I Am the Nation

I was born on July 4, 1776, and the Declaration of Independence is my birth certificate. The bloodlines of the world run in my veins, because I offered freedom to the oppressed.  I am many things, and many people.

I am the nation.

I am 213 million living souls— and the ghost of millions who have lived and died for me.

I am Nathan Hale and Paul Revere.  I stood at Lexington and fired the shot heard around the world.

I am Washington, Jefferson and Patrick Henry.

I am John Paul Jones, the Green Mountain Boys and Davy Crockett.

I am Lee and Grant and Abe Lincoln.

I remember the Alamo, the Maine and Pearl Harbor.

When freedom called I answered and stayed until it was over, over there.  I left my heroic dead in Flanders Fields, on the rock of Corregidor, on the bleak slopes of Korea and in the steaming jungle of Vietnam.

I am the Brooklyn Bridge, the wheat lands of Kansas and the granite hills of Vermont.

I am the coalfields of the Virginias and Pennsylvania, the fertile lands of the West, the Golden Gate and the Grand Canyon.

I am Independence Hall, the Monitor and the Merrimac.

I am big.  I sprawl from the Atlantic to the Pacific … my arms reach out to embrace Alaska and Hawaii … 3 million square miles throbbing with industry.

I am more than 5 million farms.

I am forest, field, mountain and desert.

I am quiet villages— and cities that never sleep.

You can look at me and see Ben Franklin walking down the streets of Philadelphia with his breadloaf under his arm.

You can see Betsy Ross with her needle.

You can see the lights of Christmas, and hear the strains of “Auld Lang Syne” as the calendar turns.

I am Babe Ruth and the World Series.

I am 110,000 schools and colleges, and 330,000 churches where my people worship God as they think best.

I am a ballot dropped in a box, the roar of a crowd in a stadium and the voice of a choir in a cathedral.  

I am an editorial in a newspaper and a letter to a Congressman.

I am Eli Whitney and Stephen Foster.

I am Tom Edison, Albert Einstein and Billy Graham.

I am Horace Greeley, Will Rogers and the Wright brothers.

I am George Washington Carver, Jonas Salk, and Martin Luther King.

I am Longfellow, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Walt Whitman and Thomas Paine.

Yes, I am the nation, and these are the things that I am.  I was conceived in freedom and, God willing, in freedom I will spend the rest of my days.

May I possess always the integrity, the courage and the strength to keep myself unshackled, to remain a citadel of freedom and a beacon of hope to the world.

This is my wish, my goal, my prayer in this year of 1976— two hundred years after I was born.

ATTRIBUTION: OTTO WHITTAKER, “I Am the Nation,” Norfolk and Western Railway Company Magazine, January 15, 1976, front cover.  This was originally written in 1955 as a public relations advertisement for the Norfolk and Western Railway, now the Norfolk Southern Corporation, and did not contain the phrase, “the steaming jungle of Vietnam.”  It has been widely reprinted, generally without attribution, has been set to music, is reprinted by some newspapers every Independence Day, and has been read into the Congressional Record several times.

Rev. Dr. Kenneth L. Beale, Jr.

Chaplain (Colonel-Ret), U.S. Army

Pastor, Ft. Snelling Memorial Chapel