Bob Neal

The stew of censorship bubbling up around schools, books and curriculums across the country threatens to deprive children of the opportunity to learn a great and heartening story.

The story of America. Like any good story, it has a beginning, a middle and an end. We are in the middle and a long way from the end. I hope.

The story began with white men, mostly wealthy and elite, vowing to answer to no foreign power. In this case, the king of England. So, they created a nation, with features such as checks and balances, ways to amend its Constitution and ways to stifle the worst results of majority rule.

The words in their documents and transcripts cannot help but inspire. And while anyone can see that the nation they launched was deeply flawed, they gave us tools to slowly and surely move toward the high ideals they had set for us, if not for themselves.

We’ve used them often in positive ways. Let’s consider three: race, gender and immigration.

My boss at The Gazette in Montreal was a well-regarded foreign correspondent and analyst. He had been a bureau chief in Paris, London and Washington, five years each. He was least fond of his years in Washington and of the United States as a model. Yet he often said, “The United States is the only country in the world that has tried to come to grips with the issue of race.”

The progress he lauded is in peril. As teachers are interpreting new laws in Florida, for example, they can’t teach about slavery because it might make white kids feel “uncomfortable.” Nor can they teach about the stirring sacrifices of millions of people, north and south, that ended slavery.

Many founders grasped the evil of slavery and the clash between their words and deeds. So, even as they compromised to start a nation, they gave their successors tools to reverse the evil.

I do not minimize the suffering of the millions of Black Americans during and after slavery. As a boy in Missouri, I read “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” and shuddered, maybe wept, at the treatment of Black people only 99 miles from my home. I saw traces of its cruelty everywhere.

Slavery is rightfully called our original sin. It took 246 years to get rid of it. But we did.

Those white and elite men who set up our nation regarded women hardly higher than they regarded people in bondage. Women weren’t chattel property. Not exactly. A few, such as Abigail Adams, even had clear influence on their husbands’ thinking and morals. But women were by law and custom little more than appendages of men. And woe to the spinster.

If you take 1607 and the settlement at Jamestown, Virginia, as the starting point — you could take 1565 and the settlement at St. Augustine, Florida, too — then women waited 313 years to achieve recognized citizenship and the vote.

Many take the Seneca Falls (New York) Convention of 1848 as the beginning of the drive to get the vote for women, though rumblings began at least 25 years earlier. Dating from Seneca Falls, it took 72 years. The Declaration of Sentiments adopted at Seneca Falls said, “All men and women are created equal.” You know how far that sentiment got, even after women got the vote.

Even the 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution, landmarks of citizenship, didn’t grant full citizenship to women. Only the adoption of the 19th amendment in 1920 did that. I shudder to think what would happen today if that amendment came to Congress and the states.

Those early white and elite men even gave us the tools to become a multi-colored, multi-racial society, though that path had huge steps backward. So long as immigration was mostly from northern and western Europe, it flowed fettered only by the immigrants’ ability to pay passage.

But about 25,000 Chinese were working in California factories shortly after statehood (1850), and 15,000 worked to build the transcontinental railroad. Their presence challenged the all-white flow of immigration, and in 1882 Congress adopted the Chinese Exclusion Act. The name is self-explanatory. Asian immigration ground to a standstill.

Meanwhile, we set migration quotas for each country, quotas heavily biased toward countries that were mostly white. That lasted until Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality Act in 1965, abolishing country-of-origin quotas and allowing families to sponsor relatives from abroad.

Here’s a wee example of the multi-generational benefits of immigration. An immigrant family opened a hot dog stand in 1922 in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Millions of franks later, a son of the founder became president of the Ford Motor Co., then of Chrysler. Yocco’s Hot Dogs lives on, and has four stands today. No Yocco’s, no Lee Iacocca and no turnaround at Ford or Chrysler.

I can’t begin to enumerate how immigration has made us richer, in every way. Our system is broken, and neither political party has an immigration plan that can pass a deadlocked Congress — I first typed “deadbeat” but that was a typo, maybe — but I still celebrate immigration. Starting with the Arabella that family lore says left our family in 1630 at Newburyport, Massachusetts. And the ship of unknown name that carried our Neal ancestor from Ireland to North Carolina.

We move slowly, but we move. It’s a pity so many politicians don’t want children to know that.

Bob Neal doesn’t say he’s proud to be American. He says he’s fortunate to be American and that he’s proud of the great things America has done. He loves the story, and thinks it can get even better. Neal can be reached at bobneal@myfairpoint.net.