America, Why I Love Thee

WHY I LOVE THEE An Address on the Road to America’s 250th Keynote — Republican Luncheon · Kissimmee, Florida Delivered by John Shane Vaughn · Approx. 45 minutes [ Delivery note: This runs roughly 45 minutes at an unhurried, conversational pace. The bracketed lines are YOUR stage directions — do not read them aloud. The red lines are your applause beats; land them and let the room breathe. ] OPENING — WHY YOU ARE IN THIS ROOM Thank you. Thank you, and good afternoon. I could have chosen a myriad of topics today. I love teaching about the Republic — I could stand up here and talk to you about the Constitution, about the courts, about the fights in Washington, about the elections in front of us. There is no shortage of things a man could say to a room full of patriots. But I felt it would be more fitting to do something else. With the greatest birthday in the history of this nation now just days away, I felt it would be fitting to PREPARE you. To prepare you for the great celebration of America’s two hundred and fiftieth birthday. So I came here, to Kissimmee, Florida, to remind you of something. To remind you of WHY you are at this luncheon in the first place. You are here because you believe in a great country. And you are here because you believe in PRESERVING that greatness. And I want to start right there, because that word matters. Preservation. You see, there is a difference between us and the people on the other side of the aisle, and it is not a small one. It is in our very nature. The radical believes the way to a better world is to tear down what exists and build something brand new from the rubble. He distrusts the past. He is embarrassed by it. He wants to wipe the slate. But the conservative — the conservative looks at something precious, something that took centuries to build, and his first instinct is not to smash it. It is to PROTECT it. To conserve it. To hand it to his children intact. Our nature is preservation — not radical change. We are the ones who keep the lights on while everyone else argues about burning the house down. And so I want to spend our time together today on a simple question. A question I think every conservative ought to be able to answer before the fireworks go up over this country in two weeks. Why? WHY do we love her? Why is she worth preserving? And I want to anchor that question in a line you have sung a hundred times. A line so familiar you have probably let it roll right past you without ever once stopping to weigh what it actually claims. ‘America! America! God shed His grace on thee.’ Have you ever — truly — considered the profundity of that line? Not God MIGHT shed His grace. Not God, PLEASE shed Your grace. The song does not beg. It TESTIFIES. It looks back over everything this nation is and declares it as a settled fact: God shed His grace on thee. Past tense. It already happened. Grace was poured out on this specific land, this specific people, in this specific hour of history. Now ‘grace’ — there is a word worth slowing down on. Grace is not a wage. Grace is not something you earn, and it is not something you deserve. Grace is a gift given to people who could never have purchased it. So when Katharine Lee Bates stood on top of Pikes Peak in 1893, looked out over the spacious skies and the amber waves of grain, and wrote that America had been GRACED — she was saying something the modern cynic cannot stand to hear. She was saying this country is not a self-made success story. She is a GIFT. Shed on us. Whether we deserved it or not. God shed His grace on thee. That is not a prayer. That is a verdict. And this afternoon, I intend to read you the evidence. So that is our task today. I want to give you the REASONS — the kind of reasons you can take home to a skeptical son-in- law and a cynical grandchild, the kind that hold up when somebody sneers that America is nothing special, nothing but a lucky accident that happened to get rich. Because here is my thesis, and everything I say this afternoon will drive toward it: America was no accident. She was no roll of the dice. From the ground she stands on to the men who built her, there is grace upon this country — grace SHED, deliberately, generously — and once you see it, you cannot un-see it. PART ONE — THE LAND WAS NO ACCIDENT Let’s start where almost no patriot ever thinks to start. Not with 1776. Not with the muskets or the parchment. Let’s start with the GROUND. The dirt under your feet. The rivers. Because before there was ever a Declaration, there was a piece of real estate — and it is the single most blessed piece of real estate on the face of the earth. And that is not patriotism talking. That is geography. Consider the land itself. The United States sits on the largest unbroken block of usable, temperate, farmable land anywhere on this planet. Not the biggest country — the biggest block of land that actually GROWS things. We are four percent of the world’s population, and we feed a fat slice of the entire world. Corn, soybeans, wheat, sorghum — we don’t just feed ourselves, we feed nations who would starve without us. Now ask yourself: why? Why here? Because of the second gift — and this is the one that takes my breath away. The rivers. This country is laced with over two hundred and fifty thousand rivers. But here is the miracle that almost no other nation on earth enjoys: OUR rivers connect. The Mississippi, the Ohio, the Missouri, the Tennessee — they don’t run off in