American Minute with Bill Federer: Carl Sandburg, Pulitzer Prize-Winning Poet: “When a nation goes down … one condition may always be found; they forgot where they came from”

“I see America, not in the setting sun of a black night of despair ahead of us,

I see America in the crimson light of a rising sun fresh from the burning, creative hand of God.

I see great days ahead, great days possible to men and women of will and vision,”

stated poet Carl Sandburg in an interview with Frederick Van Ryn of This Week Magazine (January 4, 1953, p. 11.)

Carl Sandburg was born on January 6, 1878, to Swedish immigrants who worked on the railroad.

After 8th grade, Carl Sandburg left school, borrowed his father’s railroad pass, and traveled the country as a hobo.

Carl Sandburg volunteered for military service, was sent to Puerto Rico in the Spanish-American War, and then attended college on a veteran’s bill.

Carl Sandburg wrote children’s fairytales, called Rootabaga Stories, and mused of his wanderings in American Songbag.

Carl Sandburg wrote in Remembrance Rock (1948, ch. 2, p. 7):

“A baby is God’s opinion that the world should go on.”

He continued:

“A baby, whether it does anything to you, represents life.

If a bad fire should break out in this house and I had my choice of saving the library or the babies, I would save what is alive.

Never will a time come when the most marvelous recent invention is as marvelous as a newborn baby.

The finest of our precision watches, the most super-colossal of our supercargo plants, don’t compare with a newborn baby in the number and ingenuity of coils and springs, in the flow and change of chemical solutions, in timing devices and interrelated parts that are irreplaceable.

A baby is very modern. Yet it is also the oldest of the ancients. A baby doesn’t know he is a hoary and venerable antique — but he is.

Before man learned how to make an alphabet, how to make a wheel, how to make a fire, he knew how to make a baby — with the great help of woman, and his God and Maker.”

Carl Sandburgi, in 1926, wrote Abraham Lincoln-The Prairie Years, and in 1939 he wrote Abraham Lincoln-The War Years, for which he received a Pulitzer Prize.

In 1959, Sandburg was invited to address Congress on Lincoln’s birthday.

On October 25, 1961, Sandburg was invited to the White House by John F. Kennedy.

In his Complete Poems, for which he won a Pulitzer, 1951, Carl Sandburg wrote:

“All my life I have been trying to learn to read, to see and hear, and to write.

At sixty-five I began my first novel …

It could be, in the grace of God, I shall live to be eighty-nine …

I might paraphrase: ‘If God had let me live five years longer I should have been a writer.'”

In his poem Prayers of Steel, Carl Sandburg wrote:

“Lay me on an anvil, O God.

Beat me and hammer me into a crowbar.

Let me pry loose old walls.

Let me lift and loosen old foundations.

Lay me on an anvil, O God.

Beat me and hammer me into a steel spike.

Drive me into the girders that hold a skyscraper together.

Take red-hot rivets and fasten me into the central girders.

Let me be the great nail holding a skyscraper through blue nights into white stars.

Sandburg wrote:

“God,

The game is all your way, the secrets and the signals and the system; and so for the break of the game and the first play and the last.

Our prayer of thanks.”

Sandburg wrote in “Washington Monument by Night” (Slabs of the Sunburnt West, 1922):

“The Republic is a dream. Nothing happens unless first a dream.”

Carl Sandburg wrote:

“When a nation goes down, or a society perishes, one condition may always be found; they forgot where they came from.

They lost sight of what had brought them along.”

Sandburg’s statement is similar to Pulitzer Prize winning historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., who wrote in an op-ed titled “Folly’s Antidote” (The New York Times, January 1, 2007):

“History is to the nation as memory is to the individual.

As persons deprived of memory become disoriented and lost, not knowing where they have been and where they are going, so a nation denied a conception of the past will be disabled in dealing with its present and its future.

‘The longer you look back,’ said Winston Churchill, “the farther you can look forward” …

I believe a consciousness of history is a moral necessity for a nation.”

John F. Kennedy wrote in the Introduction to the American Heritage New Illustrated History of the United States (1960):

“History, after all, is the memory of a nation.

Just as memory enables the individual to learn, to choose goals and stick to them, to avoid making the same mistake twice – in short, to grow – so history is the means by which a nation establishes its sense of identity and purpose.”

If history is the memory of a nation, then America has national Alzheimer’s.

