OCR Text |
Show Today's Spirit of '76 That famous old painting, "The Spirit of 76," has given millions of patriotic Americans a thrill. K expresses as well as anything could the dauntless, heroic way in which the men of Revolutionary times banded themselves together to face a common enemy. It is the one painting that everybody thinks of on Independence Day; the one picture that returns to us out of the past to express in visual form the emotion that is uppermost on the Fourth of July. In this year, somehow, it starts a train of thought to whicn all of us might well devote a little time. If the men of '76 faced a great crisis, so do we. If they found it necessary to sink their differences and march shoulder to shoulder against the foe, so shall we. It wasn't easy for them, either those Revolutionist forefathers of ours. The country was far from united in those days. A great many people opposed the break with England. A great many others, engrossed in the problems of a frontier land, bound up in their perennial struggles with the wilderness and the Indians, simply did not care very much one way or the other. There were sectional rivalries, too colony against colony, creed against creed, class against class. Somehow, in spite of the odds, the early Americans found a way to submerge those rivalries and unite those factions. They marched together against the redcoats, and after overcoming obstacles which seemed insuperable they won the independence which their descendants always have counted their most prized possession. Today we're facing much the same problem. We, too, are fighting for our independence; our inde-t inde-t pendence from the business cycle, from industrial stagnation, stagna-tion, from poverty, from hunger, from all the tragic ills that follow in the train of a financial collapse. The fight can be won if we set ourselves to it. But to win it we shall have to unite, to march shoulder to shoulder p as the men of '76 did, to sink our rivalries and forget our quarrels. This is no time for the jealousy of class against class. ' It calls for united action. If we can learn the proper lesson from the events which Independence Day commemorates we can have that united action and, going on to ultimate victory, vic-tory, can prove that the spirit of 1932 is a worthy descendant descend-ant of the spirit of '76. f - , |