separate directions and die. They link together into one vast, navigable highway of water. And that highway runs straight through the heart of the richest farmland on earth. WHY THAT MATTERS — IN PLAIN ENGLISH: In most of the world, a farmer who grows more than he can eat has to pay a fortune to move it to market — by road, by rail, over mountains. Half his profit is gone before he sells a bushel. In America, the farmer in Iowa floats his harvest down to New Orleans on water that God carved through the middle of his own field — for almost nothing. That is not a small advantage. That is the engine of the wealthiest nation in human history. And then add the harbors. Three of the finest natural deep-water harbors on the entire planet — San Francisco Bay on the west, Chesapeake Bay and New York Bay on the east. Gifts. Free of charge. Most great nations would trade half their territory for ONE of them. We were handed three. And then the walls. Look at where this nation sits. An ocean to the east. An ocean to the west. Two oceans no enemy army has ever crossed to conquer us. And to the north and the south — friendly, weaker neighbors, no rival empire breathing down our neck. While the nations of Europe spent a thousand years bleeding each other across borders you could step over, America grew up behind two of the widest moats God ever dug. Now I want you to feel the contrast, because it is the contrast that proves the point. Take Russia — enormous, the largest country on earth by far. And miserable. Why? Her rivers are long, but they DON’T connect, and half the year they’re frozen solid, and they empty uselessly into the Arctic where nothing ships. Her farmland is short-season and her crops can rot before they ever cross her own endless steppe. All that size — and the geography fights her every single day. America’s geography does the OPPOSITE. It works FOR her. Every river, every harbor, every ocean — all of it pulling in the same direction, toward greatness. There is a strategist’s phrase for the nation that controls the middle of the North American continent. They call it ‘the inevitable empire.’ Inevitable. Because once a free and industrious people settled this exact ground, with these exact rivers and these exact harbors and these exact walls — greatness wasn’t a maybe. It was coming. Katharine Lee Bates put it in three words. ‘Amber waves of grain... the fruited plain.’ She wasn’t writing an agriculture report. She was looking at the most generously provisioned land on the face of the earth and naming the only thing that could explain it. The spacious skies. The amber waves. The fruited plain. America did not seize that land — it was SHED on her. God shed His grace on thee. Now you can call all of that a coincidence if you like. You can say the dirt got lucky. But I want you to hold that thought — because in a moment I’m going to show you something that luck cannot explain. Grace can shed good soil on a nation. But good soil cannot aim a rifle. And it cannot miss. PART TWO — THE MAN THEY COULD NOT KILL Good ground is one thing. But good ground sitting empty is just a pretty wilderness. Somebody has to BUILD the Republic. And the building of it came down, more than to any other single human being, to one man. Every honest historian — left, right, religious, secular — calls him by the same name. ‘The indispensable man.’ George Washington. Indispensable. Their word, not mine. They mean: take this ONE man out of the story, and there is no United States of America. No victory in the Revolution. No Constitutional Convention held together. No peaceful first presidency that handed power to the next man instead of seizing a crown. Pull Washington out, and we are very likely subjects of a king to this day. So hold that in your mind — the entire Republic hanging on one mortal man — and now watch how many times that one man should have been DEAD long before the nation he would build was ever born. Deliverance number one. Washington is a young man, barely twenty-one, sent on a five-hundred- mile journey through frozen wilderness held by hostile tribes. On the way back, the guide traveling with his party — a man who was supposed to be leading them — suddenly runs ahead about fifteen paces, turns around, raises his musket, and fires it directly at Washington. Fifteen paces. Friends, a child could not miss a grown man at fifteen paces. A trained marksman could not miss if he were TRYING to miss. The gun fired. And the ball did not touch him. Deliverance number two — and this one is documented in Washington’s own hand. The Battle of the Monongahela. Braddock’s defeat. Washington is a young officer in the British army when his column is ambushed. And listen to how it unfolds. The officers are on horseback — sitting up high, perfect targets above the smoke. And one after another, they are shot off their horses. One. After. Another. Washington’s horse is shot dead beneath him. He climbs onto a second horse. THAT horse is shot dead beneath him too. And when the smoke clears and the battle is over, Washington takes off his coat — and counts FOUR bullet holes torn through the fabric. Four. And not one of them touched the man inside it. WASHINGTON’S OWN WORDS — IN A LETTER, JULY 18, 1755: “By the all-powerful dispensations of Providence, I have been protected beyond all human probability or expectation; for I had four bullets through my coat, and two horses shot under me, yet escaped unhurt, although death was leveling my companions