Sheldon Hackney: Shaken confidence, forgotten purpose

As the horror of the events of Sept. 11, 2001, were washing over me a year ago, I found myself puzzling over the meaning of the obviously carefully selected targets. The terrorists had flown right past the Statue of Liberty and had ignored the Capitol, in order to fly their grim bombs into symbols of American economic and military power. I hoped then that they had got us wrong; that our nation was something more important than our economy and our armed forces.

I happened to be teaching the Civil War that day, as I was again a year later, so I turned naturally to Abraham Lincoln's definition of the nation in the Gettysburg Address, a nation "conceived in Liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." Lincoln would have objected to the idea that he was "redefining" America, because he found the American identity clearly and permanently stated in the Declaration of Independence. He knew that America had not yet achieved those ideals, just as we now know that we still fall short, but he also understood that progress toward the promise of American life depended on democracy: "government of the people, by the people, and for the people."

More important, as Lincoln told a cheering crowd in Independence Hall on Feb. 22, 1861, between his election and his inauguration, while southern states were seceding and the Union was in doubt, the Declaration was not just about separation of the colonies from the mother country but about liberty, "hope to the world for all future time. It was that which gave promise that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance."

A year ago, as I absorbed the enormity of the events unfolding in real time on my television screen, I was also enormously moved by the heroism of those on the spot, not only the emergency personnel, but ordinary people caught in dire circumstances who helped each other even at the risk, and sometimes the price, of their own lives. The response of the country more generally was amazing and has continued to be so. Donations of money and blood and time and prayers indicated the unity that we felt. The flag became suddenly our proud symbol of belonging. We all felt assaulted.

Having been something of a Jeremiah in public and in print, worrying about the retreat of our society into radical individualism and selfishness, cordoned off from the cares of others in our gated communities, suburbs and edge cities, I had to entertain the possibility that I was wrong. In the response to Sept. 11, there was dramatic proof that a sense of common purpose was still alive, that the principles of the Founding Fathers, of Lincoln, of Martin Luther King Jr. and countless other dreamers of justice were not dead.

Of course, time passed. We soon witnessed petty squabbling about who was to get how much of the money that Congress had appropriated and then the revelation that fraudulent claims were being made by people who had suffered no loss at all. We have spent the year since Sept. 11 reading about corporate corruption and crony capitalism -- greed taken to an obscene level. We have seen no progress on the critical environmental issues on which the future of our planet depends and we have seen the erosion of civil liberties at home under the dubious argument that it is a necessary price for domestic security.

I am worried. I fear that though the emergency caused by the threat of terrorism continues, our lives more generally have returned to the old pathways of getting and spending.

So, I find myself wondering again whether they got us right. Will our only response be military? Events are moving rapidly but not yet conclusively.

My prayer and my secular act of faith is to believe that they did not get us right, that we will revive the notion that we are the political embodiment of the difficult ideals of liberty and equality and that we will come to understand that our long term security depends not only on military strength and intelligence mastery, as important as those are, but also on our ability to encourage the spread of democracy and the increased opportunities that inevitably accompany it, and our willingness to engage the long-term challenge of sustainable development. In that way we can be true to our heritage while assuring our future.

Sheldon Hackney is a professor of history and former president of the University of Pennsylvania. He served as chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities during the Clinton administration.

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