What’s on Jim’s Mind (Issue #203)

Today’s pop quiz. Ready?

“Is anybody there? Does anybody care? Does anybody see what I see?”

Who was the person who first said (or, in this case, sang) these words?

Kudos to all who know that it was William Daniels in the original Broadway production of 1776 in 1969.

Much like today, 1969 marked a moment in time in which America and much of the world seemed to be coming apart at the seams. Richard Nixon had been inaugurated as the 37th president of the United States; Sirhan Sirhan was tried and convicted of the murder of Senator Robert Kennedy; The Chicago 8 (soon to become The Chicago 7) were indicted and put on trial in connection with the violent demonstrations that had taken place the previous year during the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago; Former President Dwight Eisenhower died. In 1969, the first US troops were withdrawn from Vietnam while hundreds of thousands of people in cities across the US demonstrated against the war there.

And right in the middle of all of the events of 1969, a musical play that paid tribute to the delegates who assembled in the summer heat of Philadelphia to get this flawed democracy off the ground opened on Broadway. The musical 1776 reminded Americans why it was so important to keep this experiment of democracy going, a hundred and ninety-three years after it began, at a time when a lot of people, like a lot of people today, were perhaps feeling otherwise.

1776 opened to wonderful reviews and went on to become a great success. Daniels, known at the time more for playing the uptight suitor whose rigidity would always lead him to lose the girl to the likes of Jason Robards or Albert Finney, played John Adams in both the play and the film versions of 1776. In the play’s climactic moment, Daniels makes a stirring musical case for the need for democracy and for the founding of this new nation.

1776 was patriotic to its soul, but I don’t think I ever thought of it, even at the time of taking the easy road of asking us to swallow musical jingoism. It never resorts to lifting our spirits with an American Revolutionary War equivalent to “God Bless America.”

What the play does do, as great plays do so often, is to take a second thoughtful look at a received truth about a time we thought we knew and to help us to better understand who we were then and who we are now. A fresh look at 1776 does exactly that and even sprinkles in a glimmer of hope: the knowledge that we have faced problems and dire days before, and our history and our struggles have taken us through times both good and bad, great American successes and dismal failures, times that serve to remind us that we the people of this country continue to be a part of this potentially gallant and noble experiment, even as we struggle mightily one more time to get it right.

The historical John Adams had his own overwhelming doubts,

“Democracy has never been and never can be so durable as aristocracy or monarchy; but while it lasts, it is more bloody than either. … Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.

Of course, he wrote those words over two hundred years ago. I wonder what he would have to say today about a country that has taken so many steps forward toward building Lincoln’s “ new birth of freedom dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal?”

And here is where I am coming down in my thoughts today. I hear other words from the 1776 song, not the ones from the beginning that I used to open this letter, but one that comes much later near the end, and they have also kept running through my brain.

I see fireworks I see the pageant and pomp and parade I hear the bells ringing out I hear the cannons roar I see Americans All Americans Free forevermore!

1776, 1969. Two different moments in time when democracy hung in the balance. Can we make it through 2024?

Believe in yourselves. Dream. Try. Do Good. — William Daniels

And today’s letter is for Kaf Warman, a long-time reader, a gifted movement teacher at Carnegie Mellon University, and someone whose “Heart was always in the work.” She will be missed by many people-former students, colleagues, and above all, cherished friends, like Ralph Hall…and Barbara.

– Jim Niesen

Write to me directly at jim@irondale.org

[embed]Is Anybody There, 1776