on every side of me.” Now I want to be careful and honest with you, because you deserve a speaker who tells you what’s solid and what’s legend. THAT letter is real. It is preserved in the national archives. Those are Washington’s own words about his own coat. And he was not the only one who saw the hand of Providence on him. Just weeks after that battle, a preacher named Samuel Davies — a man who would later become president of the college we now call Princeton — stood up and pointed to that obscure twenty-three- year-old colonel and said this, in a sermon that is preserved to this day: REV. SAMUEL DAVIES — 1755: “I cannot but hope Providence has hitherto preserved him in so signal a manner, for some important service to his country.” Some IMPORTANT service to his country. Twenty- one years before the Declaration. Decades before the presidency. A man looked at a soldier the bullets would not touch and said out loud: God is saving this one for something. And there is one more story — and this one I give you as TRADITION, not as court evidence, because it was written down years later and it has surely been polished in the retelling. But I tell it to you anyway, because even the stories a people pass down reveal what they could plainly see. The tradition says that sixteen years after that battle, Washington was out surveying the frontier, and an old Indian chief traveled a long way to find him. And when they sat down, the old warrior told him why he had come. He said: I was there, at that battle by the river. I was firing at you. I told my best marksmen to bring you down. We aimed at no one else. And not one of us could touch you. THE WARRIOR’S WORDS, AS THE TRADITION GIVES THEM: “A power mightier far than we shielded him from harm... he will become the chief of nations, and a people yet unborn will hail him as the founder of a mighty empire.” Did it happen word for word? I doubt it. But here is what I will not let you miss. The men SHOOTING at Washington could see it. The enemy could see the hand on him. It took an old warrior on a battlefield to say out loud what too many of our modern, credentialed historians have trained themselves NOT to see. So let me put it to you the way I’d put it to that cynical grandchild. Once — once — I’ll grant you luck. Twice, you’re straining. But the guide who cannot miss and misses... the officers falling like wheat while he sits untouched in the saddle... two horses dead beneath him... four holes in the coat and not one in the chest — and THEN this same man goes on to become the one indispensable figure in the founding of the freest nation in the history of the world? That is not luck. Luck doesn’t have a curriculum. Luck doesn’t aim at a destiny. Washington himself told you what it was. He called it Providence. The least we can do, two hundred and fifty years later, is believe the man who was standing inside the coat. Grace was shed on a battlefield that day. It wore the shape of four bullet holes in an empty coat. God shed His grace on thee — and her name, that afternoon, was George Washington. PART THREE — FROM WEAKLING TO SUPERPOWER And if you think the hand let go of America once she was born — you have not read the rest of the story. Roll the tape forward a century and a half. Nineteen forty-one. America enters the Second World War as what one historian flatly called a military weakling. A foreign-policy lightweight. An army smaller than several of the second-rate powers of Europe — a nation that had just spent a DECADE in a Depression that broke her banks and gutted her arsenals. And in less than four years — LESS than four years — watch what comes out of that so-called weakling. THE ARSENAL OF DEMOCRACY — IN UNDER FOUR YEARS: • 86,000 tanks • 2,400,000 military trucks • 6,500,000 rifles • 96,000 bombers — and aircraft of every kind by the hundreds of thousands • And FORTY-ONE BILLION rounds of ammunition. She put nearly 16 million Americans in uniform — more men than Germany, more than twice Japan. Let me give you just ONE factory, so you can feel it in your chest. Ford built a plant called Willow Run. The largest factory on earth at the time — an assembly line more than a MILE long. And out the end of that line, at the height of the war, came a four-engine B-24 bomber — a machine with over a million parts — finished and ready to fly. One. Every. Sixty-three minutes. A finished heavy bomber every hour, around the clock, out of a country that eighteen months earlier couldn’t arm its own soldiers. That is not an economy. That is a nation being lifted by something larger than itself. She walked into that war a weakling. She walked out of it the most powerful nation the world had ever seen. And then — as if to sign the signature — watch the rival fall. For forty-five years the Soviet Union stood against her. An empire of nearly three hundred million people. The Red Army. A nuclear arsenal of tens of thousands of warheads aimed straight at the heart of this country. The single most dangerous adversary the United States ever faced — a rival that could have ended human civilization in an afternoon. And how did that empire fall? Not in a final war. Not in a mushroom cloud over Washington. Not with the streets of Moscow running red. It simply... came apart. From the inside. On the last day of 1991 the flag came down over the Kremlin for the last time, and the most heavily armed enemy in American history dissolved — quietly — like a bad dream at sunrise. Ten thousand