Birth Of The Unlikely Republic

When I was a kid, there were all these books and articles about why the Japanese emerged from our occupation to kick our ass in every conceivable industrial sector. My dad became obsessed with it. So did Malcolm Forbes, who wrote about it regularly.

The prevailing theory, then and now, was that the Japanese were somehow able to make their workers vastly more productive than our own. That is, they were getting more work produced in a manhour, and since manhours are tied to dollars, you can see how the whole thing soon boiled down into an equation. Productivity and calculations to measure productivity were, as you might imagine, a significant part of my education at the Else School of Business.

Theories about why the Japanese culture was getting more work per hour out of its people were discussed regularly. One weekend, I went up to the delta with Daddy and Bob Fortenberry to fish with Charlie Deaton and Robert Wingate. We didn’t talk about fish. We talked about how to apply these principles to the people of Mississippi to attract industry here. Mississippi was and is a very poor state. We need ideas.

Most people have since given up on the idea of competing with Asia industrially. Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen were the last people to talk seriously about bringing steel back.

Malcolm Forbes had this theory that Americans are always talking about how big, rich, powerful, and strong we are, but the Japanese counter that with “We’re a very small country, with almost no national resources except fish.” Forbes believed that because the Japanese people had to work harder to survive, their culture valued working harder.

The Japanese attacked us in 1941 because we were expanding our presence in the Pacific Ocean, which they believed threatened their cultural uniqueness. Fifty years later, I listened to panels with Ray Harryhausen and Ray Bradbury, talking about how the Japanese were obsessed with importing American science fiction, starting with his film Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, which became Godzilla.

The week I was born, the most popular song in America was “Sukiyaki” by Kyu Sakamoto. It sounds exactly like any of the love ballads by white crooners of the day but in Japanese. Even today, Japanese and Korean music sounds much more American than Asian. They’re still kicking our ass in the factory, but nationalists in both Japan and Korea worry that their countries are becoming American.

There are some brilliant Mississippi thinkers on Twitter. There are also about half a billion absolute lunatics, but I’m getting pretty good about separating the wheat from the chaff.

Cindy Hyde-Smith made a video and posted it on Twitter. Sitting in front of a green screen, she had somebody chromakey in footage of fireworks in the night sky behind the Lincoln Memorial. She delivered a heartfelt message about how great America is, how great our soldiers are, how great our wars are, and all the key memes conservatives have to touch on to survive.

She ended her plea for your approval by invoking the phrase “one nation under God.” “One Nation Under God” is a phrase invented in 1954, during a time when there was a conservative backlash against liberal politics that saw us through the war and ended the depression. To give you an idea of what else was happening in 1954, Edward R Murrow produced a half-hour “See it Now” report entitled “A Report on Senator Joseph McCarthy,” in which he exposed the radical excesses of the Republican Party and their efforts to destroy the civil liberties of Americans.

Most people don’t know or don’t consider why we celebrate the Fourth of July. There’s much written today about how Jefferson wasn’t a very good man. Much was written then about how Addams wasn’t a very good man. Franklin was a womanizer. Whether or not you judge him for it is up to you.

Men are flawed. Every man God created is flawed except for one, and his flaw was living in a mortal body.

While George Washington and his men fought off the King’s army and mercenaries, begging for food and gunpowder as they went, fifty-six men met in the Pennsylvania State House during the stifling summer heat, besieged by flies, to discuss the matter of Peace with Great Britain while yet asserting their rights or the frightening concept of independence from the fatherland. Men of consequence and lovers of letters assembled with the ideas of John Locke, infusing their concept of what life a man might lead.

Among the actual flies, Addams had become something of a Gadfly on the issue of independence. The Continental Congress appointed a five-delegate committee, including Jefferson, Franklin, and Addams, to draft a proposal for independence. After discussing the elements of the proposal with the committee, Thomas Jefferson retired to a rented room on June 11, 1776, to draft a letter to the King of England, stating their position.

The letter begins: “The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America”

“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”

Declaring ourselves Free of Britain, Jefferson then gets into the meat of the matter.

“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. ”

On July 4, 1776, Jefferson’s document was adopted, with some important and historic revisions. While it took several weeks to gather all the signatures, fifty-six men signed the letter and sent it to King George of Great Britain. While they retained copies for themselves, nobody knows what happened to the copy sent to George.

July 4 doesn’t celebrate America’s greatness. It celebrates the audacity of fifty-six men who had the courage to redefine the value of a man’s life and gamble their fortunes and their necks on the outcome. We celebrate the day that we chose to build a republic based on the value of a single human life, not the greatness of a king and his army.