By Joannie Fischer The official documents
now on display in Washington, D.C., offer one
version of America's story. It's an
authorized biography of sorts, screened and
sanctioned. But the beauty of words in a democracy
is that anyone can offer them up, and they live or
die not by a ruler's dictate, but by their
ability to permeate hearts and minds, to ignite
passions, and to provoke action. Throughout our
history, we have learned that words with enough
resonance--whether from a slave, a student, or a
songwriter--can change history as dramatically as
any decree.
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In fact, for every official document
marking our nation's progress, there are
countless others that have steered events, whether
by inciting, critiquing, warning, encouraging,
cajoling, enraging, or inspiring. Sometimes the
words in these unofficial manifestos are so powerful
that they still echo through time, blending with
other potent phrases from other outspoken souls to
form a grand montage of ideas and urgings, odes and
rants, tall tales and truthful testimonies. This
"unauthorized" biography of our nation is
scrawled in letters and diaries, in pamphlets and
propaganda, in poems and rock concerts, in novels
and essays. From the whole, vast array, we each pick
and choose those lines that move us most, and piece
together our own story of what it really means to be
an American.
To be sure, without some of these
scripts, key moments in U.S. history might never
even have taken place. Without Thomas Paine's
elegant and angry prose, for example, we might not
even exist as an independent country today. In 1775,
Colonial leaders were torn by warring views about
how to deal with mother England. Then, in January
1776, Paine's pamphlet Common Sense was
published in Philadelphia, opening with the
legendary phrase, "These are the times that try
men's souls." It argued forcefully for the
necessity of revolution and sold 150,000 copies
overnight. It's widely credited with overcoming
dissenters' qualms and unifying opinion enough
to make the Declaration of Independence possible.
"Without the pen of Paine," said John
Adams, "the sword of Washington would have been
wielded in vain."
So, too, was the Civil
War sparked not by the flare of a cannon but by a
flair for language. Although slavery had been
controversial for 100 years, and tensions between
the North and South ran strong and deep, it took
novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle
Tom's Cabin to convey in intimate detail the
horrors of slavery and galvanize the abolitionist
movement. In 1851 and 1852, roughly 10 years before
the siege of Fort Sumter, some 300,000 people had
devoured her tome, published in weekly installments
in a magazine and ending with this exhortation:
"On the shores of our free states are emerging
the poor, shattered, broken remnants of families. .
. . They come to seek a refuge among you."
Stowe so famously fueled fevers that Abraham
Lincoln, upon meeting her in 1862, is said to have
declared, "So you are the little woman who
wrote the book that started this great war!"
