May 20—The following is the unofficial draft for first part the May 17 Schiller Institute Chorus event celebrating America's 250th, which contains most of the texts read.

PROLOGUE—ELVIRA GREEN

(INTONED OR SUNG)

IN ‘76 THE SKY WAS RED

THUNDER RUMBLING OVERHEAD

AND KING GEORGE COULD’T SLEEP IN HIS BED

AND ON THAT STORMY MORN

OLD UNCLE SAM WAS BORN

Those words are from a 1939 Cantata called “Ballad For Americans.” Ballad for Americans was performed on November 5, 1939, for a CBS radio show called "The Pursuit of Happiness," produced by Norman Corwin. The person that sang those words was Paul Robeson. Robeson, who spoke over 20 languages and sang in over 50, truly personified all of America, with his deep, rich bass. 

10 years later, Paul Robeson would be blacklisted. In 1950 his passport would be taken without any indictment or formal charges placed against him. He was {disappeared} from American life for 9 years. Paul Robeson didn’t change. The United States changed.

In the 1960s, America once again changed in a new, positive direction. Assassinations changed it again, in a most tragic direction.

America has a complicated relationship with change. This country was given birth in a Declaration of Independence, and later a Constitution, that changed space and time forever. But America’s realization of that Declaration has often fallen short of its noble aspirations. 

Poet Langston Hughes posed the paradox of America in these words:

O, let America be America again—

The land that never has been yet—

And yet must be—the land where every man is free.

The land that's mine—the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME—…”

Who is “me?” Is “me” the tired, the poor, the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free” described by poet Emma Lazarus’ words, written at the base of the Statue of Liberty?

Some say, “No!” What do you, what do we say? Are we America?

Our Declaration of Independence tell us: “But when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security.”

But how? In what way can we become the new Guardians of the Declaration’s promise? 

We propose that we are America; that artists must become the new Guards of our security; and that it is only through Beauty that we will proceed to true Freedom. 

We proclaim that the old, displaced, forgotten Songs of Freedom, that infused the words, and fortified the mission of the many different people that gave birth to this nation, over and over, in our first 250 years, hold the emotional key to our national salvation today. Those songs, even today, carry a power greater than that of the false force of arms. It is from the immortal fountain of this art, forged in slavery, war and revolution, that we must take the living water that can cleanse us, nourish us, and refresh us for the next 250 years and more. 

We welcome you to your nation, and this celebration of “The land that never has been yet—

And yet must be—the land where every man is free.

“Kenst du das Land?” Do you know this land? It is, after all, yours.

CHORUS: "Lily of the Valley"

ELVIRA GREEN—“Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes; and accordingly all Experi- ence hath shewn, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed."

JONATHAN KRUK—"The Long Train"

CHORUS: "By and by"

ELVIRA GREEN: “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness—That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

CHORUS: "AIN’T A THAT GOOD NEWS"

ELVIRA GREEN: “A MASSACHUSETTS PETITION"

To the Honorable Council and House of Representatives for the State of Massachusetts Bay, in General Court assembled January 13, 1777 – the Petition of a great number of Negroes who are detained in a state of Slavery in the Bowels of a free and Christian Country, Humbly Showing – 

That your Petitioners apprehend that they have in common with all other Men, a natural and unalienable right to that freedom which the great Parent of the Universe had bestowed equally on all Mankind, and wish they have never forfeited, by any compact or agreement whatever – 

but that they were unjustly dragged, by the cruel hand of power, from their dearest friends, and some of them even torn from the embraces of their tender parents, from a populous, pleasant and plentiful Country –

and in Violation of the Laws of Nature, and of Nation, and the defiance of all the tender feedings of humanity, brought hither, to be sold like Beasts of Burden, and like them condemned to Slavery for Life, Among (a) people professing the mild Religion of Jesus –

A People not insensible of the sweets of rational freedom – nor without spirit to resent the unjust endeavors of others to reduce {them} to a State of Bondage and Subjection – 

your Honors need not to be informed, that a life of Slavery, like that of your petitioners, deprived of every social privilege, of everything requisite to render Life even tolerable, is far worse than Non-existence – 

They cannot express their astonishment, that it has never been considered, that every principle from which America has acted in the course of her unhappy difficulties with Great Britain, pleas stronger than a thousand arguments in favor of your Petitioners –

They therefore humbly beseech your Honors, to give this Petition its due weight and consideration, and cause an act of the Legislature to be passed, whereby they may be restored to the enjoyment of that freedom which is the natural right of all Men and their Children (who were born in this Land of Liberty) may not be held as Slaves after they arrive at the age of 21 years –

so may the Inhabitants of this State, (no longer chargeable with the inconsistency of acting themselves, the part which they condemn and oppose in others) be prospered in their present glorious struggles for Liberty; and have those blessings secured to them by Heaven, of which benevolent minds cannot wish to deprive their fellow Men.

