The Soul of the Nation

I know I keep saying that I have finally reached the bottom, that there simply is nothing left in the universe’s bag of tricks that could or will surprise me. But it consistently turns out that I was wrong and this morning, as I opened some of my usual news sites to see what was being featured as the morning’s news, I found myself so flabbergasted—and so outraged—that, yet again, I have to eat some crow: I thought nothing could surprise me any longer, but I was clearly wrong. Again.

I am referring to the news report published this morning revealing that the team of lawyers appointed by a federal judge to identify the specific would-be migrant families whose children were taken from them at the border, that this team of especially appointed legal eagles have admitted that they have failed, not once but in 545 different cases, to track down the parents of the children involved. And also, just to make the lot of these poor children even more dismal, the likelihood is that about two-thirds of their parents were deported to Central America without any mechanism having been set first in place to keep track of their whereabouts so that they could be reunited with the children taken from them once they were sent home.

This is America? It hardly seemed possible to me then that children were being separated violently from their parents in the first place. But infinitely less possible for me to fathom is that we have somehow failed to create a foolproof mechanism for reuniting this families torn asunder by agents of our own government.

I am not a believer in open borders. I understand the need for would-be immigrants to follow the rules and apply for admission in a dignified, decorous way that conforms to American law. My own wife is an immigrant to this country and she carefully played by those very rules when she came here in 1999. But if the parents involved were attempting to circumvent the law and illegally sneak into our country, what crime did their babies commit? Or children so young then that they are incapable of saying clearly now where their parents were originally from, thus where they would likely have been deported back to. My guess is that some of the children who were taken as babies are probably not even able to say what their parents’ full names are, let alone their original addresses.

This will be addressed in future weeks, I suppose. The current administration is under court orders dating back to 2018 to reunite families separated at the border. Is it even remotely possible that there simply is no way to do that? Jewish readers even moderately familiar with their own history will certainly know the answer to that question. And it does not at all redound to the credit of our nation.            

In my opinion, this issue, almost more than any other, goes to the question of our nation’s soul.

The notion that the national soul is in play in the current election is hardly original with me, of course, as witnessed by Joe Biden’s remark the other day that the campaign for the White House isn’t “just about winning votes,” that is it “about winning the heart and, yes, the soul of America.” For its part, the Trump campaign has lately been using the same language: the slogan “Save America’s Soul” surfaced just last week to encourage donors to contribute to the campaign. Reporter Elizabeth Dias wrote an interesting essay in the Times the other day about the use of this specific kind of language to suggest what’s really at stake on November 3, but she didn’t turn to the text I wish to present here with my interpretation as my own contribution to the discussion. (To read Dias’s article, click here.)

She did cite a lot of interesting sources, that I do have to give her. Referencing authors like Frederick Douglass (who felt that the struggle against slavery had to lead to the abhorrence of slavery being “fixed in the soul of the nation”), Lyndon B. Johnson (who spoke about the nation finding its “soul of honor” on the battlefield at Gettysburg), and Martin Luther King, Jr. (who described the mission of the organization now known as the Southern Christian Leadership Congress as one “to save the soul of America” by promoting civil rights and racial equality), she sets a good literary base upon which to stand while expatiating about the meaning of the concept under consideration and asking what it means—or could mean—for a nation to have a soul that animates and guides it along, presumably in some analogous fashion to the way the human soul animates and guides the body that houses it.

But she didn’t get to Whitman, the greatest of all American poets and—at least in my opinion—the author of the greatest of all American books, Leaves of Grass.

Whitman’s poem “By Blue Ontario’s Shore,” opens with a vignette that goes to the heart of the matter. The poet imagines himself wandering along on the U.S. side of Lake Ontario shortly after the end of the Civil War. (I’m citing the poem’s final version; the first was written before the war.) And there he is sauntering along when all of a sudden “a Phantom gigantic superb with stern visage” accosts him. “Chant me a poem,” the phantasm demands, one “that comes from the soul of America.” And then, in case the poet still didn’t quite understand the task being laid at his feet, the creatures restates the challenge:  Sing me, it says, “the song of the throes of Democracy.”

