Brotherhood Day

Brotherhood Day, which is dedicated to better understanding between races and creeds and which is being celebrated throughout this nation today, is a unique American institution. No one, of course, can estimate its efficacy. Dealing in spiritual inponderables its concrete achievements cannot be determined. Nevertheless the very act of instituting such a day is in itself an achievement of prime importance, particularly at a time when men’s minds are being turned away from thoughts of human brotherhood to bitter racial, national and group rivalries. To our best knowledge no other country in the world has called into existence such a challenging symbol of fundamental human unity.

It is fitting that this day should be celebrated in this month which is dedicated to the anniversaries of two great and representative Americans—George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. Both of these men helped to mold American destiny. Both stand at the headwaters of epochal movements reaching down to our own day. And both embodied in their life’s work ideals which must remain basic in American life if its character is not to undergo a complete and tragic disfigurement.

The two men were worlds apart as far as their background and training were concerned. Washington was the staid and courtly gentleman whom political circumstances made a revolutionist. Lincoln was a product of the vast and lonely wilderness of American backwoods life. One was an aristocrat and the other a plebeian. Nevertheless both of them magnificently embodied the great American tradition. Washington was a champion of religious freedom and tolerance. “No man’s sentiments are more opposed to any kind of restraint upon religious principles than mine are,” he write. His dream of America was of an haven of refuge for all the persecuted of the earth. “I conceive under an energetic general government such regulations might be made. And such measures taken, as would render the country the asylum of pacific and industrious characters from all parts of Europe—a land of asylum for mankind.”

Lincoln’s faith in democracy, freedom and equality never for a moment wavered during all the terrible years of struggle and civil war. Next to Thomas Jefferson, who framed the Declaration of Independence, Lincoln was its most passionate and uncompromising champion.

The principles of Jefferson are the definitions and axioms of free society. And yet they are denied and evaded, wih no small show of success. One dashingly calls them “glittering generalities.” Another bluntly calls them “self-evident lies.” And others insidously argue that they apply to “superior races.”

These expressions, differing in form, are identical in object and effect—supplanting the principles of free government and restoring those of classification, caste, and legitimacy. They would delight a convocation of crowned heads slotting against the people. They are the vanguard, the miners and sappers of returning despotism. We must repulse them, or they will subjugate us. This is a world of compensation; and he who would be no slave must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves, and under a just God, cannot long retain it.”

Lincoln vehemently rejected the doctrine of superior and inferior ###ces. He knew that there were advanced and backward races but he refused to attribute this fact to any biological fiction. Alexander Stephens, one of the most brilliant minds of the Confederacy, attempted, like most Southern spokesmen, to justify slavery on some such ground. He declared: “Prevailing ideas entertained by Jefferson and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the old Constitution were that the enslavement of the African was wrong in principle socially, morally and politically. Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner stone rests, upon the great truth that the Negro is not the equal of the white man; that slavery—subordination to the white man—is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first in the history of the world based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. The great objects of humanity are best attained when there is conformity to the Creator’s laws and decrees.

But Lincoln, for whom the “electric chord” that linked the hearts of all Americans was not blood but the love of freedom, wrote: “I am not a know-nothing; that is certain. How could I be? How can anyone who abhors the oppression of Negroes be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degenracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except Negroes.’ When the know-nothings get control, it will read, ‘all men are created equal, except Negroes and foreigners and Catholics.’ When it comes to this, I shall prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”

How prophetic these words are for our own day and how desperately needed is this message of Washington and Lincoln to a confused and groping generation such as ours.