by Paul R. Spitzzeri
During this America250 commemoration, in what, in many quarters, is a deeply divided nation, there are widely broadcast concerns about the remaking of parts of our nation’s capital and the issues with them, the operations and response to the Great American State Fair, the searing temperatures affecting celebrations on this 4th of July, including the cancellation of a holiday parade in Philadelphia, the city where the Declaration of Independence was signed, and more. Yet, throughout the nation, communities are readied to commemorate what that foundational document embodies, including an event, part of a national America’s Block Party, tomorrow at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum with the $17.76 admission fee going to charitable purposes
Fascinatingly, news has just been announced that the only known contemporaneous copy of the Declaration of Independence has been discovered by a volunteer (three cheers for volunteers!) in the British national archives, being one of 11 copies printed in New Hampshire and sent to England on an American ship, which was seized by English forces off the coast of Portugal. The folded document was then placed among letters and remained hidden until the volunteer Michael Scurr found it in February. Now, it will be part of an exhibit at the archives on the American Revolution, so there’s at least one “feel good” story for the holiday!
This sixth part of our post on how the centennial of the birth of the Republic was marked in Los Angeles in 1876 turns towards the oration of the day, following a parade through the downtown of the city of not much more than 10,000 persons, delivered during “literary exercises” at the Round House, a fanciful adobe building, with a remarkable garden, owned by George Lehman, native of Alsace-Lorraine in France, at Main and 2nd streets.
The speaker was James G. Eastman, a lawyer in partnership with Anson Brunson and Jackson Graves. A native of New York, Eastman migrated to California in 1868 and lived and worked in Marysville in the northeastern portion of the state and, briefly, in San Francisco, before settling in Los Angeles in 1875. The law firm founded shortly afterward was deeply involved in the tangled, twisted affairs of the failed Temple and Workman bank.
Eastman quickly became recognized for his public speaking skills, including for Decoration (Memorial) Day ceremonies. In an obituary following his death, due to alcoholism, at the county’s poor farm, later Rancho Los Amigos in Downey, it was observed that Eastman was a mental and physical wreck at that facility for a half-dozen years and, when occasionally freed, was frequently jailed due to his dissipation. The remembrance added that “one of his last public speeches was on July 4, 1876, at the centennial celebration in Los Angeles, where he was orator of the day.”
Strangely, Eastman began his speech with a tale of how an unnamed Aztec ruler, apparently Montezuma II, as “the light of heaven’s prophecy shone upon him” while also “melting the shackles of superstition” and, thereby, allowing the king “through the vista of years, to see such a government as ours” was moved to proclaim,
The long, long cycles pass away; an age of battles intervenes, and lo! there is a government whose motto is “Freedom and God!” Those words are dark to my understanding, but pass them down from generation to generation as a sacred tradition; for some time, with this motto, the people of this continent will take their place among the deathless nations of the earth.
How Eastman concocted this fantastic forecast of the American democratic experiment through the words of an Aztec emperor is an interesting question, but the speaker used this introduction to assert “we are to-day celebrating the one hundredth anniversary of the realization of Montezuma’s prophecy.”
He then turned to the vital need for Independence Day, telling his hearers that,
It is well, in such an age of secular toil and struggle, that each year should bring one day [though Christmas was certainly another?] when the din of the marts is hushed; when the jostle and strife of commerce cease; when the anvil is silent and the workshop dumb; when the money changers desert the temple, and the miser’s ears listen to a music sweeter than the music of his worshiped gold; when sectarian strife and partisan bickerings retire shame-faced before the presence of that broader patriotism, that feeling of universal brotherhood, which fills every American heart and mind with the thoughts of our country. It is well that there comes one day, when the student and the laborer, the banker and the pauper, losing sight of all distinctions of fortune and chance, can meet on common ground, and, in the full enjoyment of a common sovereignty, walk hand in hand—proud, exultant, thoughtful, admiring—through these galleries of civil greatness; when we may own together the spell of one hour of our history upon us all; when we may rise into the sphere of a higher life in the contemplation of a government founded upon equality, anchored in the patriotism of all its citizens, aiming at the greatest good for all, and in grateful homage bow before the throne Divine and mingle forty million voices in one common prayer that Columbia may remain the favored child of Heaven, and that peace be within her gates and joy within her palaces forever.
This sample of Eastman’s rhetoric clearly shows his capacity and aptitude for the flowery language and lofty sentiments that marked the qualities of the skilled orator. He went on to suggest that, while any nation might celebrate its existence, none could stake claim to what America could, as he insisted that the centennial day was “the world’s jubilee!” Moreover, whether at the Vatican or a Hindu temple in India, at Athens or Tokyo, it was the American flag that “waves in triumphant grandeur, the joy, the pride, the protection of the civilized world.”
The speaker alluded to the celebration taking place that day at Philadelphia, part of a half-year of commemoration at an exposition discussed in this post, and the fact that there were representatives of other countries in attendance. He added that what the centennial offered as a gift to the world was “one hundred years of intellectual freedom; a century of equal rights.”
Eastman went on to suggest that what each year’s celebration of the founding of the United States through its Declaration of Independence meant was “nothing less than universal liberty” and “new life to the world, a new impetus to human progress.” He evoked a spiritual essence as he proclaimed,
I feel the spell of an unbound grandeur which comes with the day, rides upon the sunlight, sparkles in the rippling wave, paints its presence in a beauteous picture on the very brow of nature, and which, though felt by all, by none can be described. It makes silence eloquent.
