The Shining City on a Hill – YouTube

Dinesh D'Souza and America – YouTube

A People's History of American Empire by Howard Zinn – YouTube

God Bless America or This Land is Your Land

The real versus the ideal

There are two views of America- one sees America as a beacon of liberty to the world and the greatest nation on Earth. The other sees America as a place pulled by a vision of fantastic high ideals, but that reaching those ideals is still a work in progress.

These competing visions of America can be seen in two famous songs.

First let's look at the songs:

Kate Smith introduces God Bless America – YouTube

Here is composer Woody Guthrie with his original campfire sing-along "This Land Is Your Land." Notice that there are some lyrics here that have been censored and which you didn't sing around the campfire. Woody Guthrie- This Land Is Your Land – YouTube

Think about what makes these songs different. How do they see America?

This Land is Your Land

This Land Is Your Land

When we last checked in with our story Kate Smith had a massive hit song with "God Bless America" being played in jukeboxes in restaurants across America. Folksinger and social activist Woody Guthrie was hitchhiking through a freezing Pennsylvania winter in the 1930s, and any cafe where he stopped he heard the recording of Kate Smith singing "God Bless America." It got on his nerves.

Not only did it get on his nerves, it just made Woody plain angry. America was still in the grips of the Great Depression and people were homeless and starving. "If

there was a blessing in the first place it was over and done with," said Guthrie.

Guthrie was born in Oklahoma and spent his life championing social justice and civil rights. You may remember from the beginning of the semester folk singer Pete Seeger's story about Guthrie being scheduled to play at banquet in the segregated South. When he learned that African-Americans wouldn't be allowed to attend the show he angrily pushed over the banquet tables and left without performing. "Everybody needs to start a little trouble now and then," he said.

He wrote his song as direct response to Berlin's "God Bless America." The original song was called "God Blessed America for me." As you can tell, especially from the censored lyrics, he presents a radical vision of a bottom-up, grassroots America, challenging it to move towards its democratic ideals.

These censored lyrics are:

There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me; Sign was painted, it said private property; But on the back side it didn't say nothing; That side was made for you and me. In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people, By the relief office I seen my people; As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking

Is this land made for you and me? Nobody living can ever stop me, As I go walking that freedom highway; Nobody living can ever make me turn back This land was made for you and me.

This was also the years of the Great Dust Bowl when drought in Oklahoma, Colorado, Texas, and New Mexico forced farmers off their land. Many took what belongings they could and left for California. (Their story was captured in John Steinbeck's epic novel "The Grapes of Wrath") These economic refugees were derisively called "Okies" and characterized as "shiftless," and "relief chiselers," and chided as having "a lack of ambition" and "stealing jobs" from Californians.

LA Police Chief Edgar "Two Gun" Davis (right) ordered "Okies" to leave California or face 180 days hard labor where you are only entitled to a Bible, "beans and abuse." Davis once said Constitutional rights were of "no benefit to anybody but crooks and criminals." The politically powerful chief set up a so-called "bum-blockade" manned by LA police at the state's borders though technically city police had no jurisdiction at the state's borders. One mother of six stopped at the "bum-blockade" was asked to pay $3.40 for a California license. She only had $3. She wept. "That's food for my babies," she said. They let her in

for free, but scholars say perhaps one in a thousand migrants "inspired mercy."

Refugees gathered in shanty towns called Hoovervilles (a derogatory reference to president Herbert Hoover, president at the time of the start of the Depression.) Police would often burn down Hoovervilles and evict the residents. In 1941 The US Supreme Court ruled in Edwards versus California that states had no right to restrict interstate migration by poor people or any other Americans.

Mitt Romney: Prizing Freedom Here is an excerpt from Republican politician and 2012 presidential candidate Mitt Romney's book "Prizing Freedom."

Nations are shaped by their founders, often for many generations and centuries after those founders are gone. The culture and character of America reflects the nature and convictions of the men and women who founded it.