Harvard Professor George Santayana wrote in Reason

in Common Sense (Vol. I of The Life of Reason, 1905):

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Judge Learned Hand wrote:

“The use of history is to tell us … past themes, else we should have to repeat, each in his own experience, the successes and the failures of our forebears.”

Aristotle, in his book Rhetoric (4th century BC), called this “deliberative rhetoric,” using examples from the past to predict future outcomes:

“The political orator is concerned with the future: it is about things to be done hereafter that he advises, for or against.”

Lord Acton wrote in 1877:

“The story of the future is written in the past.”

Patrick Henry stated March 23, 1775:

“I know of no way of judging the future but by the past.”

Edmund Burke wrote in Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790:

“People will not look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors.”

Cicero stated in Ad M. Brutum, 46 BC:

“Not to know what happened before you were born is to be a child forever.”

J. Edgar Hoover warned in the introduction to Edward

L.R. Elson’s book, America’s Spiritual Recovery, 1954:

“We can see all too clearly the devastating effects of secularism on our Christian way of life.

The period when it was smart to “debunk” our traditions undermined … high standards of conduct.

A rising emphasis on materialism caused a decline of “God-centered” deeds and thoughts.”

Senate Chaplain Peter Marshall stated:

“Along with our higher education came a debunking contest … a sort of national sport …

It was smarter to revile than to revere … more fashionable to depreciate than to appreciate …

Debunking is … a sign of decaying foundations.”

Socialist historian Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (1980) has been one of the primary works “debunking” America’s heritage.

An exposé revealing Zinn’s manipulation of the facts has been written by Mary Garbar, Debunking Howard Zinn: Exposing the Fake History That Turned a Generation against America (2019).

Zinn’s tactic was one of deconstruction, a type of “gene-replacement therapy” for a culture, which uses a “Drive–Neutral–Reverse” methodology to ideologically undermine a nation.

The first step is to separate students from their country’s past by portraying the founders of the country in a negative light, ignoring the fact that the founders gave them a system which provides for maximum individual liberty and opportunity;

then students are in a neutral phase of being “open-minded”;

finally, the students are indoctrinated with a whitewashed socialist-sharia cancel-culture future.

President Donald Trump stated July 3, 2020:

“The violent mayhem we have seen in the streets of cities that are run by liberal Democrats, in every case, is the predictable result of years of extreme indoctrination and bias in education, journalism, and other cultural institutions …

… Our children are taught in school to hate their own country, and to believe that the men and women who built it were not heroes, but that were villains.

The radical view of American history is a web of lies — all perspective is removed, every virtue is obscured, every motive is twisted, every fact is distorted, and every flaw is magnified until the history is purged and the record is disfigured beyond all recognition ..

No movement that seeks to dismantle these treasured American legacies can possibly have a love of America at its heart …

No person who remains quiet at the destruction of this resplendent heritage can possibly lead us to a better future.”

Will & Ariel Durant wrote in The Story of Civilization, 1967:

“History is an excellent teacher with few pupils.”

The Durants wrote in The Lessons of History, 1968:

“Civilization is not inherited; it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew; if the transmission should be interrupted … civilization would die, and we should be savages again.”

Reagan warned the Phoenix Chamber of Commerce,

March 30, 1961:

“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream.

The only way they can inherit the freedom we have known is if we fight for it, protect it, defend it and then hand it to them with the well thought lessons of how they in their lifetime must do the same.

And if you and I don’t do this, then you and I may well spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free.”

Carl Sandburg died July 22, 1967.

At his 85th birthday party (6 January 6, 1963, Sandburg had stated (The Best of Ralph McGill: Selected Columns, 1980)

“Time is the coin of your life. You spend it.

Do not allow others to spend it for you.”

President Ronald Reagan stated in his State of the Union Address, January 25, 1984:

“Each day your members observe a 200-year-old tradition meant to signify America is one nation under God.

I must ask: If you can begin your day with a member of the clergy standing right here leading you in prayer, then why can’t freedom to acknowledge God be enjoyed again by children in every school room across this land?

America was founded by people who believed that God was their rock of safety …”

Reagan concluded:

“I recognize we must be cautious in claiming that God is on our side, but I think it’s all right to keep asking if we’re on His side … Carl Sandburg said,

‘I see America not in the setting sun of a black night of despair … I see America in the crimson light of a rising sun fresh from the burning, creative hand of God.'”

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