Editor’s note: This column was published on July 5, 1982.
JASPER — The world started going to pot about the time we abandoned the hand-craned ice-cream freezer. That was the finest device ever invented for teaching youth that work was its own reward. The old freezer was a symbol of its own back during my youth. It was one of the things that meant the Fourth of July. This was how we celebrated our independence, and I don’t know of a better way than eating homemade ice cream.
We know — or most of us do — what the 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence went through. But what did this one document make out of us? Americans, of course. An American is someone who knows the lineups of major league baseball teams and the first and last lines of the “Star-spangled Banner.” Francis Scott Key wrote the lyrics to our national anthem, and he is probably the only person ever to know all the words of the song. America is the only country in the world, where you can say what you think without thinking.
An American is a fellow whose grandfather was a German who settled in Wisconsin and married a Swede whose mother’s father married an English woman, whose son met a girl at college whose mother was an Austrian, and whose father was a Hungarian Jew, and their son, in this century right now, is six feet tall. (We are among the tallest races on Earth.) An American goes to college, plays football, can’t speak a word of any known language except American English, and is doubtful whether he ever had a grandfather.
An American doesn’t like to take orders. If you speak to him in a friendly way, he will do almost anything you ask, within reason, of course. Once you get him into a war, he is a tough fighter, but he has a low opinion of war, except when he is dressed up for a Fourth of July parade in his American Legion uniform. He doesn’t like to commit himself to one place. He is restless, and likes to travel in his own country or elsewhere if he can afford it. He can devise more ways to save himself work than a member of any other known group of human beings. That’s why he has invented so many gadgets.
Americans are enormously inventive. This is one of the greatest races of inventors ever produced. An American is born free and he shows it in the way he moves. He is the best-fed human being on Earth. I know all about the ghettos and children in rural sections going hungry. I’ve been there, and it is bad. It’s got to be made better. But just the same, the per capita consumption of food in the United States is higher than anywhere else. America is rich in resources. There are other countries rich in resources, but we have gotten as far as we have because we produced a certain kind of human being and a certain type of mind. All of this was made possible because 56 men were brave enough to send the king packing. That is why the Fourth of July means so much to us.
Here in the mountains, there is always a celebration on Independence Day. A “big day,” we call it. We do not have any class distinction here. Everybody is equal to everybody, no matter how rich or how poor. The only person who calls a doctor “doctor” is the doctor’s wife. Everybody else calls him by his first name. We have low-income groups, but never upper, middle or lower “classes.” Our heritage comes to us from the hills, the woods, the farms. Our heritage comes to us from the homes of common men. Our heritage is of absolute democratic regeneration of spirit and everyone has become saturated with this thought. And that’s what Independence Day means to mountaineers.
So let us go now and celebrate the Fourth of July. Our family will break out the old hand-cranked freezer, which is a tradition with us. It is best to remember that the men who worked to make us what we are were guided by a higher power. All indicated this at one time or another. And to be safe on the Fourth, don’t buy a fifth on the third.
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