WILL THAULT: American identity crisis?

On this day, 82-years ago, 160,000 young Americans, Britons, and Canadians crossed the English Channel toward the beaches of Normandy, France, knowing that many of them wouldn’t survive the invasion. What they did know, however, was exactly who they were and what they were fighting for.

As we prepare to celebrate America’s 250th birthday, it begs the question if we as a people still share the same certainty that those soldiers held tightly to so long ago?

Over the past several years in this space, I’ve explored pieces of the answer to that question: The Mayflower Compact, the Founding Fathers’ faith, FDR’s Four Freedoms, the sacrifice of the Greatest Generation. All chapters from the same American story.
With D-Day and our nation’s 250th birthday upon us, it’s time to review the whole book.

Many of the men who waded ashore at Omaha and Utah beaches were the sons and grandsons of immigrants – Italians, Irish, Poles, Jews, Czechs – who had come to our shores with little more than the clothes on their backs, hungering for something the Old World had denied them. They left behind the social systems, religious persecutions and ethnic hatreds of Europe in search of becoming something new. An American.

Three years before D-Day, President Franklin Roosevelt clearly defined what it meant to be an American against the backdrop of a world gone mad with war. He called them Four Freedoms that were worth defending everywhere on earth: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.

That inheritance was first conceived on Nov. 11, 1620 in the cramped cabin of a small ship anchored off Cape Cod. Fortyone men signed the Mayflower Compact, pledging to govern themselves by “just and equal laws” for “the general good.”

America’s first idea wasn’t freedom from each other, it was freedom “with” each other.

One hundred fifty-six years later, that seed became the Declaration of Independence, our true birthday. The reason we don’t mark our birth from the dates of the Articles of Confederation or the Constitution of 1787 is because those two documents answered the question of “how” America would govern itself, while the Declaration answered the only question that mattered: “why” America had the right to exist.

Thomas Jefferson summed it all up with the self-evident truth that all men are created equal – endowed not by a king but by their Creator with the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

John Adams cautioned against the fragility of these ideals bound by the laws written into the Constitution. He said, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

He was talking about a selfgovernance that’d require something in return from the people who held it. That “something” had a name. In 1908, Jewish immigrant playwright Israel Zangwill opened The Melting Pot on Broadway. His hero proclaimed, “America is God’s crucible, the great melting pot where all the races of Europe are melting and reforming …into the crucible with you all. God is making the American.”

With that, at the Washington premiere, President Theodore Roosevelt leaned from his box and shouted, “That’s a great play, Mr. Zangwill.” Roosevelt later wrote that the play would always be “among the very strong and real influences upon my thought and my life.”

“The Melting Pot” was Zangwill’s way of describing an immigrant’s dream of a new identity. America didn’t ask where you came from; it only asked what you were willing to become.

The men who stormed Normandy were the living proof. Their dogtags may have read Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, with surnames like Kowalski, Santini, Goldberg or O’Brian, but on that beach, they were one thing above all else. American.

That clarity is what makes our present moment so striking – and so concerning. America’s deepest sin – slavery and its long shadow – stands as permanent evidence that the ideals of the Declaration were dishonored from the beginning for millions. Yet the story of American progress expanded the promise of 1776 to those it originally excluded.

While expanding the circle, though, the danger lies in abandoning its center. Today, the melting pot has been replaced by the “salad bowl” – identity defined not by what we share in common but by what makes us different. Skin color, ethnicity, national origin, religious heritage, and political affiliation – the very categories immigrants sought to escape, have become the primary lens through which we are now asked to view ourselves and each other. Instead of celebrating our unity in diversity, we use our differences as a cudgel to crush the beliefs of those who don’t think as we do.

Jefferson’s “All Men Are Created Equal” has quietly morphed into something the Founders wouldn’t recognize: all men are created “separate but equal,” a phrase this country spent a century fighting to bury.

Those famous Americans who came before us, saw the real risk to our unity wouldn’t come from threats abroad, but within. Lincoln warned well before the War Between the States, if America falls, “it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad.” In George Washington’s Farewell Address, he said, “The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party dissension …is itself a frightful despotism.”

The men who fell on D-Day didn’t place faction above nation. They “were” the nation – every last one, whatever their name, beliefs or from whatever country their grandparents had fled. They knew what it meant to be American because they had been taught it, lived it, and, on June 6, 1944, many died for it.

So the question that carries us from today to Independence Day is the same one they answered without hesitation on Normandy beach: Do we still know who we are?

Will Thault is a retired businessman who spent much of his career in southwest Georgia before retiring to Alabama.