Maybe I’m Old School
I’ve always been a bit nerdy about history, especially American history. Growing up, I thought about the Founding Fathers, Abraham Lincoln, and American presidents the way other kids thought about superheroes, outer space, or medieval kingdoms. And one Halloween, I went all in and dressed up as Benjamin Franklin. I had the bifocals, a wig that itched, and a mini copy of the Declaration of Independence that I refused to put down. There was even a time when I told my parents I wanted to be a printer when I grew up, like Franklin was, because childhood me had decided that running a printing press was a perfectly reasonable career to aim for in the 21st century. (It is not, and I am still crestfallen by this news.)
Photographic evidence of my Benjamin Franklin obsession come to life.
I’ve never really lost that love for American history, and with our nation’s 250th anniversary here, I hope you’ll indulge me for a few minutes as I revel in it. I still get something in my chest when I read the words left behind by America’s giants, but lately I’ve started to wonder if that makes me too old school.
Because somewhere along the way, it became unfashionable to talk about America like it was headed toward something better. To say out loud that the country could keep improving the lives of its people - and perhaps even the lives of those beyond its borders - and that it can genuinely work for all of us, regardless of our race, whom we love, or how we vote. Confess that belief now, and someone will tell you that you’re naive, partisan, or selling a fantasy.
Maybe I’m old school. But I think those giants were onto something, and as another Fourth of July arrives, I’d like to spend a few minutes in their company.
Benjamin Franklin, a spirit of compromise
“When you assemble a number of men to have the advantage of their joint wisdom, you inevitably assemble with those men, all their prejudices, their passions, their errors of opinion, their local interests, and their selfish views. From such an assembly can a perfect production be expected?”
- Benjamin Franklin, Closing Speech at the Constitutional Convention, September 17, 1787
I would be remiss not to begin with Ben Franklin himself. It was September 17, 1787, the final day of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. Franklin was 81 and too frail to stand, so his remarks were read aloud by James Wilson of Pennsylvania shortly before the delegates were asked to sign the final draft of the Constitution. He openly acknowledged that he was not leaving the convention perfectly satisfied with the document before him. “I confess that there are several parts of this constitution which I do not at present approve, but I am not sure I shall never approve them.” But he had lived long enough to become suspicious of his own certainties. “The older I grow, the more apt I am to doubt my own judgement, and to pay respect to the judgement of others.” He urged every delegate in the room to doubt his own infallibility - and to sign anyway.
To Franklin, a constitutional convention was not a contest to be won by any one man. It was a gathering of proud, opinionated men attempting the harder task of listening and learning from one another and remaining open to changing their minds. Later that day, James Madison wrote down that Franklin looked at a sun painted on the back of Washington’s chair and said he had spent the whole convention wondering whether it was a rising or setting sun. “But now at length I have the happiness to know that it is a rising and not a setting Sun.” Franklin never mistook the Constitution for a perfect or permanent answer. What mattered to him was building a system sturdy enough to endure and humble enough to improve.
Maybe I’m old school. But I think a nation founded on the belief that it can improve itself is something close to a miracle, and I hope we don’t become too cynical to appreciate it.
Abraham Lincoln, a spirit of grace
“Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword as was said three thousand years ago so still it must be said ‘the judgements of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’”
- Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1865
Nearly 80 years later, the prejudices, errors, and selfish local interests Franklin warned about had torn the nation apart. Lincoln had spent his first term trying to save the Union. By the spring of 1865, with Sherman marching through the South and Grant pressing Lee in Virginia, he had earned a second term - and with it, the opportunity to shape what came next.
He had every political incentive to turn his second inaugural into a victory lap - to name the traitors and promise them the reckoning they deserved. But he didn’t take that chance. He spoke about the war as a wound the whole country had earned for the sin of slavery. He lingered on the uncomfortable truth that both sides had prayed to the same God in hopes of victory. "Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other.”
But amidst all that grief and destruction, he called the nation toward mercy rather than judgment. To Lincoln, the men who fought against him were still his countrymen, and the work ahead was not vengeance but reconciliation. “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan - to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
Lincoln possessed all the power necessary to be cruel and every argument required to justify it, but he chose charity anyway.
Maybe I’m old school. But I think the true measure of a country is how it treats the people it has every reason not to treat kindly, and I hope that’s a standard we haven’t quietly abandoned.
Franklin Roosevelt, a spirit of solidarity
“Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere. Our support goes to those who struggle to gain those rights or keep them. Our strength is our unity of purpose. To that high concept there can be no end save victory.”
- Franklin Delano Roosevelt, State of the Union Address, January 6, 1941
In January 1941, Franklin Roosevelt stood before a nation watching tyranny sweep across Europe. Poland had fallen. Denmark and Norway had fallen. Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and even France had fallen. He used that moment to steady a reluctant nation for what lay ahead, and in doing so he tried to define what the struggle was really about. He named four freedoms he thought belonged to every person alive: freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. After each freedom came the same refrain: “everywhere in the world,” until no one could pretend he was speaking only about Americans.
It is the third freedom that has stuck with me. Freedom from want. Roosevelt was making a claim that still sits at the center of our arguments about freedom itself: liberty is not only about what a government cannot do to you, but also about whether you can feed your children, receive care when you are ill, and grow old with dignity and security. He put a decent shot at a stable life in the same breath as speech and worship. He saw security not as charity, but as part of what freedom required.
Maybe I’m old school. But I think a freedom that cannot reach the kitchen table is only a partial one, and I hope we have not taught ourselves to be indifferent to the rest.