And your Petitioners, as in Duty Bound, shall ever pray. 

Lancaster Hill

Peter Best

Prince Hall

Brister Slenser

 Newport Sumner

Nero Funelo

Jack Pierpont

Job Lock 

THEY ARE FOUNDERS. SAY THEIR NAMES.

JONATHAN KRUK: A passage written for our Declaration of Independence, but removed from the final draft. 

“[The King]has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN King of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce.

"And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he has obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the Liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another."

KEVIN THOMPSON: O FREEDOM 

JONATHAN KRUK: 1787, Gouveneur Morris Speaks Out Against Slavery—

"The admission of slaves into the representation, when fairly explained, comes to this, – that the inhabitant of Georgia and South Carolina, who goes to the coast of Africa, and in defiance of the most sacred laws of humanity, tears away his fellow creatures from their dearest connections and damns them to the most cruel bondage, shall have more votes in a government instituted for protection of the rights of mankind, than the citizen of Pennsylvania or New Jersey who views with a laudable horror so nefarious of practice."

CHORUS: My soul’s been anchored in the Lord

JONATHAN KRUK: FIRST RHODE ISLAND

ELVIRA GREEN: LEMUEL HAYNES: "LEXINGTON"

Although our numbers were but few 

And they a numerous throng

Yet we their armies do pursue 

And drive their hosts along 

One son of freedom could annoy

A thousand tyrant fiends

And their despotic tribe destroy 

And chase them to their dens

Thus did the sons of Britain’s King 

Receive a sore disgrace

Whilst sons of freedom joined to sing 

The victory they embrace

CHORUS: Chester

CHORUS: HIS NAME SO SWEET

JONATHAN KRUK: "When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect for the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”

ELVIRA GREEN: The Declaration of Independence was composed and drafted 250 years ago by a Committee of Five: Ben Franklin, John Adams, Robert Livingston, Roger Sherman and Thomas Jefferson. The committee appointed Jefferson to draft the Declaration, and he did so, between June 11 and June 28. That draft was then reviewed and revised by John Adams and Ben Franklin. 

Of its beginning, Professor Danielle Allen, in her book "Our Declaration," wrote:

”We have to begin by focusing on the very beginning, just one clause to start: 'When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people…' That beginning seems overdone. Why not just say, 'When it becomes necessary…'? Why add 'in the course of human events '? And what exactly is 'the course of human events' anyway? 

Since 'course' is another word for 'river,' an image of a waterway lies behind this sentence. Although Jefferson may not have been thinking explicitly about rivers when he wrote the first draft, the language itself, the word 'course,' has this useful image built into it. We can use this image of a river to work our way into the sentence. 

A river has a definite shape. An infinity of droplets combine into a single flow, all moving together in the current in one direction. And all that water is rolling towards some knowable destination. The muddy Mississippi, for instance, may meander, but it descends inevitably into the Gulf of Mexico.” 

Professor Allen is correct. But what is this river of events? William Shakespeare, in Act Five of Julius Caesar, wrote:

“There is a tide in the affairs of men.

Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;

Omitted, all the voyage of their life

Is bound in shallows and in miseries.

On such a full sea are we now afloat,

And we must take the current when it serves,

Or lose our ventures." 

This was the "course of human events" that ran before, during and after that moment in 1776. 

Only poets, and artists, know the river’s true source. Poet Percy Shelley said: 

The everlasting universe of things 

Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves, Now dark—now glittering—now reflecting gloom—

Now lending splendor, where from secret springs The source of human thought its tribute brings 

Of waters—with a sound but half its own.

EVERETT SUTTLE: Three solos—

The Boatman’s Dance 

Zion’s Walls 

Shenandoah 

KEVIN THOMPSON: Ol’ Man River

EPILOGUE 

"America goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign Independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. 

"The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force.The frontlet upon her brow would no longer beam with the ineffable splendor of Freedom and Independence; but in its stead would soon be substituted an Imperial Diadem, flashing in false and tarnished lustre the murky radiance of dominion and power. She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit."

What would John Quincy Adams, Secretary of State, later President of the United States, who spoke those words on the Fourth of July in 1821, think of America today? More to the point, what would he do about America today?

On July 4, 1826, exactly 200 years ago this July 4, John Quincy Adams’ Father, John Adams, the second President of the United States, died. On that exact same day, Thomas Jefferson, the third President of the United States, the penman of the Declaration of Independence, also died. Opposite in many ways, imperfect in many ways, they were two of the Committee of Five that wrote a revolution more perfect than themselves.

That revolution in thought is not the property of the people that wroteit, or the people that profess it. It is the property of the people that believe it, and act on it, everywhere in the world. John Quincy Adams was right: if America is the dictatress of the world, America is a slave to despotism. It is no longer the master of its own spirit. It is no longer America. 

So, what America are we? Sovereign, or enslaved? Are we “The land that never has been yet, and yet must be?” Kennst du das Land? America, know thyself!!!