A POCKET FULL OF PRESIDENTS

a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle Massachusetts
Sunday February 20th, 2005



I got to thinking the other day about just how much of our heritage as Americans we carry around with us in the form of spare change. From the American Revolution to the Second World War, from the Old Dominion to the New Deal -- I can give you a pretty interesting history lesson for just 41 cents, yet how many of us ever really think about the legacy represented by the handful of loose coins we set on the top of our dresser when we empty our pockets at night?

The largest of these coins, both in value and actual size, is generally the quarter. There are, of course, a couple of coins that are larger, but these seldom seen and even more seldomly spent oddities are not nearly so widely-circulated as the ubiquitous "two-bits" bearing the image of George Washington, First President of the United States and "Father" of our country, "first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen." Washington is perhaps the most iconic of all our Presidents: his image not only appears on the quarter, but also the dollar bill and in the most prominent place (naturally) Mount Rushmore. Our nation's Capital is named for him, as is Mount Washington (which I'm told is the highest peak in New England) and the State of Washington where I was born: the only state in the union to bear the name of any President. Washington was also the only American President ever to be elected unanimously by the Electoral College, and without even the fuss and bother of a General Election. And, of course, it's really his birthday ( February 22nd) that we celebrate as "President's Day" this weekend.

As kids we all heard the legendary story of Washington chopping down the cherry tree, and then taking responsibility for his action with the memorable declaration "I cannot tell a lie;" while as adults perhaps we have learned to draw inspiration from his leadership in times of great adversity -- keeping the Continental army together at Valley Forge, crossing a frozen Delaware River to attack the Hessians at Trenton on Christmas Eve (another iconic image), leading by the courage of his personal example at a moment in our history when mere survival was a triumphant victory, and the outcome of the matter was still very much in doubt. Yet I suspect that Washington is most appreciated by historians for what he DIDN'T do -- for his insistent refusal of more magnificent titles in preference for the simple "Mr President," and for his retirement from public life after serving two terms in that office -- a precedent which has only been broken once in the entire history of our nation.

Thomas Jefferson, whose portrait appears on the nickel, was perhaps both the most personally accomplished, and also the most complicated and enigmatic, of all our Presidents. He was also a Unitarian, as well as the President I personally admire most, despite his increasingly obvious flaws. Like Washington before him, Jefferson was a Virginian and a slave-holder, whose wealth and leisure (along with the liberty to enjoy them) were made possible by the forced labor of others. Jefferson was well aware of the evils of slavery, and also of his complicity in its preservation through his own participation in a society that was dependent on it. "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just," he wrote. "His justice cannot sleep forever." Yet he was never able (or perhaps never willing) to win his own economic independence from a system of oppression he abhorred on moral and ethical grounds.

Like many enlightened Southerners of his day, Jefferson believed that slavery was already on the decline, and that the ban on the further importation of slaves from Africa which took effect during his Presidency would hasten its eventual extinction, never realizing that the acquisition of his Louisiana territory, together with the invention of the cotton gin, were already beginning to create an even more brutal and oppressive system of slavery than Jefferson ever knew at Montecello. The owners of northern textile mill like those in Lowell, many of them wealthy Boston Unitarians, implicitly colluded in this dehumanizing process of repression and commodification, and complained vocally when their own clergy dared to bring politics into the pulpit by speaking out in favor of abolition, or in condemnation of things like the Mexican War, or the "conspiracy of loom and lash" which dominated the American economy throughout the ante-bellum period.

The internal slave market which arose to supply the burgeoning demand for plantation labor in the deep South would within a generation see hundreds of thousands of African Americans sold "down the river" each year to the cotton producing states of Arkansas, Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi. By the 1820's, young healthy males could be purchased for $500 in Virginia (or perhaps just across the Potomac river, in the nation's capital), and then sold for three times that amount in New Orleans; while the value of young women often depended upon their perceived potential as "breeders." The sanctity of marriage and family ties meant nothing on the auction block; children were routinely separated from their mothers, and husbands from their wives, and the entire dehumanizing system was grounded in an evolving ideology of racism which basically served to rationalize and justify certain members of a family owning (and selling) their own biological brothers and sisters as property. It's an especially ugly chapter in American history, involving kidnapping, rape, calculated exploitation and brutal oppression, and we are still living with its legacy today, despite the great strides this nation has made in the area of race relations in our own lifetimes.

