July 4th is my favorite holiday. I admit that a big reason is that I am a sucker for fireworks. However, the main reason that I love the 4th of July is that I love America. In an era that denigrates patriotism, at least on July 4th it is possible to revel in patriotic display. This year, I have been spending time thinking about some comments made by Alexis de Tocqueville in his classic book, Democracy in America, published in 1835. It remains widely read and widely quoted by anyone seeking to understand the American character. If you are wondering how a book published 189 years ago could still be relevant, keep reading.
Tocqueville’s background gave him an unusual perspective on a country which was only 50 years old when he began his travels, and which had no hereditary aristocracy or wealth. He was born in 1805 into an aristocratic family that had shaken by the French Revolution, both his parents having been jailed during the Reign of Terror. He studied law in Paris where he met a fellow lawyer named Gustave de Beaumont and in 1831, he and Beaumont traveled to America to study the American penal system. They crossed most of what consisted of the United States at the time, traveling from Rhode Island to New Orleans by stagecoach, horseback, and canoe.
I laugh that one of the first things which surprised him about American culture was how early everyone ate breakfast. I have heard this same comment from 21st century Europeans attending medical meetings in the USA, whereas American physicians are surprised that meetings in Europe rarely begin before 9 am!
This July 4th, as you sit outside waiting for the fireworks to start, I thought I’d provide a few Alexis de Tocqueville quotes for you to ponder:
- When the past no longer illuminates the future, the spirit walks in darkness.
- The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.
- Any measure that establishes legal charity on a permanent basis and gives it an administrative form thereby creates an idle and lazy class, living at the expense of the industrial and working class.
- There is, indeed, a most dangerous passage in the history of a democratic people. When the taste for physical gratifications among them has grown more rapidly than their education and their experience of free institutions, the time will come when men are carried away and lose all self-restraint at the sight of new possessions they are about to obtain. In their intense and exclusive anxiety to make a fortune they lose sight of the close connection that exists between the private fortune of each and the prosperity of all.
- Not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits flame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius and power. America is great because America is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.
- Nothing is more wonderful than the art of being free, but nothing is harder to learn how to use than freedom.
Happy 4th of July!
–Caroline
Dr. Fife is a world renowned wound care physician dedicated to improving patient outcomes through quality driven care. Please visit my blog at CarolineFifeMD.com and my Youtube channel at https://www.youtube.com/c/carolinefifemd/videos
