American Minute with Bill Federer
Carl Sandburg, Pulitzer Prize-Winning Poet: "When a nation goes down ... one condition may always be found; they forgot where they came from"
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"I see
America,
not in the setting sun of a black night of despair ahead of us,
I see
America
in the crimson light of a rising sun fresh from the burning, creative
hand of God.
I see great days ahead, great days possible to men and women of will and vision,"
stated poet
Carl Sandburg
in an interview with Frederick Van Ryn of
This Week Magazine
(January 4, 1953, p. 11.)
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Carl Sandburg
was born on January 6, 1878, to Swedish immigrants who worked on the railroad.
After 8th grade,
Carl Sandburg
left school, borrowed his father's railroad pass, and traveled the country as a hobo.
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Carl Sandburg
volunteered for military service, was sent to
Puerto Rico
in the
Spanish-American War,
and then attended college on a veteran's bill.
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Carl Sandburg
wrote children's fairytales, called
Rootabaga Stories,
and mused of his wanderings in
American Songbag.
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Carl Sandburg
wrote in
Remembrance Rock
(1948, ch. 2, p. 7):
"A baby is
God's
opinion that the world should go on."
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He continued:
"A baby,
whether it does anything to you,
represents life.
If a bad fire should break out in this house and I had my choice of saving the library or
the babies, I would save what is alive.
Never will a time come when the most marvelous recent invention is
as marvelous as a newborn baby.
The finest of our precision watches, the most super-colossal of our supercargo plants,
don't compare with a newborn baby
in the number and ingenuity of coils and springs, in the flow and change of chemical solutions, in timing devices and interrelated parts that are irreplaceable.
A bab
y is very modern. Yet it is also the oldest of the ancients.
A baby
doesn't know he is a hoary and venerable antique — but he is.
Before man learned how to make an alphabet, how to make a wheel, how to make a fire, he knew how to make
a baby
— with the great help of
woman, and his God and Maker."
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Carl Sandburg
i, in 1926, wrote
Abraham Lincoln-The Prairie Years,
and in 1939 he wrote
Abraham Lincoln-The War Years
, for which he received a Pulitzer Prize.
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In 1959,
Sandburg
was invited to
address Congress
on
Lincoln's birthday.
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On October 25, 1961,
Sandburg
was invited to the White House by
John F. Kennedy.
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In his
Complete Poems,
for which he won a Pulitzer, 1951,
Carl Sandburg
wrote:
"All my life I have been trying to learn to read, to see and hear, and to write.
At sixty-five I began my first novel ...
It could be, in the
grace of God,
I shall live to be eighty-nine ...
I might paraphrase: 'If
God
had let me live five years longer I should have been a writer.'"
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In his poem
Prayers of Steel,
Carl Sandburg
wrote:
"Lay me on an anvil,
O God.
Beat me and hammer me into a crowbar.
Let me pry loose old walls.
Let me lift and loosen old foundations.
Lay me on an anvil,
O God.
Beat me and hammer me into a steel spike.
Drive me into the girders that hold a skyscraper together.
Take red-hot rivets and fasten me into the central girders.
Let me be the great nail holding a skyscraper through blue nights into white stars.
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Sandburg
wrote:
"God,
The game is all your way, the secrets and the signals and the system; and so for the break of the game and the first play and the last.
Our
prayer
of thanks."
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Sandburg
wrote in "Washington Monument by Night"
(Slabs of the Sunburnt West,
1922):
"The
Republic
is a dream. Nothing happens unless first a dream."
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Carl Sandburg
wrote:
"When a nation goes down,
or a society perishes, one condition may always be found;
they forgot where they came from.
They lost sight of what had brought them along."
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Sandburg's statement
is similar to Pulitzer Prize winning historian
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.,
who wrote in an op-ed titled "Folly's Antidote"
(The New York Times,
January 1, 2007):
"History
is to the nation as
memory
is to the individual.
As persons deprived of memory
become
disoriented
and lost, not knowing where they have been and where they are going, so
a nation denied a conception of the past
will be
disabled
in dealing with its present and its future.
'The longer you look back,' said Winston Churchill, "the farther you can look forward" ...
I believe
a consciousness of history
is
a moral necessity for a nation."
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John F. Kennedy
wrote in the Introduction to the
American Heritage New Illustrated History of the United States
(1960):
"History,
after all, is the
memory of a nation.
Just as
memory
enables the individual to learn, to choose goals and stick to them, to
avoid making the same mistake twice
– in short, to grow – so
history
is the means by which a nation establishes its
sense of identity and purpose."
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If history is the memory of a nation, then America has national Alzheimer’s.
Harvard Professor George Santayana
wrote in
Reason
in Common Sense
(Vol. I of The Life of Reason, 1905):
"Those who
cannot remember the past
are
condemned to repeat it."