Thomas Jefferson's personal biography helps illuminate this aspect of our national history as well . A potent combination of circumstantial, anecdotal, and (more recently) hard scientific evidence (in the form of DNA testing) has now convinced all but the most recalcitrant historians that Jefferson was indeed the father of the children of his slave Sally Hemings, who was both 30 years his junior and the half-sister of his deceased wife Martha. Nowadays I suspect that many would find the difference in their ages more scandalous than the difference in their races (notwithstanding the fact that Sally's own ancestry was only one-quarter African, and at least two of her own children were able to "pass" as "white"). But we also are beginning to understand that our ideas of "race" are simply socially constructed fictions which, nevertheless, continue to exercise surprising power over our lives and our daily interactions with one another, as well as the distribution of wealth, power, privilege and opportunity within our society itself. The descendants of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings should remind us all that nothing in this life is truly black or white, and that the emphasis should rightfully be on "American" rather than "African" or "European" or any other descriptive adjective.

Of course, it was Abraham Lincoln who took the "self-evident" truths articulated by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, that "all men are created equal [and] ...endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights," and persuasively transformed them into a shared intellectual foundation for our liberal democracy -- a government "of the people, by the people, and for the people" -- as well as the rationale for putting an end to legal slavery in the United States once and for all, a mere "four score and seven years" after Jefferson first inspired Colonial Americans to seek their own independence from Great Britain. And a hundred years after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, Martin Luther King Jr. stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, and put in his two cents worth, demanding that America honor the promissory note written by Jefferson and Lincoln, rather than allowing it to come back marked "insufficient funds." King's dream that "the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood," and that his own children "will someday live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character" simply reflects the reality that often our differences are only skin-deep, while the table of brotherhood is more than just a metaphor. The real challenge is transforming the sweltering heat of injustice and oppression into an oasis of freedom and justice, by rising up and living out the true meaning of America's self-evident truth, that we are all created equal...

America has never really had an openly Gay President, although historians have long speculated about James Buchanan, a life-long bachelor whose wealthy fiancee Anne Coleman broke off their brief engagement when Buchanan was 28, and may even have taken her own life shortly afterwards. Buchanan's best friend and roommate for 23 years was William Rufus King; the two of them were virtually inseparable, and collectively known (at least in some private circles) as "Miss Nancy and Aunt Fancy." More recently, some historians have also grown interested in Lincoln's sexuality, pointing to his well-known lack of interest in women as a young man, his troubled and stormy marriage to Mary Todd, a four year relationship with a man named Joshua Speed (with whom Lincoln shared a bed when they were bachelor roommates in the late 1830's), and a fairly well documented incident in which President Lincoln again shared his bed with another man -- this time one of his bodyguards, a Captain David V. Derickson, possibly on more than one occasion, when Mrs. Lincoln was away from home. The evidence is hardly conclusive, but it is highly provocative, and like Jefferson's mid-life relationship with a teenaged slave needs to be better understood in the context of its own time. But I do think it's safe to say that had Captain Derickson been a woman, the obvious conclusion would seem far less ambiguous. Today's "Log Cabin" Republicans take their name from this speculation about the sexual orientation of our sixteenth President; and if it were to turn out to be true that Lincoln was bisexual, would he be any less of a great President because of it?

The humble penny may be the smallest denominated coin buried down in the deepest corner of our pockets, but what it lacks in monetary value it makes up for in durability. We've been minting Lincoln Cents since 1909 -- the 100th anniversary of Lincoln's birth; it is the longest issued coin in United States history, and has been struck and circulated in greater numbers than any other coin in the history of the world. The first Washington quarters were minted in 1932; the first Jefferson nickels six years later, in 1938. Lincoln, Washington, and Jefferson routinely occupy the top three spots on lists of America's most distinguished Presidents -- their faces each grace our currency as well as our coinage, and of course all three are carved on Mount Rushmore as well. The first Roosevelt dime was minted in 1946 -- just a year following his death, which occurred shortly after the beginning of his fourth term as President.

