Mercer University Commencement
May 12, 2007
Judge Griffin B. Bell
THE CHALLENGE OF CITIZENSHIP
My remarks to you today will focus on challenges. You were challenged to get university degrees and today’s graduation is proof positive that you have achieved that challenge. But there will be other challenges ahead. What would life be like without challenges? Would your life feel fulfilled if there were no great challenges to face?
Thomas Jefferson, at age 30, was a very successful appellate lawyer, but he sold his practice and retired from the law practice. He stated that his life was not being fulfilled by practicing law. He decided to devote his time to public service – and the rest is history.
President Lincoln, as a young lawyer speaking some three generations after the Revolution, despaired over the lack of challenges then as compared to what the Founding Fathers had done in the American Revolution. He pondered over what they had risked and what they had accomplished. He said that they had crafted a government more favorable to liberty than any in history, and it was up to their progeny to preserve and expand the great experiment.
The Revolution fostered the belief that success was dependant on discipline and the extent of one’s talents. The Revolution led to the abolition of privileges and class distinctions. All could have ambitions. There were Western lands to be developed and mountains to climb. Any man’s son became the equal of any other man’s son. But to Lincoln, the Founding Fathers had left a meager yield to his generation after they had harvested the “Field of Glory.” He described the Founding Fathers as a forest of giant oaks who built on the hills and in the valleys of America, a political edifice of liberty and equal rights, and provided to the world a practical demonstration of the capability of a people to govern themselves. They succeeded, so what was left for Lincoln’s generation to accomplish? He stated that there was nothing left for the family of the lion or the tribe of the eagle nor for “towering geniuses” who scorned “a beaten path.”
But within a decade, slavery had become the great issue of the nation, an issue so great as to make other issues seem unimportant, an issue that went to the heart of whether our nation, as a nation, could survive or would break up into parts. Lincoln had no idea, when he despaired a decade earlier, than an issue as great as that which faced the Founding Fathers was to be his to resolve. His life would be fulfilled. His was the challenge of citizenship in its most extreme form.
You may ask: Are there any challenges left for you? I can recite my own history as a precedent. I am of the World War II generation. I was in the audience in Washington, D.C. at the inauguration of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy when he issued the challenge to my generation, which was also his generation: “My fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for you country.”
This was our call to citizenship. My generation had previously been privileged to answer the call to arms. This was a call to another kind of patriotism, that of the responsible citizen whose obligation it was and is to respond to the call of good citizenship. That was more than 50 years ago, and we need not recite the citizenship record of my generation. We are now almost three generations way from that time, and perhaps it is time for another call to citizenship.
Our value system seems to be eroding. Our political system is not working well either through design or ignorance or both.
Good citizenship makes us responsible for recognizing our values and for preserving them. A great newspapers columnist, Walter Lipmann, of another generation, wrote that our civilization can be maintained and restored by rediscovering the eternal truths, which he described as the elementary principles of work, sacrifice and duty, the transcendent criteria of truth, justice and righteousness and the grace of love and charity. He said that these are the things which have made men free, and it is this test of wisdom which will give us the light and courage we need.
Our Constitution is at once a stroke of genius and a workable plan for governing under which our leaders are given the power to lead but are sufficiently tied down so that we the people control them rather than the leaders controlling us. We are not yet the sheep as De Tocqueville predicted might be the case with the government as our shepherd. Our separation of powers and checks and balances under the Constitution has enabled us as citizens to keep our government in check and not vice versa.
Our weakness lies in the lack of knowledge of the constitutional system on the part of many citizens and the consequent inattention given to the selection of public officials that we are privileged to select by our votes – if we vote at all.
Too many of our citizens are still left in the lower economic classes as distinguished from the middle class; there is too much dependency on the government for support, and we lack a national creed or goal of being givers and not receivers of government largess or private charity.
It has also led to officeholders who lack respect for the constitutional system, under which power and responsibility are allocated between the three branches of government. We have the Congress attempting to handle leadership matters assigned to the President, such as foreign policy, foreign intelligence and the Armed Forces rather than restricting their activities to their own powers of funding and legislating. We have some judges on courts who on occasion act as legislators in their overbroad rulings as if their discretion is unfettered, and their power is used in the extreme rather than sparingly.
Many of our leaders are poll driven to the point that they are followers rather than leaders.
It would take courage to go against the flow or the polls. For example, it would be unpopular to do what is necessary to win the war in Iraq. It is unthinkable, but the case, that with high oil prices, we are paying for the cost of the Iraq war for both sides. It would be unpopular to take the drastic stop of rationing gasoline until we can have an effort like the A-Bomb Project (the Manhattan Project of World War II) to fashion an engine to operate on alternative fuels rather than being beholden and subject to the blackmail at the hands of the Iranians and perhaps others. Such an effort might lead to defeat, but losing an election is not the end of the world if the loss results from a good faith effort to meet the public interest.
Our political parties seem to assume that they are principalities, separate from and as important as our government, and they seem to value their party interest more than the public interest. A major challenge of citizenship is to elect that person or those persons who stand fast for the public interest. Other interests are merely political and not necessarily in the public interest. We need to ferret out those officeholders whose conduct is outside the public interest and to be at pains not to elect such people.
This is the challenge of citizenship. In the end, we must and we will be proud of our citizenship and of being Americans.
On a personal note, I want to add something, hoping that some of you will follow this route. While I was still in law school at Mercer, my hope was that I could devote part of my career to public service. I have been privileged to do just that and, as a consequence, I have a feeling of fulfillment. I am satisfied with the divergent paths of my career, which included many years of public service. I have always considered public service as a public trust and have tried to act accordingly. My wish for you is that you will find similar fulfillment in whatever career you choose. You may choose a lifelong career in the private sector, but if an opportunity presents itself in public service, I hope you will seize that opportunity to serve.
And now I close with this. I am reminded of the Italian artist, Constantine Brumidi, who came to our country from Italy and became, above all, a proud U.S. citizen. He painted the frescoes in our nation’s capitol between the House and the Senate. You may see his signature there today. He proudly signed the frescoes: “C. Brumidi, citizen of the U.S.”
That is what we are, young and old. We are citizens of the U.S.
I have always been proud to be a Southerner, but the greatest of all, like Brumidi, is to be a citizen of the U.S.
About the Speaker
Judge Griffin B. Bell is recognized as one of the country’s great Americans. His advice has been sought by leaders in Congress, the U.S. Attorney General’s office and U.S. presidents. Only five years after receiving his law degree from Mercer University’s Walter F. George School of Law in 1948, he joined the law firm of King & Spalding in Atlanta as a partner. In 1960, he became the Chief of Staff for Gov. Ernest Vandiver. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy appointed him as a judge of the United States Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, where he served 15 years. Under President Jimmy Carter, he served as the 72nd Attorney General of the United States from 1977 to 1979. A partner of King & Spalding, he is a longtime trustee and benefactor of Mercer. The University’s Board of Trustees established the Griffin B. Bell Award for Community Service to honor him