they bad-mouth the principles they stood for. They think Americans such as James Madison and Alexander Hamilton are museum pieces, interesting historical figures with no relevance to our lives today.

  You’re probably familiar with their take on America’s founding. They think the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are just documents written by old white men to benefit other old white men. To really have a just and equal society, they argue, we have to change these documents, update them for the times, and make them no longer mean what the Americans who wrote them intended them to mean. Either that, or we have to ignore them altogether.

  I hear from and meet Americans every day who have a very different view. They see America as having flaws, to be sure. But they understand that these flaws are not in the nature of our country but in the nature of humanity. No government can—or should try to—change our fundamental human nature. Deliverance is for the next life. You don’t have to look any further than the killing fields of Cambodia, the gulags of Soviet Russia, or the mass starvation of Communist China to see what happens when government tries to remake men and women.

  The wonderful thing about the system we inherited from the Founders is that it doesn’t try to change our humanity; rather, it respects it and honors it. This is the approach our Founders took from the very beginning, when they announced the birth of America with, next to the Bible, the most consequential words for human freedom ever written:

  We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

  I still get chills when I read these words. They express a beautiful idea—that we are all equally precious in the eyes of our Creator—that gave birth to a beautiful country.

  “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights . . .”

  It is to keep faith with these words that our Constitution begins “We the people.” In America, the people are sovereign, not just as a group, but individually. We are endowed by our Creator with this sovereignty. That means no person, no king and no government, can rule us without our consent. We all have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that wasn’t given to us by government; it was given to us by God. Therefore, it can’t rightly be taken away by government.

  To me, the Declaration of Independence is an expression of our ideals as a nation—the ideals of liberty and equality—and the Constitution is how we make those ideals a reality. I found a great metaphor Abraham Lincoln used to describ
e the relationship between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution in Matthew Spalding’s wonderful book We Still Hold These Truths.

  To illustrate how the Declaration and the Constitution work together, Lincoln cited Proverbs 25:11: “A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in a setting of silver.” For Lincoln, the principles of the Declaration—that we are granted by our Creator with inalienable rights—are the apples of gold. “The Union, and the Constitution,” Lincoln wrote, “are the picture of silver, subsequently framed around it. The picture was made for the apple—not the apple for the picture.”

  For me, this is the essence of freedom: to be a child of God whose God-given rights and responsibilities are respected by her government under the Constitution. What makes all of us Americans isn’t our ancestry or our skin color but our belief in this freedom. This isn’t the kind of freedom that says, “Whatever feels good, just do it.” It’s the kind of freedom that says, “Don’t tread on me.” It’s the kind of freedom that shouts that men and women aren’t just as free as their government or their king will allow them to be. Freedom is our birthright. We are free as a consequence of being made in the image of God—even if you don’t believe in God. Not only that, but we are equally free; no person or group of persons is less free than any other.

  Too many voices in America today sound the wrongheaded belief that these truths are no longer so self-evident. Some of these voices come from Washington, but many more come from our universities, our high school textbooks, even our churches. These skeptics think we have outgrown our founding principles, that even the wisest men and women in 1776 and 1787 couldn’t possibly have been wise enough to create an effective government for America in the twenty-first century.