Editorial: Despite indignities, the eagle still soars

This editorial first appeared in the July 4, 1873, issue of the Minneapolis Tribune under the headline "Our Oration.'' It's reprinted here, in all of its unique glory, as a reminder of how much and how little has changed in 136 years.

The Tribune has no room for gasconade. That may be safely left to the more succulent of the orators who will this morning make their annual escape from counting rooms and lawyers' offices, from clerks' desks and auctioneers' stools, to wave the Star Spangled Banner for an hour, and to instruct the wondering bucolic multitudes concerning the gorgeous glories of Yankeedoodleism. To-day Americans kiss the blarney-stone.

To-day we are caught in our most receptive and gullible mood. Nothing tending to illustrate our past or prophesy our future is too gross for deglutition to-day. We believe in our own history and our Manifest Destiny, and we have unbounded faith in the sufficiency of the bald-headed eagle which, as his eulogists will observe to-day, with one foot on the Alleghenies and the other on the Sierras, expands his tranquil tail over the blue Caribbean and lifts his majestic voice over Hudson's Bay, proclaiming freedom to a downtrodden world. And other things. We shall not meddle with this bird. He can still whet his avenging beak and carry in his claws an assorted variety of thunderbolts. He has been misused and insulted a good deal in his time -- more than enough to have brought to an untimely grave any ordinary fowl.

When that hypercritical hero, John Mitchell, landed in San Francisco, a fugitive from his native land, he alluded to himself as "a poor exile, panting for freedom, who throws himself, breathless and exhausted on these shores, and finds grateful protection in the hospitable shadow of your eagle's wings." And within a year he cursed the bird, because it would not bring him a "plantation of fat niggers.'' The bird has suffered many indignities; and, fifteen years ago, it appeared in the illustrated papers, alternately as a vulture carrying a piccaninny by the reverse of his baggy pantaloons, and a buzzard gorged at the carcass of Free Labor. And yet it is able to soar.

One hundred years ago to-day all that was known of America was a strip of land one hundred and fifty miles wide, stretching from Portland to Savannah, thinly peopled, wretchedly cultivated, with about the wealth and population of the present State of Illinois. Franklin was in London, shaking a dagger of warning at the Lords and Commons. Washington was at Mount Vernon, using his little hatchet in trying to invent a new plow and hew out the model. John Adams was in Boston, and had just refused the office of justice of the peace -- "lest it might bias my judgment," said he. Thomas Jefferson was a Williamsburg lawyer, thirty years old, listening to the wisdom of Gov. Fauquier, and distilling from the pamphlets of Thomas Paine the famous principles which soon crystalized into the Declaration of Independence. Paine, himself, had just invented the planning-machine and the iron-bridge. Patrick Henry, lazy and eloquent, had failed as a "store-keeper," and was loafing and fishing along the Rappahannock. That royal imbecile, George Brunswick, had resolved to tax ten, "just to maintain the right of taxing," and the fiery words of James Otis were slowly working among the inflammable materials along the coast.

Ninety years later -- ten years ago to-day -- our second war for independence was at the turning stake. Grant was on the home stretch. At ten o'clock in the morning of July 4th, ten years ago, Pemberton laid his sword at his conqueror's feet in the rear of Vicksburg. Six hours afterwards, on the same day, Longstreet's corps was finally hurled down the hill at Gettysburg.

To-day is our chief national holiday; and its value does not lie in detonations and displays, in bombast and blazon, but in its power of conquering the prejudices and moulding in new forms the habits of the foreigners whom we are striving to make our own, and who are now only Americans by brevet. Nearly half of the citizens of Minneapolis were born across the sea, in the alien realm of Kingcraft. They are trying to learn our ways, and to adopt for their own use the best of our ideas. This holiday should furnish some of the assimilative chyle to assist the process of our difficult digestion.

There are some feeble, fearful souls who see in this vast procession of European immigrants only a terrible sea-serpent, hydra-headed and many-armed, with relentless grasp of flexible body, and horrible bloody maw, sent to fulfill the behest of priests and princes by devouring this stalwart young republic. They are the victims of their own inflamed imaginations. They have got the political jimjams. Our power of swallow is immense -- equal to any emergency. Every passing Fourth of July will enable Germans more and more to forget that they are Germans, Irish to forget that they are Irish, Scandinavians to forget that they were born on the northern peninsula, and to remember only their duties to the land of their adoption. Their children will not be Germans, Irish, Scandinavians -- they will be born and bred Yankees. Much of our national prowess lies in our heterogeneous origin -- in the mixing of iron and silver ion our blood -- but as we pass through the crucible of Independence Day, we should become more and more allied in patriotic feeling, more and more homogeneous in desire and purpose. Subjected to this annual test, foreigners will learn to adopt the faith that is at the basis of our national life -- that the people are wiser than their rulers, that everybody knows more than anybody, and that the greatest statesman is he who governs himself.