Positive Liberty

A friend recently asked me for suggestions of how to get more into the July 4th feeling. He was disappointed that some acquaintances had referred to it as “fireworks day,” and wondered what I’d recommend as far as feeling more in touch with the meaning of the holiday. Last year, I made some recommendations on this score, but I thought I’d update them with some new recommendations this time around.

1) Music

The works of Scott Joplin. Ragtime is pre-jazz music that really seems to convey something basically American. Joplin’s music is joyful and clever and historically it stands at the beginning of modern American popular music. “Maple Leaf Rag” was in its way the first platinum record: that is, it was the first piece of music to sell a million copies of sheet music. Of course, as “race music,” ragtime has connections to some of the country’s oldest problems. As the Wikipedia article notes, rag hits were often tainted with the worst sort of racist imagery. Yet ragtime was still a great artistic innovation, and Joplin is rightly remembered today as a great popular artist.

2) Movie

Cinderella Man. I absolutely loved this movie, and I thought it conveyed American virtues in a profound way. The scene in which Braddock (Russell Crowe) gives back the welfare money is my particular favorite. This movie’s themes of self-reliance and individual initiative are brilliantly expressed, and I suspect this movie will do more good in putting the legacy of the Depression behind us than a dozen books like Amity Shlaes’.

3) Food

Gumbo. No question. Good gumbo is awful hard to find in restaurants here in California, I’m afraid. The best I’ve found is at Po Folks in Buena Park, which—alas!—is 400 miles away from me.

4) Read

Fiction: I’m tempted to repeat last year’s suggestion of Huck Finn. But this time, try Tom Sawyer. It’s much shorter and it’s not as profound as Huck Finn, of course, but this novel virtually invented the American concept of boyhood—at least in its artistic depictions. Since Tom Sawyer, the image of a boy’s life has been understood in the framework Twain established, and the legacy of that depiction remains in everything from Norman Rockwell to Bart Simpson. The old symbols still work their magic.

Nonfiction: Thomas Jefferson: A Strange Case of Mistaken Identity by Alf Mapp. This is the first volume of Mapp’s biography of Jefferson, which is still my favorite Jefferson biography (and I’ve read quite a few). The second volume is Thomas Jefferson: Passionate Pilgrim. Although these books came out before the more recent evidence regarding the Sally Hemings affair—and so Mapp rejects the idea that Jefferson fathered children with Hemings—the books are still wonderfully well written, and I am particularly pleased that he allows Jefferson to speak for himself largely. Unlike other biographies, which try not to quote much from Jefferson, Mapp is content to let his writings do their work.

5) Visit

If you have a presidential library nearby, most of them do special events for Independence Day. The most popular one (because it’s so convenient) is the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, California. There, and at the Reagan Library, they’re having George Washington impersonators, hotdogs and apple pie—just fun, lighthearted Americana.

For a more serious turn, of course, you can go to a cemetery—the older, the better, particularly if it has veterans. Old cemeteries have such beautiful headstones and monuments, and it’s always interesting to speculate about the lives that these people lived. In Placerville, near where I live, the Placerville Union Cemetery actually has a small Civil War graveyard! Eastern cemeteries, of course, will have older stones, some of them real works of art.

It’s interesting to think about short American history is, in some ways. My family was very close to a nice lady we called “Grandma Cross”: she was the grandmother of a friend of my mother. Grandma Cross, who died only two or three years ago, was born in 1910, the same year that Mark Twain died. Twain was born in 1835, the year before James Madison died and the Battle of the Alamo occurred. Madison, of course, was born in 1751—which means that here, in three lifetimes, we have all of American history. When you look at the dates on an old gravestone, it’s amazing to think about all that was happening during those years, and all that’s happened since.