The mark of a top-notch orator was the ability to demonstrate knowledge through specific citations of the history of whatever subject was on tap, so Eastman revealed his understanding of the past by citing, in short order, the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt; the miraculous Greek victories over the Persians at Marathon and Thermopylae; the greatness of Imperial Rome; and the empires of Alexander, Julius Caesar and Napoleon, though he was sure to note that these last all crumbled while “the memories of Independence Hall shall still bloom in imperishable freshness.”
The speaker went on to suggest, in fact, that “in the wreck of matter, two events shall stand forth in immortal youth,” the crucifixion of Jesus Christ and the Declaration of Independence, the two intertwined as ennobling “the birth of the doctrine of universal love and universal liberty.” Eastman told the audience that, “while the theme is so comprehensive that no human mind can grasp its fulness, or picture its glories, there is yet a fitness and wisdom in our meeting and communing” over “the greatness the inauguration of which this day commemorates.”
It was, therefore, good to “thoughtfully review the track o’er which American greatness has trod.” For Eastman, this meant going back to the landing in 1620 of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock where, he asserted, “the germ of our government was planted,” and then contemplating 1876 when he and his fellow Angelenos could “behold that government laying its hands upon two oceans; upheld by the strong arm[s] of nearly fifty million people, commanding and receiving the loyal homage of a continent, and the profound respect of the universal world.” Doing this, he continued, “we can scarcely comprehend the wonderful transition.”
None of the rise of American greatness, Eastman went on, was due to chance or magic, but, instead was born from “a legitimate cause” as he intoned,
This great growth, great development, great progress, great advancement, annihilating wildernesses, spanning rivers, girding the continent with steel, is the result of fixed, immutable laws, and has been brought about by means which could not fail of such an end.
For the citizen, there was a duty and responsibility to uphold “this heritage of freedom, this mighty government of protection, this lovely land of peace and progress.” Moreover, those listening to the speech were exhorted to “realize that we are links in the great chain, wheels in this monster machine, active makers in the glory of this republic, and responsible alike to the past and future for the manner in which we study and perform our part.”
To Eastman, it was obvious and self-evident that America had “a government whose sovereignty should be perpetual because universal” as well as “a government self-protecting, because its power was equally distributed among all who enjoyed its benefits.” Moreover, there were the evocations of equal rights, the common interest in the nation’s strength and the nature of progress, all born from centuries, as the orator put it, of oppression and the evil of monarchy and inherited power.
The argument added that “the evil which had hitherto existed was the concentration of power in the hands of the few” so that the lesson of the American Revolution was that “the remedy adopted was a universal distribution of power among the governed.” Eastman rose to further flights of rhetorical ecstasy to lionize the founders whose credo “burst forth from a million lips; beamed in a million eyes; sounded out in the revolutionary eloquence of fire” and which “stands to-day radiant and defiant upon the summit of our greatness—the authoritative proclamation of freedom to humanity.”
The orator’s emphasis on duty is striking, as involving “our joint and individual responsibility to humanity and God for the progress, the perpetuation and the success of this greatest of human experiments.” He commented that “the memories which are borne upon the golden sunbeams of this anniversary should lead us to the contemplation of this great trust” while it was averred that “a great portion of the American people have never arrived at a proper estimate of the sublimity of their political eminence, or their responsibility for the disasters which have shadowed the march of our national progress,” this last presumably including the Civil War.
Eastman’s next remark, made amid the Long Depression starting in 1873 and continuing through the decade, as well as the scandal-ridden administration of two-term President Ulysses S. Grant, is worth remembering at any time, including our own, as he cautioned,
We are apt, in the age of excitement, of struggle for wealth, of false social rules and systems, and of poisoned ambition, to lose sight of our own sovereignty and its incidents. We see those who, by nefarious practices, aided by our own indifference, have reached places of official eminence, wasting the wealth of the nation, the time belonging to their constituents, destroying the credit of the government, prostituting the dignity of their power to the furtherance of measures which portentous of evil and pregnant with calamity.
Yet, the speaker admonished, some might raise a voice and show concern, but then turn back to their own affairs and it was inquired, “is this a proper exercise of our boasted sovereignty?” Eastman asked if this was how we showed our attention to duty which required “the active, thoughtful participation” of citizens and whether Americans were “keeping faith with the past, or maintaining our integrity with the future?”
Another query was posited: “is it not rather out duty to call those public officers to account, and make of them such an example that none will dare repeat the experiment?” The attorney added, “why not arraign these mighty criminals before the bar of public opinion, and by their utter condemnation and discomfiture stay the progress of this mighty evil?” Reiterating his call for the proper assumption of citizen responsibility, Eastman implored his audience that,
He should actively contribute to the formation and preservation of an elevated, pure public sentiment which shall cause peculation [appropriating public funds], duplicity, demagogueism [sic] and political corruption to retreat shamefaced from its presence.
Ignorance, it was remarked, was no excuse as Americans should be “basking in the sunlight of perfect freedom” and had ample access to knowledge and understanding, including “news, received by the harnessed lightning record [through the telegraph and, very soon, the telephone] of every heart throb of the nation, and every shock to any nerve in the great system.”
It was reiterated that, “we owe it, not alone to the past and future, but to our own age, its mighty progress, its glorious history, its wonderful triumphs, its past promise, to know and do.” Clearly, the effects of the economic depression and the results of the corruptions and scandals in Washington weighed heavily on the minds of many as the American centennial took place and we can certainly look to 1976, with its financial difficulties amid the post-Watergate environment, and this 250th anniversary year and ponder these words with care and consideration.
We’ll return tomorrow, on our anniversary day, and complete our look at Eastman’s address and other aspects of the American centennial, so be sure and join us then.