American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation by Jon Meacham

Author:Jon Meacham [Meacham, Jon]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Tags: Nonfiction
ISBN: 9781588365774
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-03-19T21:00:00+00:00

THE GOOD FIGHT

Shortly before noon on a cool spring day in April 1943, Franklin Roosevelt left the White House with his wife, Eleanor, and Mrs. Edith Wilson for the brief journey to dedicate the newly constructed Jefferson Memorial. A reporter for The Washington Post noticed that the early Japanese cherry blossoms were already fading as Roosevelt doffed his dark cape and rose to face the monument. Five thousand people were on hand. Right Reverend Henry St. George Tucker, the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church in America, stepped to the microphones for a moment of prayer. As the people in the crowd bowed their heads and listened to the bishop’s words, guards wearing the costumes of Continental Army soldiers stood at attention before the memorial’s Ionic columns. How like Jefferson to be fixed forever in a classical temple, modeled after the Pantheon of Rome, dedicated by a man of Christ in the capital of a nation fighting a global war to protect our own liberty and to project the rights of “Nature’s God” to all the world. Asking the audience to join him, Bishop Tucker thanked God for “raising up thy servant, Thomas Jefferson, to be a leader in the cause of freedom to which the Nation was dedicated at its birth.”

It was the president’s turn. His braces locked in place, his big hands holding the rostrum, Roosevelt gazed up at the great statue of Jefferson. Sculpted from plaster—the bronze would have to wait until after the war—the nineteen-foot-tall Jefferson looked rather defiant, his feet set as if ready to stride forward at any moment, his strong, stern face staring out toward the White House. Jefferson, Roosevelt told the crowd, was an “apostle of freedom” who saw that “men who will not fight for liberty can lose it. We, too, have faced that fact.”

Americans would not shrink from wars against tyranny and terror. Jefferson, Roosevelt said, “lived in a world in which freedom of conscience and freedom of mind were battles still to be fought through—not principles already accepted of all men.” Roosevelt paused. “We, too, have lived in such a world.”

A cold wind blew off the Potomac, but Roosevelt, in his gray suit coat, did not seem to notice. He had a sermon to preach. “Thomas Jefferson believed, as we believe, in man. He believed, as we believe, that men are capable of their own government and that no king, no tyrant, no dictator can govern for them as wisely as they can govern for themselves,” said Roosevelt. “He believed, as we believe, in certain inalienable rights. He, as we, saw those principles and freedoms challenged. He fought for them, as we fight for them.”

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