I’ve often imagined what it must have been like for those very first people who left Europe to immigrate to America. They left behind home, family, security, and predictability in exchange for a life-threatening ocean passage, the possibility of hostile indigenous people, and uncertain shelter, food, and climate.

Some who came here sought fortune. Others sought the right to practice their religion according to the dictates of their conscience. In almost every heart, it was a strain of liberty that drew them here — religious liberty, economic freedom, freedom to pioneer, or freedom from oppression. The thirst for freedom drove these American colonists. And it is very much a part of what we are as a people today — we love freedom.

That first choice of freedom by the Founders — incomplete and only perfected by Lincoln four score years later–has made all the difference. People from all over the world who prized freedom — the innovators, the pioneers, the

dreamers — came to America. And so they continue today. This is who we are as a people — it is in our DNA. It is this love of liberty and the accompanying spirit of invention, creativity, derring-do, and pioneering that have propelled America to become the most powerful nation in the history of the world.

I had to nod my head when I read what Sylvester Stallone had said: “I think America apologizes too much.” He’s right, of course. No nation has done more to promote world peace and liberty than America. No nation has done more to combat disease and to salve humanity when it is suffering than America. No nation has done more to promulgate economic principles that have lifted billions of people from poverty than America. Of course we have made mistakes and of course we can do even more for others, but this nation has from the beginning done what it believed was right and good, and the ultimate sacrifice made for liberty by so many hundreds of thousands of our sons and daughters is unrivaled in human history. Do not apologize for America.

Howard Zinn: A Challenge to American Exceptionalism Here is an excerpt from an article written by American historian and philosopher Howard Zinn.

In reality, we have never been just a city on a hill. A few years after Governor Winthrop uttered his famous words, the people in the city on a hill moved out to massacre the Pequot Indians. Here’s a description by William Bradford, an early settler, of Captain John Mason’s attack on a Pequot village.

Those that escaped the fire were slain with the sword, some hewed to pieces, others run through with their rapiers, so as they were quickly dispatched and very few escaped. It was conceived that they thus destroyed about 400 at this time. It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stink and scent thereof; but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave the praise thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them, thus to enclose their enemies in their hands and give them so speedy a victory over so proud and insulting an enemy.

Expanding into another territory, occupying that territory, and dealing harshly with people who resist occupation has been a persistent fact of American history from the first settlements to the present day. And this was often accompanied from very early on with a particular form of

American exceptionalism: the idea that American expansion is divinely ordained.

American exceptionalism was never more clearly expressed than by Secretary of War Elihu Root, who in 1899 declared, “The American soldier is different from all other soldiers of all other countries since the world began. He is the advance guard of liberty and justice, of law and order, and of peace and happiness.” At the time he was saying this, American soldiers in the Philippines were starting a bloodbath which would take the lives of 600,000 Filipinos.

One of the consequences of American exceptionalism is that the U.S. government considers itself exempt from legal and moral standards accepted by other nations in the world. There is a long list of such self-exemptions: the refusal to sign the Kyoto Treaty regulating the pollution of the environment, the refusal to strengthen the convention on biological weapons. The United States has failed to join the hundred-plus nations that have agreed to ban land mines, in spite of the appalling statistics about amputations performed on children mutilated by those mines. It refuses to ban the use of napalm and cluster bombs. It insists that it must not be subject, as are other countries, to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court.

What is the answer to the insistence on American exceptionalism? Those of us in the United States and in the world who do not accept it must declare forcibly that the ethical norms concerning peace and human rights should

be observed. It should be understood that the children of Iraq, of China, and of Africa, children everywhere in the world, have the same right to life as American children.

The true heroes of our history are those Americans who refused to accept that we have a special claim to morality and the right to exert our force on the rest of the world. I think of William Lloyd Garrison, the abolitionist. On the masthead of his antislavery newspaper, The Liberator, were the words, “My country is the world. My countrymen are mankind.”