Light of Liberty in Another Time of Crisis

Early last Sunday morning, with a bright sun burning off the last of a ground haze, our cruise ship sailed past the Statue of Liberty on our way into New York harbor.

Nothing, not all the stills, newsreels, television documentaries, not the finale of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Saboteur,” entirely prepares you for the size of the statue. Even seen across half a mile of open water, she is enormous, a stunning green goddess beckoning to us and seeming to glow as the sunlight catches her.

Hundreds of us crowded the railings and sufficient film was being shot to provide extra dividends at Kodak and Fuji. It was a perfect hour to catch sight of the statue. There was the warm, clear promise of the day and, despite all, the promise of a new life that the statue has stood for all these years.

I have no doubt that the passage produced a mix of emotions--a tangle of emotions is probably more like it--in all of us. My own feelings were touched not least by the memory of my first sailing into the harbor past the lady with the torch.

That had been 45 years ago on an April morning in 1945. I didn’t get to see the statue on that voyage. I was in a bunk deep below decks on the Queen Elizabeth, which had been fitted out as a hospital ship. The captain’s resonant British voice on the intercom had told us where we were. So last Sunday morning was a pleasure long delayed.

A little later on that earlier April morning the captain came on the intercom again, this time to say, “Ladies and gentlemen, I am sorry to have to tell you that your President, Franklin Roosevelt, died this morning at Warm Springs, Georgia.” There was, I remember, a long silence and then a voice that I would have placed in Brooklyn said, “Harry Truman.” I’d been so immersed in being an infantry private I don’t think I could have said who the vice president was.

So that 1945 morning had had its own mix of emotions, the relief at getting home from the war in one only temporarily damaged piece, the uncertainties of a war not yet over, the dismay at losing a leader I had worshiped (whatever some of the Upstate elders I knew thought of him).

The arrival and the docking last Sunday morning was in another time of crisis, and it had been more unsettling than comforting to have spent the days largely beyond the reach of daily newspapers and the more frequent fixes of radio and television.

World War II had been radio’s finest news hours, and the voices of Elmer Davis, William L. Shirer, Edward R. Murrow, even peppery H. V. Kaltenborn and other less celebrated readers and correspondents, echo in memory. Yet it was a kind of revelation at sea to appreciate how accustomed we have all become to the instantaneous visual information from television and the amazing feats of both immediacy and depth that the newspapers now achieve.

On an earlier port stop I’d telephoned a journalist friend in Washington. I said it had given me a sense of unreality to feel so detached from events. If you have a sense of unreality, my waggish friend said, you belong in the higher reaches of the Bush Administration.

If we had lost hourly contact with the breaking news in the Middle East, we had been in touch with the longer reaches of American history during port stops. There had been earlier sail-bys of Ft. Sumter, where the Civil War began, and Ft. McHenry, whose bombardment inspired Francis Scott Key to write “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

On Saturday I had walked the historic precincts of Philadelphia, pausing at the grave of Benjamin Franklin in Christ Church burying ground, where several signers of the Declaration of Independence take their rest. It is a shady oasis where the weathers have eroded the inscriptions from most of the stones and the living world seems farther away than it is.

Beyond the old brick walls, indeed, there are the carriage rides and the tour buses, the hoagie vendors and the fretful small fry tugging at skirts and demanding to go . Yet for all of it--and maybe, at that, because of the throngs--the old buildings are somehow more than political mausoleums. You still sense the ghostly presences of those philosopher-activists, contentious among themselves as they often were, who codified our dreams of individual freedom, tolerance and self-determination, and who set us on our way.

What they would make of our day I’m not sure. I suspect that only Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin himself, inventors both, would not be amazed by all the technological wizardries we take for granted. They might, on the other hand, be made melancholy to contemplate the priority that material things have taken over the abstract notion of liberty they held so dear.

Wandering through the Friends Meeting House where the life of William Penn, that devout believer in nonviolence, is celebrated, and where a loving simplicity is the desideratum, it was possible to feel just such a melancholy.

After all the courage and the sacrifices in war by generations of brave men and women, there are, as Stephen Vincent Benet said in a fine poem, “still the tyrants and the kings.”

Looking back across the four-plus decades to my first sail past the Statue of Liberty, I couldn’t help thinking--again and gratefully--what a clear-cut war I’d been in. No amount of revisionist thinking can explain away the clear and present danger that the Axis powers represented to the ideas of tolerance, individual dignity and freedom of choice.

In the mix of emotions Sunday morning was a strong dose of “Here we go again.” Liberty is still at risk from tyranny; the detailings may differ, but the root scenario is unchanged.

Yet there have been recent times when the world as a whole has seemed to learn from all its bloodyings and its butcherings. Such hope as you could find on a bright Sunday was that a whole context of lessons had been learned, one being that tyranny is unacceptable, another being that collective firmness works better than appeasement (a lesson from 1776 as well as 1939).

One way and another, it seemed curiously timely to have strolled through the American past in Philadelphia, to have saluted that glorious statue in the harbor and to have been reminded that the country, uniquely, was born of ideals of personal freedom that are relevant now as ever.