30° and Clear
Image
"A Republic, If You Can Keep It"
To the Editor:
When I was a little kid, I was always impatient for Sunday to come. I will assure you that I was not looking forward to the religious services. I will confess that I was not a great fan. Nor was I anxious to see relatives particularly. My favorite relatives didn’t seem to come around all that often. What I looked forward to was a Half-hour program called Victory at Sea. The music by Richard Rogers was very stirring and the narrator had a way of presenting the background text for the original films of our World War II naval history that was both tight and easily understood.
These films provided a wonderful insight into what my father had done in the Pacific Theatre of the War. I used to ask him about the program after it was over, and we would discuss the events that I had just witnessed on the TV.
Actually we had our best communications over that Sunday program, and eventually I came to understand a lot of what my father went through in 1943, 1944, and 1945. My cousin Henry Melin, my Cousin Bill Johnston, my cousin Alfred Cusson, and my Uncle Joseph Foss were also in the Navy. My Uncle Richmond Foss served in Europe in the United States Army. My father was a Sea Bee and was very careful to make the distinction of what those respective services were all about vis-à-vis the U.S. Navy.
My father was in construction and used heavy machinery while building airfields in the Philippines. I was impressed when he made light out of being under fire and saying how he used his blade on his big steam shovel to find off the bullets that came his way from time to time. He also saw some combat here and there before he got to building things in clearings that he had made in various jungles. He earned two medals for his service and bravery. The thing`that made it interesting for us viewing Victory at Sea was that he could relate his experiences and share them with me through the medium of these war films, because he was there.
Sharing that Sunday experience was always of great interest to me, and it was a time when my father and I could bond. The great writer and observer of our national life in the 1940’s, Studds Terkel, observed in his seminal work, `The Good War,' that World War II was, “the last Good War.” Now let’s face it, there is no war which is good, but there are wars that are just. There are wars of aggression that have to be engaged it, and there are wars to save humanity which must be fought. World War II was such a war, and it was easy to see that there were truly very clearly delineated forces of evil totalitarian, fascist, and autocratic powers that had to be stopped.
That “Axis of Evil” consisting of: Germany, Japan, Italy, and their other allies like: Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Croatia, Manchukuo, Thailand, Finland, and substantial units of Franco’s Spanish volunteers of real force were out to terminate democracy, egalitarianism, and impose a holocaust of pure hatred on humanity in order to exterminate Jews, Jehovah Witnesses, Selected Enemies of the State, Liberal Non-conformists, the-so-called “racially inferior”, the “physically and mentally unfit”, anyone who did not embrace National Socialism, or the Nazi Regime, or fascism, and the accepted values and goals of these new societies of “Aryan Supermen” as the various supreme leaders of the Axis Powers such as their significant number of friends promoted. Yes, the aims of the Allies “The Good Guys” to save the World Entire from the insanity of ultra-right-wing National Socialism were pretty easy to understand.
There are definitely times when there are not two legitimate sides to a quarrel or question. Sometimes one side is right and the other side is not, and that’s it. Take this case in point. Autocracy is bad, and democracy is good. End of argument. Now this brings me to my very favorite American of all times, Benjamin Franklin for whom this town/city was named in May of 1778.
Regardless of the grubby motives of our founding town-fathers, which have been written about many-a-time-and-oft [with a tip of the hat to my pal Mr. Shakespeare], I think that it was a great thing that we became the first community in the whole world to name ourselves for the great Ben Franklin.
His service to our country during his entire adult life is also very well known. One of his last acts of services to our nation was his contribution to the framing of our Constitution in 1787. Did you know that the proceedings of the Constitutional Convention were held sub-rosa, that is to say with no outside observers present?
Yes, all of the proceedings of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 were held in secret. Nothing of the discussions going on in those sessions of the hot summer of 1787 was supposed to be reported outside of the meeting hall. So by the time the Convention had finished its work, the public did not yet know what sort of government we were going to get. When the famous and easily recognizable and approachable Ben Franklin emerged from the Convention he was approached by a constituent and asked, “Doctor Franklin, what kind of government has been given us?”
Franklin looked at the man and said, “A republic if you can keep it.”
It was not until 1818 that the proceedings of the Constitutional Convention were published, and it was not until 1840 that James Madison’s definitive notes on the Convention were also published. I do not know about you, but I have never doubted that there would ever be a time in our history when I actually felt that we would be unable to retain our republic. After all, my
father helped make the World safe for democracy during World War II, and I watched the war that he had fought against Adolf Hitler and his gang of “certified Baddies” all of those many Sunday afternoons over seventy years ago.
My dad and a lot of other kid’s dads had done just the same thing, or they had worked in war industries along with a lot of ladies, and a lot of young women had also gone off to war as nurses, WAVES, and WACS. Some women also flew aircraft delivering these much needed flying aircraft to bases and distribution centers. Some brave women also gave their lives in various services to this country. I was pretty sure that the collective efforts of these good people would not have been in vain.
Back some 51 years ago, I took a trip to Guatemala, because the opportunity was there to do so, and I took a lot of photographs there of many things including many, many soldiers armed with machine guns all over the place. I was happy to reflect that that sort of thing did not happen in American cities because some paranoid “Supreme Leader” was uncertain of his place in the scheme of things. At the very same time that I was in Guatemala, the Nixon impeachment hearings were going on back in the States, but in all of the hotels in Guatemala City, like The Maya Excelsior, the T.V.’s were on, and as I paused to watch Sam Ervine’s Committee in the House of Representatives hearing charges of impeachment being leveled against President Richard Milhous Nixon, some Australian, German and Japanese tourists came over to where I was sitting and asked, “You are American?”
I answered affirmatively. “Do you approve of this? Does this not make your country weak?”
“Actually I think that these hearings show that my country, and more seriously, democracy in my country is very strong,” I replied. “We don’t have an exalted, autocratic, and fearless leader to look up to. Bad behavior is held to account in my country no matter how high a person may be in the government. That, I am proud to say is what democracy is all about.”
Boy oh boy, If I only could have seen fifty-one years down the road!
Maybe we will have to think about that one after all. Let me tell you as a practicing historian who has written half-a-dozen books and a couple of thousand monographs and articles and thought about things like this for almost eighty years, maybe we should think about what Ben Franklin had to say about this republic thing. I suspect that he knew what he was talking about.
By
James C. Johnston Jr.
Franklin resident, retired educator