That’s quite the challenge, defining the soul of a nation. But Whitman was up to it…and what he had then to say about the soul of the American nation is as relevant and inspiring today as it was when the poem reached its final state in 1867.

“By Blue Ontario’s Shore” is a long, complicated poem. But the single idea that comes through again and again is that, while other nations exist primarily as entities that subsume their own populations, the American concept is precisely the reverse: that the individual (and, by extension, the rights of the individual) are sacrosanct and the nation is merely the aggregate of the individuals who constitute its population. In other words, what makes America unique is the idea that the nation exists for the sake of its citizens, not vice versa, and that the identical set of basic human rights are thus at the core of both citizen and citizenry.

America, Whitman writes, is “Underneath, all individuals / I swear nothing is good to me now that ignores individuals, / The American compact is altogether with individuals, / The only government is that which makes minute of individuals, / The whole theory of the universe is directed unerringly to one single individual—namely, to You.” That, he is saying, is why the most basic American document is the Bill of Rights, which delineates the rights not of the nation or of the states, but of the individual. This corresponds precisely to what Whitman wrote in the Preface to Leaves of Grass: “The genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges or churches or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors…but always in the most common people.”

And that idea, so Whitman, is the soul that animates the American ethos, the notion that the nation can hardly even be said reasonable to exist at all other than as an aggregate of its individual citizens.

In that concept of the supreme worth of the individual rests the mission that destiny has laid at the nation’s feet, making of it not a declaration to inform or a riddle to be solved, but a kind of physically-real poem intended by its author/founders to inspire others to resist the siren call of self-serving nationalism that sees the individual as a cog in a giant machine and instead to embrace the notion that nations exist solely to promote the worth of the individual citizen possessed of inalienable rights and limitless potential. To fit that thought into the question of the children I wrote about above, the fact that the government behaved with respect to those poor children in a way that not a single American would countenance in a million years with respect to his or her own children—that they be seized, warehoused, and lost track of as a way of punishing the wrongdoing of their parents—means by definition that the nation’s leaders have betrayed the people who entrusted them with the mantle of national leadership in the first place.

“These States are the amplest poem,” Whitman writes. “here is not merely a nation but a teeming Nation of nations, / Here are the doings of men correspond with the broadcast doing of the day and night, / Here is what moves in magnificent masses careless of particulars, / Here are the roughs, beards, friendliness, combativeness, the soul loves / Here the flowing trains, here the crowds, equality, diversity, the soul loves.” I love those words because they correspond to my own sense of what makes America unique. Like many, I fear we may have lost our way and need to find a path that will put us back on the track of our own national destiny, one that will lead us to embrace the Founders’ vision of a union of states that exist to create the legal and societal context in which individuals can flourish and reach the fullest flower of their potential. The nation is the individual. No act that the individual citizen would find abhorrent can reasonably be rationalized because it was undertaken by the government and specifically not by the individual. The nation is its citizens. The citizens are the nation. Their moral bearing must therefore be their nation’s as well. Policies supported by none cannot be pursued by the government without the nation sinking to the level of tyranny it was founded specifically to resist.

To me, that is what America is…and wherein lies the specific way it differs from other nations—and particularly from the nations from which its original founders and later immigrants hailed. That intense, unselfconscious celebration of the individual is how Whitman responded to the gigantic Phantom superb with stern visage who demanded of a definition of the American soul. I personally would be incapable of ripping a baby from its mother’s arms at all, let alone doing so without guaranteeing to myself in a dozen different ways that that family will end up reunited when its parents are either granted entry into our country or sent home. That obliges me to speak out when my government appears to have failed in the most elemental way possible to watch over the children in its care. I respond therefore to this week’s revelation not merely with regret, but with rage born of indignation and shame.