warheads stood down, and not one of them flew. Tell me that’s an accident. Tell me the most dangerous standoff in the history of the species just HAPPENED to end without the apocalypse — by luck. And America was left standing alone at the summit of human history. Grace shed on the soil. Grace shed on the soldier. And grace shed on a nation when the bombs should have fallen and never did. God shed His grace on thee. PART FOUR — BLESSING IS A TRUST, NOT A TROPHY Now here is where I have to tell you the truth that the cheap, flag-waving version of this story always leaves out. Because I respect this room too much to flatter you. The hand was not on America because Americans were perfect. We were not, and we are not. We have sinned against our own ideals. We held men in chains while we wrote that all men are created equal. We have fallen short in a hundred ways, and an honest patriot owns that instead of hiding from it. So the blessing on this nation was never a trophy we earned for being good. It was a TRUST we were handed for a purpose. And this is the whole genius of that word in the song — GRACE. Because grace, by its very definition, is the thing you did NOT earn. The moment America imagines she deserved all this, she has stopped understanding the very word she’s been singing for a hundred and thirty years. And here is the hard part, the part that should make every conservative in this room sit up straight: Grace shed can be grace withdrawn. A nation that mistakes a gift for an achievement is already starting to lose it. The land, the man, the arsenal — every bit of it was a gift placed in our hands. And a gift placed in your hands makes you ACCOUNTABLE for it. The same Providence that lifts a nation up is fully able to set her down. The bullets missed Washington by an inch — but no generation is OWED that inch. It has to be earned again, by a people who remember Whose hand carried them here. And that, my friends, is the deepest reason we are conservatives. Not because we hate change — we don’t. We changed slavery into freedom. We changed a frontier into fifty states. But we change the way a man renovates a cathedral — carefully, reverently, on his knees — not the way a mob torches a building it never had to build. CLOSE — CROWN THY GOOD So what do we do, you and I, standing here just fourteen days from her two hundred and fiftieth birthday? First — we REMEMBER. Out loud. At our tables, in front of our children and our grandchildren. Because there is a long campaign underway to sandblast every one of these stories out of the American memory — to teach our grandchildren that this country is nothing but a list of her sins. And if WE don’t tell them about the rivers God carved through the farmland, and the guide who couldn’t miss, and the coat with four holes in it, and the bomber every hour — no one will. In our day, remembering out loud is an act of citizenship. Second — we stay HUMBLE. A nation handed this much does not strut. She gives thanks. The conservative kneels before what he’s been given, because he knows he didn’t build the foundation — he only inherited the duty to guard it. And third — we PRESERVE. We are the heirs now. The land was a gift to the founders. The victory was a gift to our grandfathers. But the keeping of this Republic — right now, in this generation — that falls to the people in rooms exactly like this one. For two hundred and fifty years there has been a hand on this country that would not let her fall. The hand that shed grace on the best soil on earth. The hand that turned the bullets away from the one man she could not lose. The hand that lifted a broken, Depression-era weakling into the arsenal that saved the free world. That hand has held her for a quarter of a millennium. God shed His grace on thee. I have spent this whole hour reading you the evidence — the land, the man, the arsenal — and every line of it says the same thing. Grace was shed on this nation. The verdict is in. But there is a second half of that verse, and most people never sing it like they mean it. ‘And crown thy good with brotherhood.’ You see, the grace was SHED on us — past tense, already done. But the CROWNING of it — the good we do WITH the grace we were handed — that part is not finished. That part falls to the living. That part falls to us. And now, fourteen days from the great celebration — WE are the hand. The grace was shed on the founders. The grace was poured out on our grandfathers. But the GUARDING of it, the keeping of it, the passing of it on undiminished to a generation not yet born — that falls to the people in rooms exactly like this one. Grace was shed on thee. The question is whether OUR generation will crown that good — or squander it. God shed His grace on her. Now He is watching to see what we do with it. So let me leave you with this, and then I’ll sit down. When the fireworks go up over this country in two weeks, most of the people watching them will see a party. I want YOU to see something more. I want you to see grace — four thousand miles of it, shed across two and a half centuries, carried by a hand mightier than any enemy that ever rose against her — and now resting, for a little while, in yours. Guard her well. Preserve her greatness. Crown her good. And never, ever apologize for loving the greatest country in the history of the world. God shed His grace on thee, America. And may God continue to bless these United States of America. [ Pause. Let it land. Then: thank you. ]