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Judge Learned Hand
wrote:
"The use of
history
is to tell us ...
past themes,
else we should have to
repeat,
each in his own experience, the successes and the
failures of our forebears."
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Aristotle,
in his book
Rhetoric
(4th century BC), called this "deliberative rhetoric," using
examples from the past to predict future outcomes:
"The political orator is concerned with the future: it is about things to be done hereafter that
he advises, for or against."
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Lord Acton
wrote in 1877:
"The story of the future is
written in the past."
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Patrick Henry
stated March 23, 1775:
"I know of no way of judging the future but by
the past."
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Edmund Burke
wrote in
Reflections on the Revolution in France,
1790:
"People will not look forward to posterity who
never look backward to their ancestors."
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Cicero
stated in Ad M. Brutum, 46 BC:
"Not to know
what happened before you were born
is to be
a child forever."
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J. Edgar Hoover
warned in the introduction to Edward
L.R. Elson's book,
America's Spiritual Recovery,
1954:
"We can see all too clearly the
devastating effects of secularism
on our Christian way of life.
The period when it was smart to
"debunk" our traditions
undermined ... high standards of conduct.
A rising emphasis on materialism caused
a decline of "God-centered" deeds and thoughts."
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Senate Chaplain Peter Marshall
stated:
"Along with our higher education came
a debunking contest
... a sort of national sport ...
It was smarter to
revile
than to
revere
... more fashionable to
depreciate
than to
appreciate
...
Debunking
is ... a sign of
decaying foundations."
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Socialist historian Howard Zinn's
A People's History of the United States
(1980) has been one of the primary works "debunking" America's heritage.
An exposé revealing Zinn's manipulation of the facts has been written by Mary Garbar,
Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America
(2019).
Zinn's
tactic was one of
deconstruction,
a
“Drive–Neutral–Reverse”
method to ideologically undermine a nation.
The first step is to
separate students from their country's past
by portraying negatively the country's founders;
then
students
are in a
neutral phase
of being "
open-minded";
finally, the
students
are
indoctrinated
with a whitewashed
socialist-sharia future.
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President Donald Trump
stated July 3, 2020:
"The
violent mayhem
we have seen in the streets of
cities that are run by liberal Democrats,
in every case, is the predictable result of
years of extreme indoctrination
and
bias in education,
journalism, and other cultural institutions ...
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...
Our children
are
taught in school
to
hate their own country,
and to believe that the men and women who built it were
not heroes, but that were villains.
The
radical view of American history
is
a web of lies
— all perspective is removed, every virtue is obscured,
every motive is twisted, every fact is distorted,
and every flaw is magnified until the
history is purged
and the record is
disfigured
beyond all recognition ..
No movement that seeks to
dismantle
these treasured American legacies can possibly have a love of America at its heart ...
No person who remains quiet at the
destruction of this resplendent heritage
can possibly lead us to a better future."
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Will & Ariel Durant
wrote in
The Story of Civilization,
1967:
"History
is an excellent teacher with few pupils."
The
Durants
wrote in
The Lessons of History,
1968:
"Civilization is not inherited;
it has to be l
earned
and earned by
each generation anew;
if the transmission should be interrupted ...
civilization would die,
and we should be
savages again."
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Reagan
warned the Phoenix Chamber of Commerce,
March 30, 1961:
"Freedom
is never more than
one generation away from extinction.
We didn't pass it to our
children
in the bloodstream.
The only way they can
inherit the freedom
we have known is if we fight for it, protect it, defend it and then hand it to them with the well thought
lessons
of how they in their lifetime must do the same.
And if you and I don't do this, then you and I may well spend our sunset years
telling our children
and our children's children
what it once was like in America when men were free."
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Carl Sandburg
died July 22, 1967.
At his 85th birthday party (6 January 6, 1963,
Sandburg
had stated (
The Best of Ralph McGill: Selected Columns,
1980)
"Time is the coin of your life. You spend it.
Do not allow others to spend it for you."
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President Ronald Reagan
stated in his State of the Union Address, January 25, 1984:
"Each day your members observe a 200-year-old tradition meant to signify
America
is
one nation under God.
I must ask: If you can begin your day with a member of the clergy standing right here leading you in
prayer,
then why can't freedom to acknowledge
God
be enjoyed again by
children in every school room
across this land?
America
was founded by people who believed that
God
was their rock of safety ..."
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Reagan
concluded:
"I recognize we must be cautious in claiming that
God
is on our side, but I think it's all right to
keep asking if we're on His side
...
Carl Sandburg
said,
'I see
America
not in the setting sun of a black night of despair ... I see
America
in the crimson light of a rising sun fresh from the burning,
creative hand of God.'"
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Schedule Bill Federer for informative interviews & captivating PowerPoint presentations: 314-502-8924
wjfederer@gmail.com
American Minute is a registered trademark of William J. Federer. Permission is granted to forward, reprint, or duplicate, with acknowledgment.
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