My Favorite Americans
Ask a man who his favorite Americans are, and you learn less about the dead and more about the living.
So, here are mine ...
A runaway apprentice who taught a city to stop burning. A man who treated grief like a mountain ... something you climbed, not something you sat in. Two brothers who might have been our last honest shot at living in the light
Three different centuries. Three different kinds of trouble.
Same restless country underneath.
...
Ben Franklin, the Man Who Wouldn't Sit Still
Franklin never held a job when six would do.
Printer. Journalist. Inventor. Diplomat. Philosopher. And, by his own quiet admission, a man who enjoyed a glass of wine and a long argument about the nature of things.
He gave Philadelphia its fire department and its lending library, and gave every house within reach of a thunderstorm a lightning rod, because Franklin's genius was never invention for its own sake, it was usefulness. He wanted his ideas to do something.
He was a marketer before marketing had a name. Witness Poor Richard's Almanack, which sold wisdom disguised as weather reports. He was slow to warm to revolution; when war finally came around to his way of thinking, though, he turned all the way, and turned Pennsylvania with him.
His tongue could stumble, but the pen never did, and he had the sense to let it lead. What people trusted in him wasn't polish, it was that he never scrubbed the nothing off his hands, and spent his genius lifting the common man instead of leaving him behind.
The world has no shortage of brilliant men. It has always been short on ones who remember.
Teddy Roosevelt, Who Lived Like Dying Wasn't an Option
He was born sickly, dared by his father to build a body worthy of his mind, and took the dare seriously for the rest of his life ...
He boxed. He ranched. When he lost his mother and his wife on the same terrible day, he didn't grieve quietly. He went west, hunted, chased outlaws, and came back a different animal than the one who left.
The road to the White House ran through the NYPD commissioner's office and up San Juan Hill with the Rough Riders, because Roosevelt never trusted a shortcut.
He believed in nature the way other men believe in scripture, and laid the groundwork for the national park system to prove it — doubling the number of national parks and protecting 230 million acres of American land along the way. He believed in American might the same way, and left us "speak softly and carry a big stick" to prove that too. He took on the monopolies of his day because he thought big money made for small citizens, and he was not a man inclined to let that slide.
He nearly died charting a river in the Amazon just to see where it went. That was Roosevelt's whole philosophy in one sentence: find out where it goes.
The Kennedys, and the Country We Almost Were
Eisenhower did good in his time but let covert war get comfortable, rearranging governments overseas while the country slept easy at home. The Kennedys wanted to break that machine, not feed it. They wanted to build an America worth imitating, not one to be feared in the dark.
They cared about the nation's body, not just its soul. Kennedy took a fitness council Eisenhower built and ignored, and made it a crusade. Warning that a soft citizenry made a soft nation, then daring Americans to walk fifty miles to prove him wrong. Quaint, maybe. But the logic ran through everything they touched: strength lives in the body of a country, one citizen at a time, or it rots.
They talked civil rights and worked with King (though even that alliance cracked). Robert Kennedy, as Attorney General, wiretapped the man his brother was courting for a civil rights bill. That's the Kennedys in miniature: reaching for better while tangled in what they inherited. JFK stared down the Soviets over Cuba, then did something rarer than winning: owned the Bay of Pigs as his mistake, and fired the man who'd walked him into it. Not a politician protecting himself. A man protecting the country from itself.
Then it ended the way too many American stories end, leaving half the country still asking questions nobody in power wants answered. Whatever you believe about why the brothers died, something died with them ... an America that led with virtue over leverage.
What followed tells the rest: Vietnam, two Iraqs, decades of pots stirred from Havana to Kabul we still haven't finished stirring.
The Kennedys were America's last clean exhale before it started holding its breath. We picked a different track. We're still leaning on the brakes, trying to drag the train back toward the one we left at the station.
...
Franklin built himself. Roosevelt tested himself. The Kennedys tried to redeem the whole country at once, and paid the going rate for the attempt.
Maybe that's the real thread running through American greatness. It was never the comfortable men we remembered. It was the ones who refused to sit still, and asked, out loud, whether the country could be better than it currently was.
None of them were finished products. Franklin owned slaves before he found his conscience and freed them. Roosevelt's love of the wild came bundled with a shove of the people already living on it. The Kennedys talked civil rights with one hand while their own Justice Department wiretapped the man leading the movement with the other.
Greatness, it turns out, was never the absence of contradiction. It was what a person did in spite of it, and sometimes because of it.
We can take what's good and leave out the rest:
- Franklin's refusal to let a good idea sit unused,
- Roosevelt's refusal to let a weak body or a broken heart be the last word on a man, or
- the Kennedys' refusal to believe the machinery of power was something you simply inherited and kept running.
None of that requires a war, a presidency, or a printing press. It requires showing up useful, showing up whole, and showing up anyway.
You don't have to invent the lightning rod. You just have to fix what's broken in the room you're standing in. That's how the light gets back into a country.
Not from Washington down. From ten thousand kitchen tables and church basements and Tuesday morning decisions to do the harder, better thing, made by people who never once thought of themselves as great.
This nation was never finished being built, it's certainly not finished now and it will never "finish" on its own.
Go pick up a tool.