As I mentioned earlier, FDR is the only American President to serve more than two terms in office. Elected for the first time at the height of the Great Depression in 1932, he proposed a series of government initiatives which collectively were known as the New Deal -- and resulted in things like the Tennessee Valley Authority and rural electrification, the Federal Deposit Insurance Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, and of course the Social Security Administration. He later led our nation during the Second World War, only to die at the age of 63 with victory just over the horizon. Afflicted with polio, which would eventually confine him to a wheelchair, he kept the true extent of his disability a secret from the general public, while at the same time mastering the relatively new communications technology of radio in order to broadcast his message directly to the citizens in the form of his popular "fireside chats." And he was, of course, in his own day vigorously opposed by conservatives at every turn, who saw his government sponsored programs of regulation and relief as an absolutely un-American flirtation with Socialism.

In 1941 FDR also articulated his idea of the "Four Freedoms" which he felt were the universal rights of all humanity: Freedom of Expression, Freedom of Belief, Freedom from Want and Freedom from Fear. The first two are already quite familiar to us; the latter two comprise a positive mandate for peace and prosperity which in some ways goes beyond more traditional understandings of both Freedom and Liberty, but is likewise a natural and obvious extension of those same principles. Using the definitions I borrowed last week from historian David Hackett Fischer, Roosevelt not only believed in protecting the liberty of individuals to worship and express their opinions as they saw fit, he also recognized that the Freedom to belong and to participate fully in a free society required a certain degree of physical security...both with regard to economic sustenance and the protection from physical violence. A free market cannot be a fair market without some sort of regulation. Without honest rules and the power to enforce them, the rich simply get richer while the poor get poorer, as the strong take advantage of the weak.

Recently there's been talk in certain conservative circles about replacing Roosevelt's portrait on the dime with that of Ronald Reagan. The advocates of this are basically the same people who would also like to dismantle the rest of FDR's New Deal legacy...including Social Security...but I probably don't need to spell out how I feel about the idea. Franklin Roosevelt and the dime just somehow seem made for each other. In FDR's day, for example, you could still actually buy something for a dime... breakfast and a cup of coffee if you were lucky, or at the very least a couple of beers. "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" was an anthem of the Great Depression and the New Deal, while the "March of Dimes" campaign against polio also began during Roosevelt's Presidency, and eventually resulted in an effective vaccine against that crippling disease. A coin bearing Reagan's image should likewise reflect the achievements of his administration, as well as his own personal struggle with Alzheimer's Disease. I have a few ideas. But I'm sure you can think of plenty of ideas of your own.

If history teaches us anything, it is that appearances can be deceiving, and that sometimes the truth is not only more complicated than we know, it is more complicated than we CAN know. All history is "revisionist," in that historians look to the past with a different perspective than that of those who lived it. They ask different questions, they have a better knowledge of outcomes, they have less personal investment in the disagreements and controversies of times past. Yet the study of history is the study of humanity itself in all its variation and diversity -- interesting not only for what it can teach us about our ancestors, but also for what it can teach us about ourselves. And for that reason alone, it is worthy of our close attention.

*********

READING: "Brother Can You Spare a Dime?"

They used to tell me I was building a dream
And so I followed the mob.
When there was earth to plow or guns to bear,
I was always there, right on the job.
They used to tell me I was building a dream
With peace and glory ahead --
Why should I be standing in line, just waiting for bread?

Once I built a railroad, I made it run,
Made it race against time.
Once I built a railroad, now it's done --
Brother, can you spare a dime?

Once I built a tower, up to the sun,
brick and rivet and lime.
Once I built a tower, now it's done --
Brother, can you spare a dime?

Once in khaki suits, gee, we looked swell
Full of that Yankee Doodle-de-dum.
Half a million boots went slogging through hell,
And I was the kid with the drum.

Say, don't you remember they called me Al,
It was Al all the time.
Why don't you remember, I'm your pal --
Say, buddy, can you spare a dime?

Once in khaki suits, ah, gee, we looked swell
Full of that Yankee Doodle-de-dum.
Half a million boots went slogging through hell,
And I was the kid with the drum.

Say, don't you remember they called me Al,
It was Al all the time.
Why don't you remember, I'm your pal --
Buddy, can you spare a dime?

E. Y. Harburg and Jay Gourney, 1932 (as recorded by Bing Crosby)