E Pluribus Unum?

I think I first heard it spoken while wondering what it meant as I watched the climactic scene in the Wizard of Oz in one of its annual TV airings in the 1950s.   The great and powerful Oz, a.k.a. Professor Marvel, referenced it in conferring an honorary doctorate in Thinkology upon the unwitting scarecrow for formulating the plan that rescued Dorothy from the evil designs of the Wicked Witch of the West.  And I likely first felt it in the deepest levels of my being while my family and I stood among the shivering crowds on Constitution Avenue who had gathered to applaud President Dwight Eisenhower during his second inaugural parade.   E Pluribus Unum.  I didn’t know it then, but over the years I have come to hear in its Latin phraseology both the idealism and the challenge that this remarkable country, our country, has represented to all of us who proudly call themselves Americans.

As I think about this week’s inauguration of our 46th president my thoughts go back to these boyhood recollections from an America that seems now to only exist in my memories.  And listening to the almost-daily calls, from both the left and the right, for our new leaders to bring us together in making us, once again, a unified nation, I can’t help but wonder when it was that we were anything other than pluribus, striving for, but falling short, of unum?

From its first adoption by Congress in 1782, E Pluribus Unum—“Out of Many, One”—has been more of a mythic rather than actual, day-to-day reality of life in these United States.  Perhaps that is why Congress, just sixty-five years ago, agreed to transcend our historical origins by making In God We Trust our official motto, embossing it on all of our coinage and paper currency.  Though supplanted, E Pluribus Unum has not been forgotten, emblazoned as it now is on the presidential seal, one of President Eisenhower’s final legacies as he left office in January 1960.

As with most sayings, E Pluribus Unum reveals as much about its creators as it does about the fledgling nation it came to describe and inspire.   America in the 1770s could be characterized by its “many-ness” more than by any “one-ness” that our founders strove to embody.  Our country then, as now, represented a coalition of disparate and mutually self-interested values, ambitions, and priorities that expressed themselves in factions, sectarian and sectional preferences, ethnicities, economic classes and educational disparities from which political parties, labor and lobbying organizations, both public and secret, ultimately found their voice and exercised their power.  This was true in the late 18th century when we fought each other over our loyalties to the Crown; it marked our many dysfunctions before, during and after the Civil War; and it has remained our most identifying characteristic through every era, movement and crisis which this nation has endured.

If Unum requires unanimity and complete agreement, than we have never come close to approximating that ideal, with the possible exception of those fleeting moments of emotional and patriotic fervor that touched our collective soul on a sad December Sunday in 1941, or in the immediate aftermath of a tragedy-filled Tuesday in September of 2001.  As all democracies have borne witness, we have had a messy history, governed as we have always been by competing interests and power coalitions.  Yet through the 245 years since we first declared our independence, we have survived and thrived thanks to the remarkable foresight of those disparate but realistic assemblies of founders who forged for us a social contract that yet keeps us going and still gives us hope for tomorrow.

When reading the lives and hearing the words of our founders it becomes clear that they didn’t set out to replace the monarchical Unum with another autocracy made in their own image.  Nor did they think that rule by the Pluribus, or mob as they often described it, was a formula for long-lasting survival.    Instead they created, over more than a decade of trial and error, a constitutional structure for governance that tried to balance the interests of the many with those of the few, while tempering the power of the privileged with rights and protections for those lacking social standing.   It was conceived by those seeking a “more perfect union” than they had ever experienced or dared think possible.  And while our experiment in forming a government that ensures freedom and justice for all has fallen far short of perfection, it may possibly have been, and may yet be, the best attempt to govern that we’ll ever know this side of heaven.

I marvel at the wisdom of our Founders’ creation that still commends our allegiance:  three branches of government each checking the other, representation by both population and state sovereignty, separations of powers and responsibilities between federal and state entities, elections through both popular and electoral representative processes, and the provision for executive vetoes and presidential overrides.  They even created a process by which the certainties of one age could be amended in accord with the collective wisdom of future citizens.  Each provision has proved essential to our survival as a nation, and each article woven into the fabric of our shared life has defined our limitations while elevating our possibilities.  All our Constitution ever required was that each new generation be able and willing to bring a measure of intelligent discourse to the issues of the day, as well as an abiding commitment to mediation, negotiation and compromise as the best means by which our nation could balance the forces of change and conservation that have always given energy to the dreams and convictions of our people.  

The wisdom and enduring relevance of our Constitution, itself living proof of the efficacy of utilitarian moderation, reminds us in this highly fractured time, that unum can never be achieved e pluribus unless we are willing to meet each other on that difficult and uncomfortable landscape of common ground where neither Democrats, Republicans, men, women, or people of any one race or faith is fully sovereign or owns property claims.  It is not unum that makes us who we are.  Rather it is consensus (Latin for consent, agreement, sympathy, and harmony in forging a common life), that must be both our aspiration and our destination.  For it is only there, in that place where people are willing to listen to and respect each other’s distinct voice, speak their opinions forthrightly, and honestly negotiate their differences that we can and will discover how our beloved country, these states united, may fulfill its promise to be a government of the people, by the people, and for the people that may, if we can keep it, never perish from the earth.