Freedom is America’s Strength

I received an email last week from Niraj Antani, who is leaving office shortly at the completion of his term as an Ohio state senator. The email was sent to his constituents, recounting his political career and its accomplishments as he goes out of office, having lost in his bid for a seat in Congress in the primary last year.

I had voted for him as a young conservative Republican voice in our state government. He certainly was conservative, standing for key causes such as Second Amendment rights and the right to life. And he set the record for youth. As he put it in his email:

I was just a 23-year-old kid, a year and a half out of college, the son of immigrants, given this inconceivable opportunity to serve. I’ll never forget the first time I got to press the green button on my desk, casting a “yes” vote on behalf of the 120,000 constituents of my then House district.

In a year in which Trump garnered close to a majority of the Latino vote, it’s worth noting the enduring appeal conservative values have for the kind of hard-working, risk-taking people who legal, law-abiding immigrants are likely to be. It takes a fire to leave the familiar behind and launch into a new life, and a firm belief that America is the kind of a place that gives people a chance to prove themselves. We need not fear these people, and ought to take great care to welcome those who would only make America stronger and not confuse them with those who must be excluded: those looking for a free ride or those with malevolent aims.

In his email, Antani cited someone he has held as an American hero — Haym Salomon. He is someone not widely known, so I was amazed the he even knew of him let alone held him as his hero.

Salomon was a Jew who had been born in Poland in the 1700s. Russia, Prussia, and Austria were busy carving up Poland for themselves, and Salomon found a way to flee that place that was doubly oppressive to him as a Jew. He came to New York shortly before the War of Independence, established himself in business, and quickly made a fortune.

Then came the revolution, and he devoted himself to the patriot cause, becoming a member of the New York branch of the Sons of Liberty. Imprisoned by the British for his activities, he suffered from exposure, severely damaging his health. Out of jail, arrested again, he escaped prison and fled New York for Philadelphia. There, he  became a chief aide to Robert Morris, who was superintendent of patriot finances from 1781 to 1784. During that time, Morris wrote in his diary, Salomon extended more than $200,000 worth of loans, supporting the army, the Congress as well as such leaders as Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe.

Madison wrote at the time of Salomon: “The kindness of our little friend in Front street, near the coffee-house, is a fund which will preserve me from extremities, but I never resort to it without great mortification, as he obstinately rejects all recompense.”

Crucially, Salomon extended a loan that kept Washington’s army intact as the opportunity to trap the British in Yorktown loomed. Salomon came through with hard cash at the crucial moment, some $20,000 (in 1781 dollars) — enough to supply the army’s needs and enable it to grasp the victory that won the war. Salomon gave all that he had to keep the American cause alive and see it triumph.

Salomon did not live to see the Constitution ratified. He held hundreds of thousands of dollars in bonds, but they were practically worthless after the war. Business reverses left him in debt himself, and the debt owed him by the government was never repaid.  He died penniless in 1785 in Philadelphia. His wife and children never were able to collect the loans he had given, which by their claim exceeded $600,000 in those days’ dollars. Though the issue was raised in Congress many times, nothing came of it or of a commemorative medal that was proposed to honor him.

This selfless dedication to the American cause by an immigrant patriot inspired the son of Indian immigrants who represented me in my state legislature for ten years.

Just as the Constitution wondrously combines the strengths of national and local governments in one union, so too does the ideal of America in a broader sense combine the strengths of family and ethnic identity with a united national purpose.

The America of the hard left cannot do that. To them, it is a wicked nation at the core, exploiting the weak and the different as much as it can. Their remedy is to excite reverse exploitation and to ignore individuals and their associations and communities. Identities for them are things to be controlled, manipulated, and exploited.

Contributing to America

But that is not the identity that Salomon or the Antani family saw. Proud of their own unique gifts, they offered them in service to what America has meant to so many, the land of freedom and opportunity in which each person, each family, and each group contributes to the whole wholeheartedly.

Our national unity combines many gifts freely given into a mighty force that can triumph over tyranny without and within. It is our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, and our free markets which enable us to overcome the pinched and parched zero-summers who tyrannize economies and cultures, always jealous of others’ success, always establishing their own success at the expense of those others.

Jealousy and tyranny know no borders. American citizens fall to their lures as well. We must not let in those who fear all freedom but their own, not allowing them into the country and watching them closely here. DEI has turned the minds of our law enforcement and our bureaucracies to irrelevancies, so that they fail to pick up the cues before the fact and they confuse the public and themselves afterwards by trying to shoehorn the facts into the work narrative.

Our American dream has no time to spend on jealousy or tyranny. It thrives on trust, like great jazz musicians, on a rich improvisational sense that makes the best of the opportunities each other’s successes open up for everyone else.

Our American dream is realized in the freedom to succeed together, enriching our lives materially and spiritually in a way never paralleled in human history.  As we emerge from the dark tyranny of a movement always jealous of others’ achievements, we must once again establish in our American mind the great and unselfish ideal that welcomes in all the various gifts of its citizens, in all their associations.

That generous freedom is the path to our success now and for the America of our children and grandchildren and for  the future Salomons and Antanis who come with devotion and inspiration to these shores.

READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin:

Bob Dylan’s Music and the Age of Trump

We Won, but True Freedom Requires More Work

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