The following column is the opinion and analysis of the writer:
When I learned our ancestry I thought of my mother who left this world 43 years ago, an out-of-luck single mother of two small boys working in a dance hall in the abyss of the Depression. All she knew was she voted for Roosevelt, and for 10 cents a dance, sailor, she could feed those kids.
She didn’t know in 1215 her 25th great-grandfather Sir Robert de Ros, was among the 25 barons who led a soft insurrection against King John, strong arming him into signing the Magna Carta, a radical parchment affirming the revolutionary idea that no king was above the law.
She didn’t know her ancestor, Isham Brown, who signed on with the American Revolution at age 25, who fought with the 4th Virginia Regiment in Trenton, Brandywine and Valley Forge, returned from war to find he’d lost his farm. Isham, unknown to her, ended up living “in reduced circumstances,” a condition she knew too well.
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Little did the dance hall daughter of the Great Depression know she was a daughter of the Revolution, a pauper with a past haunted by 11 colonial revolutionary patriots including a Boston Tea Party Son of Liberty. All she knew was the Lindy Hop and poverty.
When I saw the stories of her ancestors, I thought back to my visit to Yorktown when I was 30, the humble battlefield where Isham’s fellow revolutionaries defeated a king, contrasted with today’s insurrectionists loyal to a royal fool they believe to be above the law.
When I learned of the pastor who came to the New World in the 16th century seeking freedom from intolerant religious zealots, I thought of today’s intolerant religious zealots who seek to rule our lives.
These days I read the Constitution, inspired by the Magna Carta, ushered into existence by my mother’s ancestor 1,000 years ago, with renewed reverence for the legacy of its enduring ideals.
Thirty years after his death, Isham’s great-grandson, John, joined the Union army to preserve his great-grandfather’s legacy, the yet-to-be perfected union that was threatened by insurrectionists carrying the Confederate flag.
Learning his story I recalled my pilgrimage to the Library of Congress, where, appointment made, I held in my hands the objects that were in Lincoln’s pockets the night he was killed, unaware of him or his service on the right side of history.
I thought of democracy’s enduring DNA when I saw the insurrectionist carrying the treasonous Confederate flag in our Capitol. I thought of my sobering visits to Appomattox, to Fort Monroe where the traitor Jefferson Davis was held captive, to Ford’s Theatre and Springfield.
I cheered when the Confederate statues finally came down.
During the Civil War, my father’s grandfather fled starvation in Ireland, finding refuge in the new republic forged by my mother’s revolutionary kin. Like all newcomers who seek freedom and opportunity in America, they were spat on, mocked, ridiculed and marginalized. Some prospered. Many perished.
When my plucky father purchased a dance with my mother that night in a California ballroom, she welcomed him with the charitable heart of America itself, teaching the orphan of immigrants how to jitterbug, how to use cutlery like a gentleman, and how to read.
He’d enlisted to save democracy. Saving the world for democracy was in their DNA. Her doughboy dad had been machine-gunned and gassed in the First World War, an unseen scale of madness unleashed in the Old World, a divided land tortured by ancient grievances.
After that war, the market crashed and economic calamity moved America’s democracy to choose the path of FDR while another democracy chose Hitler. Fascism lurks within us, an ever-present viral variant. In ’39, with war looming, thousands of pro-Nazi Americans filled Madison Square Garden and gave the Seig Heil to anti-Semitic speakers opposed to race mixing with the same vigor with which some Americans embrace Q-Anon or Hungary’s Viktor Orban.
In ’41 on Dec. 7, Pop was at Pearl Harbor when the obedient disciples of a divine emperor attacked his beloved republic, awakening the fury of a democracy forged by immigrants. In ’44 on June 6, another Fitzsimmons, serving in the 2nd Ranger Battalion, was in the first wave of the assault on Omaha Beach. He perished among his fellow “mixed-race mongrels” which is what the “racially superior” fascists called Americans.
The mongrels of democracy liberated the Old World from its chains, woven by a charismatic demagogue who had preached anti-Semitic and racist conspiracy theories, employed unimaginable political thuggery and promised the gullible he would make his nation great again, as only he could. In less than a year the impure agents of democracy defeated the pure disciples of madness.
Look deep into your past. Democracy is in your DNA.
