The Justice Who Forgave America

Witness a small boy in Jim Crow Savannah, Georgia. He adorns a hand-scrubbed, pressed blazer. Hugging his neck is a tie, dearly purchased by his grandfather. The young man stands stiffly at his desk each morning to salute the flag of a country. A country that, at the time, did not love him back.

The boy was Clarence Thomas.

This past April 15, the Supreme Court Justice marked the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence with a speech at the University of Texas at Austin doing much the same thing he did as a young man: saluting—this time with the learned rational of a wise man—a country that now loved him back.

Tom Klingenstein, long admirer of Thomas, recorded a paean of sorts to this great man. (It is nice, you know, to receive one’s flowers while still very much alive and on the bench!)

Klingenstein’s Thomas is an accurate one. The Declaration takes pride of place as a common-sense claim about human beings and our shared fixed, universal nature. From natural touchstone arises a standard of right and wrong binding always and everywhere.

Its first and greatest principle is that all men are created equal. This authority rests on what the Declaration calls “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” And a country that takes this claim as its guiding light, Klingenstein argues, is a country worthy of its people’s love.

Sadly, devotion to the natural order has weakened. America sags under her strain, unsure of herself on account of the past sins of racism. On that subject Thomas speaks with an authority no critic can match. Jim Crow is not forgotten, but it is forgiven. After all, Justice Thomas is too acutely aware of those European nations that refuse forgiveness and now choke on their own histories.

Klingenstein draws the conclusion plainly: if this great man, who lived the worst of America firsthand, can forgive her, the rest of us might, and ought, to manage.

Klingenstein, for his part, divides the country into lovers, haters, and doubters. The lovers need no persuading; the haters are likely irredeemable. The audience that matters is the middle: citizens who do not hate America but cannot quite embrace her.

Scolded by today’s destructive Left that the country is irredeemably racist, they do not quite believe it, but fear does not allow them to rebut it. These Americans were taught, criminally, the founding was a grand hypocrisy. Theoretical equality proclaimed by men who failed to walk the walk. Little wonder the middle hesitates at the Pledge. Nearly everything they read, and watch teaches them to doubt.

Thomas’s education ran counter to this more modern persuasion. His grandfather, Myers Anderson, and the Irish nuns who taught him insisted the boy love a country that did not love him.

Why?

Well, because what they were really encouraging was he love the philosophic spirit of the Declaration. They understood the moral power that animates America, and had confidence that it would, in time, condemn the very system that degraded him. Those principles were, in Thomas’s words, “deeply ingrained into American culture.” It was no accident they were the same truths preached in his church. As Klingenstein observes, many nations profess principles like the Declaration, but only in America, are they a way of life.

The radicalism of the 1960s did tempt Thomas briefly but that is only of minor interest to note. Of greater interest is that his grandfather’s common sense outlasted this temporary influence. Doubting Thomas, if we may, came to believe by reflection and choice, in the concepts inherent in Federalist #1: hard work, fair play, self-reliance, marriage, and fatherhood are the surest route to human flourishing. Klingenstein reminds us that every American should shudder at how the same boy would fare in one of today’s inner cities. Today, schools are worse and, more fatally, the fathers are gone.

Today, the practical stakes sit in every classroom. And this means, every parent that cares can get involved to the good. Teach children to doubt their country, Klingenstein warns, and eventually they will not have one. Teach them to love this land and her philosophic principles and future generations will flourish.

Appropriately, Klingenstein leaves us with the boy at his desk, stiff in unfamiliar clothes, his salute crisp and determined. The boy became a great man, the best of America. What his grandfather and those nuns gave him, a country worth loving and the character to defend it, is still on offer at 250. It is, as Klingenstein says, in the nature of things.