Eleanor Roosevelt, a spirit of dignity
“No one race and no one people can claim to have done all the work to achieve greater dignity for human beings and greater freedom to develop human personality. In each generation and in each country there must be a continuation of the struggle and new steps forward must be taken since this is preeminently a field in which to stand still is to retreat.”
- Eleanor Roosevelt, Speech at the Sorbonne, Paris, September 28, 1948
FDR imagined freedoms that belonged to every person, but Eleanor Roosevelt would spend the years after his death trying to place those freedoms into the moral vocabulary of the entire world.
When the war was over and Franklin was gone, another Roosevelt stood at the Sorbonne in Paris before a continent still digging itself from the rubble. Eleanor Roosevelt had spent two years chairing the commission that wrote the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and she had come to make the case that human freedom was the defining question of the age. She understood that democracy is slow - that all its arguments, elections, and compromises can make a benevolent dictatorship seem attractive to people in a hurry - but she refused to accept that as an excuse for tyranny. “There is no way of insuring that a dictatorship will remain benevolent or that the power once in the hands of a few will be returned to the people without struggle or revolution.”
She chose the long road of democracy because the principles of freedom are precisely the things that cannot be bargained away for efficiency. And she would not let anyone treat the work as finished. No nation and no generation inherits dignity fully secured. Each must work to preserve and expand it. Standing in the aftermath of one of the worst tragedies in modern human history, Eleanor Roosevelt insisted that the answer to humanity’s failures was more dignity and freedom, not less.
Maybe I’m old school. But I think someone who could stand amid the ruins of humanity’s darkest moment and still wager on human dignity understood something about hope that we could all stand to relearn.
Martin Luther King Jr., a spirit of hope
“It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the negro people a bad check, a check that has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.’ But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt.”
- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, August 28, 1963
Nearly a century after Lincoln, another giant stood in Lincoln’s shadow to say that the American promise remained unfulfilled. He made the point in the language of money, arguing that America had written every citizen a check, drawn on the words of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, but when Black Americans went to cash it, the nation defaulted on its obligation.
Instead of turning a century of broken promises into bitterness, Martin Luther King turned it into a dream. He dreamed of a country that would measure his children by their character instead of their skin. He dreamed of the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveholders sharing one table. He was not asking America to become something entirely new. He was asking it to honor what it had promised from the very beginning.
Maybe I’m old school. But I still believe that “all men are created equal” names an obligation that belongs to all people, and I hope we never grow comfortable attaching footnotes to that promise.
Nearly two centuries separate Dr. Franklin from Dr. King. They lived in different Americas, spoke to different crises, and would have disagreed about any number of things. Yet the same thread runs through all five voices. Each saw America as a promise that wasn’t finished yet, and each one believed the work was to keep widening the circle of who that promise was for.
Franklin built a republic capable of self-correction. Lincoln taught that healing matters more than vengeance. FDR insisted that freedom must reach the kitchen table, while Eleanor Roosevelt carried the language of dignity beyond America’s borders. And King reminded us that none of these promises mean very much if they are not extended to everyone - without exceptions, asterisks, or fine print.
That, to me, is our inheritance. Somewhere, along the way, we decided that speaking about it openly was naive, partisan, or embarrassing. We learned to mistake cynicism for wisdom. But I am not convinced that hope is childish, nor that believing in the possibility of improvement requires us to ignore our failures.
I understand these figures were deeply flawed people. Franklin owned slaves for much of his life. FDR authorized the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. The distance between what these men and women said and did can feel enormous.
But here’s the thing: their words are exactly what we use to recognize their failures.
The reason we can say Franklin’s slaveholding was wrong, or that internment was a betrayal of American ideals, is that America articulated a standard and then fell short of it. The promise came first, and the hypocrisy came afterward.
Those ideals were not an excuse for our failures. They are the measuring stick by which we judge them - and the reason we keep expecting something better of ourselves.
Maybe this is what being old school means.
It means Franklin’s humility: the willingness to admit that no person, no party, and no generation possesses a perfect wisdom, and that a republic only survives if its people remain open to being persuaded.
It means Lincoln’s grace: refusing to confuse disagreement with enmity and remembering that the work of self-government begins with seeing one another as countrymen rather than enemies.
It means FDR’s conviction that freedom must reach the kitchen table, that liberty without security, dignity, and a fair chance at a decent life is an unfinished promise.
It means Eleanor Roosevelt’s insistence that human dignity is never permanently won, but must be renewed and defended by every generation in every place.
And it means King’s faith that America’s founding promises belong to everyone, without exceptions, footnotes, or fine print.
Some will call that naive. Others will say it is old-fashioned. But I cannot bring myself to believe that hoping for a better country, a kinder country, and a freer country has somehow become embarrassing.
As we celebrate the Fourth of July and the 250th anniversary of this country, I think about Franklin at the end of that long summer in Philadelphia. He spent months staring at the carved sun on the back of George Washington’s chair, wondering whether it was rising or setting. Only when the Constitution was finally complete did he decide he knew the answer.
“It is a rising and not a setting Sun.”
The remarkable thing is that every person I have written about inherited that same sunrise and insisted that more people ought to stand in its light. Lincoln tried to bind up the nation’s wounds. FDR expanded the meaning of freedom itself. Eleanor Roosevelt carried human dignity to people beyond the United States. King demanded that the promises written at the founding be honored for all Americans.
None of them believed the work was finished. None of them mistook the country they had for the country they hoped to build.
Maybe I’m old school. But if believing that America can keep widening that circle of freedom, dignity, opportunity, and belonging makes me old fashioned, then I am content to wear that label.
And like Franklin, I am still betting that the sun is rising.
