Clint Smith: Make America What It Set Out to Be

**Tim Miller** (0:00)
Hey, everybody. We have got my guy, Clint Smith, coming up next. And the pod ended, and I was thinking, I was pretty melancholy. I was also pretty negative about America. And I'm about to drop this on you guys, on your holiday weekend. And Clint did a good job at moments of lifting my spirits, but I want to carry out my obligation to you and yours, and offer a little bit of uplift about this great country of ours, following that big soccer win last night over Bosnia and Herzegovina. I want to read two items for you. The second, if you're a long-time Bulwark podcast listener, you've probably heard before, but it's always nice to refresh it. It's one of my favorites. It's a letter from Thomas Jefferson to the mayor of Washington, DC.,
saying that he's too sick to go to the 50th anniversary of the Declaration. So, the 1826 version of the event that we'll be holding on the mall this weekend. History or trivia nerds will know that Jefferson ended up dying on the 50th anniversary of the Declaration. And so, this letter from him to Roger Waitman is one of his last writings. And it's extremely poignant. And I used to torture my staff with it back when I worked on Republican campaigns on the 4th of July morning to try to get them in the right mindset for celebrating our nation. So, I'm going to read that one to you. First, Bill, in the newsletter yesterday, shared some comments that Gerald Ford made on the 200th anniversary of the Declaration. And unlike our megalomaniac president, Gerald Ford used the occasion, marked the occasion, to go to a naturalization ceremony and talk and welcome the newest Americans on the 200th anniversary and talk about the importance of immigration. I'm going to read both of these back to back because I think they say something important about our country that I want to leave you with before we get to Clint. Here's Gerald Ford at 200 I'm very proud to welcome all of you as fellow citizens of the United States of America. I invite you to join fully in the American adventure and to share our common goal and our common glory. You've given us a birthday present beyond price, yourselves. The Patriots of 1776 wanted to build in this beautiful land, a home for equal freedom and opportunity, a haven of safety and happiness, not for themselves alone, but for all who would come to us through centuries. How well they built is told by the millions upon millions who came and are still coming. Immigrants came from almost everywhere, singly and in waves. Such transfusions of traditions and cultures as well as of blood have made America unique among nations, and Americans a new kind of people.
We offered citizenship to all, and we've been richly rewarded. That was Gerald Ford on 200 Here's Thomas Jefferson again on the 50th, explaining why he won't be able to be there to celebrate and lamenting that. I should indeed, with peculiar delight, have met and exchanged their congratulations personally with the small band, the remnant of that host of Worthies who joined with us that day. In the bold and doubtful election we were to make for our country between submission or the sword, and to have enjoyed with them the consolatory fact that our fellow citizens after half a century of experience and prosperity continue to approve the choices we made. May it be to the world what I believe it will be, to some part sooner, to others later, but finally to all, the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government that form which we have substituted restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. All eyes are opened or opening to the rights of man.
I find these things paired together on the 50th and the 200th to be particularly beautiful about our experiment because it's talking about two related things that are happening. Ford is talking about those who are coming to the country and still want to come because we are offering this freedom to them. We're offering them opportunity. We're offering them escape from tyranny.
Jefferson, to Waittman, is talking about how he hopes this is our export, that all of the world will follow in America's example.
Some sooner and others later, will have the opportunity to burst the chains of oppression.
Obviously, the context there for Jefferson is tough because not everybody in America had burst the chains at the time of the 50th. But it was about this aspirational hope, right? That everyone will be able to be free. Everyone will be able to secure for themselves the rights of self-government and all the rights that are enshrined in the Bill of Rights and all the rights that are enshrined in our founding documents and that this American moment, this American founding is not, was not the end of something. It was not the end of a war. It was not just the beginning of the country. It was the beginning of the sea change where everyone the world over will start to have their eyes opened to the opportunities of freedom.