Gettysburg
It was the Fourth of July in 1938. The United States was still suffering the effects of the Great Depression. Things were improving – unemployment was down from the desperate days of 1933 when a full one-fourth of Americans were out of work. But the number was creeping back up from the peak of the “New Deal” just the year before – with 19% still searching for a job.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt went to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to speak to the last veteran survivors of the Civil War battle. Seventy-five years before, the greatest cannonade in history was so loud, it shook church bells in Philadelphia 120 miles away. As Roosevelt spoke, it was seventy-five years since Robert E. Lee took his invading force away from the low ridges south of town and the bugles went silent. Roosevelt was speaking to the last of those warriors. Twenty-five Gettysburg battle veterans were in attendance, along with about two thousand others who served on both sides of the Civil War.
Those seventy-five years represented an incredible speeding up of history. Roosevelt’s speech was broadcast to the nation on radio. Airplanes flew over the gathering, and the bloodshed of Gettysburg (still the bloodiest battle on US soil) was dwarfed by the death and destruction of the First World War. The nation was only vaguely aware of the precipice it faced. While some warned of the coming conflagration, World War II was not seen as inevitable.
Normandy
Yesterday was the seventy-seventh anniversary of D-Day, the Allied invasion of France to defeat Nazism. Seventy-seven years since nearly 7000 ships appeared off the coast of Normandy and let loose an artillery barrage that shook their world. D-Day was a pivotal part of my parents’ life. On that day in June of 1944, Mom was already in France, helping prepare the French Resistance in sabotaging the Nazis. Dad was still in England, waiting to join US forces in supporting the struggle. They both survived the War, and came to the United States to have a family and live an extraordinary life.
I was born twelve years and a couple months after D-Day. In just that brief time the United States fought a war in Korea, and was in an ongoing Cold War with the Soviet Union. The leader of the invading force on D-Day, General Dwight Eisenhower, was then the President of the United States. The nation was in the shadow of potential nuclear holocaust, but a post-war economic boom seemed non-stop, and my parents were on the “ground floor” of a budding new industry – television.
Historic Distance
That distance from the Civil War in 1863 to Roosevelt’s New Deal seems enormous. And yet, the distance from June 6, 1944 to today is even greater, seventy-seven years and lifetimes ago. What in my upbringing was a recent memory, one my parents re-lived often, is now faded black and white pictures in history books, ranked with the Norman Invasion in 1066 and the Battle of Waterloo in 1814 as one of the great turning points in history. So few survivors are left, we can no longer directly feel the sand or the hear the cannon, the concussions or the blood.
If history flew from Gettysburg to the Great Depression, it has literally broken the sound barrier from D-Day to the Insurrection. We live in an era ultimately connected. We literally wear our “Dick Tracy Wrist Radios”. The entire wealth of human knowledge is within reach in our pockets. And yet that network of communication also serves to isolate us from each other. We can hide behind the keyboard and screen and avoid direct human interaction.
Righteous Might
Three years after Roosevelt spoke at Gettysburg, the United States rose in its “righteous might” to literally save the world from tyranny. Now we can’t even unite to face a world pandemic. Our divisions are so great, we cannot even agree on what a “fact” is.
It’s been seventy-seven years since D-Day. I can still reach out in memory and hear the stories, feel the emotions, recognize the pride my parents took in what their generation accomplished. So much has changed, but as with all progress, something is lost as well as gained in the changing.
My parents, part of the Greatest Generation, faced seemingly insurmountable problems. The Great Depression, joblessness, climate disasters, Fascism and tyranny. In their “righteous might” they united to overcome all of those obstacles. While with the clear vision of history, their success looked inevitable, it certainly didn’t seem that way while they lived it. Now seventy-seven years later we too face existential threats: to our climate, our world and to our Democracy.
What will our grandchildren say about us in their speeches on June 6th of 2098?
