What is that “certain idea”? It has to do with a type of democratic nobility, something most of us can recognize the moment we see it. It’s Sojourner Truth asking the suffragists at the 1851 Woman’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, “Ain’t I a woman?” It’s Lou Gehrig, stricken with A.L.S. in his 30s, calling himself “the luckiest man on the face of the earth.”
It’s Gail Halvorsen, the candy bomber of the Berlin Airlift, parachuting chocolates and gum to the hungry children of the besieged city. It’s John McCain refusing an offer to be released before other American P.O.W.s in North Vietnamese captivity — and, 40 years later, publicly rebuking a supporter for calling Barack Obama, his opponent in the 2008 presidential race, “an Arab.”
It’s Robert F. Kennedy after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination: “What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness; but is love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another.” It’s George H.W. Bush after lightning victory in the Persion Gulf war: “This is not a time of euphoria, certainly not a time to gloat.”
Democratic nobility is also found on a page I keep in my desk drawer, a passenger manifest of the ship that brought my 10-year-old mother to the United States, thanks to the Displaced Persons Act of 1948. Right below my mother’s name and nationality — “Stateless” — there is Jamil Issa Hasan, 26, Jordanian; Bruna Klar, 27, Italian; Martha Kohlhaupt, 41, German; and Gerda Nesselroth, 45, also stateless.
Soon to be Americans all.
What all of this boils down to is the self-restraint and compassion of the temporarily powerful, the self-respect and absence of self-pity of the temporarily weak, and the shared conviction that strong and weak are united in a common democratic creed. It’s what people used to admire about our national character — mythologized to some extent, but based in something real: understatement and confidence, decency and expectation, the America of Huck and Jim, Bogart and Hepburn, Shepard and Glenn.
