Originally written June 29, 2005
By EDWIN COONEY
It was January 27th 1981, and we Americans were a proud and happy people. After just one week in office, President Ronald Wilson Reagan, by his mere presence in Washington, D. C., had vanquished the “malaise” of the Carter years. A major factor of our national sense of self-congratulations was the return of 52 Americans from 444 days as hostages in Iran.
I was listening that Tuesday afternoon to the Columbia Broadcasting System’s coverage of the hostages’ triumphant ride to the White House. Eric Severeid, one of CBS's longtime commentators, was called out of retirement to provide the broadcast with a bit of historical perspective. A victim of the Great Depression, an admirer of Franklin D. Roosevelt, a close personal friend to men like Adlai Stevenson and Hubert Humphrey, Mr. Severeid was no disciple of President Reagan’s brand of modern conservatism.
Where the liberal Severeid and the conservative president could find common ground, however, was in their mutual assessment of the basic goodness of the American people. During his comments on Iran’s audacity in the taking of the original 53 hostages, Mr. Severeid drew a most interesting distinction. Pointing out that the world’s reaction would be much more intense if Britain or the United States took hostages, Eric Severeid spoke of “The ‘special strength’ of the shameless.” Iran’s taking of our embassy personnel hostage was shameless rather than powerful because it responded to its resentments and ambitions, in this instance, rather than to its advertised moral foundation.
Unfortunately, time didn’t permit Eric Severeid to wax more eloquently on this theme, but the distinction between power and strength, as I understood Mr. Severeid, was the distinction between the metaphysical and the measurable or between the moral and the material forces of society. Mr. Severeid didn’t include the Soviet Union and China in his brief commentary, but it is my guess that if he had, he would have relegated them to the strong rather than to the powerful among the nations of the world.
Most every country possesses a military capacity for the protection of its people or for, in some instances, the whim or ambition of its leadership. But military and economic institutions, as vital as they are, are aspects of a nation’s material strength. A nation is powerful, it seems to me, when its might is merely secondary to its way of life. A powerful nation thus has the ability to attract the affection and admiration of other peoples to its ways, purposes, and culture quite aside from the strength of its economy or its arms.
In mulling over the significance of Eric Severeid’s observation, I wondered how many times in our own history we’ve been shameless rather than powerful in our reaction to the outrageous fortune of circumstances. Let’s randomly review some of our past. The process is a bit arbitrary, but I’ll be as objective as I can be. Here is a list of historic events. You decide whether we, as a people, were merely strong or whether we were powerful in our participation in these events. Score them for yourself, then see if your evaluation matches mine.
(1.) 1776—We declare our independence from Great Britain asserting that “All men are created equal.”
(2.) 1787—During the course of writing a constitution we declare that blacks and Indians should be counted as three fifths of a person.
(3.) 1788—We ratify a constitution with checks and balances in order to: “…form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare and to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and to our posterity…”
(4.) 1832—Five Indian tribes are driven from their homes in the southeast and forced to move westward to Oklahoma territory along the “Trail of Tears,” in order to accommodate an expanding white population.
(5.) 1845—Democrats proclaim Manifest Destiny as their belief that Americans have been divinely inspired to rule the North American Continent from sea to sea.
(6.) 1861—Civil war begins when Confederate troops fire on Fort Sumter.
(7.) 1863—Lincoln signs the Emancipation Proclamation.
(8.) 1920—The Twentieth Amendment giving women the right to vote is ratified.
(9.) 1941—Congress declares war against the “Axis Powers”: Germany, Italy and Japan.
(10.) 1964—The 1964 Civil Rights Bill granting to all people equal access to public places and activities becomes law.
I evaluate events 2, 4, 5, and 6 as instances of our strength rather than of our power. It was our superiority in economic development, might of arms and numbers of people that enabled us to: degrade and enslave blacks; conquer and destroy Indian society and culture; defeat the Mexicans thus imposing upon them our “manifest destiny”; and finally to go to war with one another over the right of the southern states to secede from the union. These, it seems to me, are the acts of the shameless rather than acts of the powerful.
Events 1, 3, 7, 8, 9, and 10, I suggest, are examples of our power rather than of our strength alone. Now there is no debate as to the value either of a strong free enterprise economy or a strong military defense. We could not have: won independence from Great Britain; insured liberty to ourselves and to our posterity; upheld Mr. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation (as morally and even legally weak as it was); defended ourselves against foreign attack during two world wars; or insured the civil rights of women and minorities without either a flourishing economy or a sufficient military or law enforcement capacity. But these six latter historic events are examples of our power rather than merely of our strength for three overriding reasons. They are inclusive of people’s aspirations and rights. They have established an expectation that those aspirations will be supported, sustained and expanded to the maximum benefit of all. Finally, the forces behind these events were performed on behalf of our moral values rather than merely on our practical and material needs.
In their support of President Bush’s re-election last November, American voters, it would seem, endorsed our current policy in Iraq. The question therefore is: Were we powerful or shameless by that vote?
Respectfully Submitted,
Edwin Cooney