Published: July 04, 2009 08:35 pm         

Stephanie Salter: Give me liberty — as soon as we agree on what it is

TERRE HAUTE — Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.

— George Bernard Shaw



One of the things I forgot (or never knew) was the Statue of Liberty’s official name: “Liberty Enlightening the World.”

Her French sculptor, Frederic Auguste Bartholi, bestowed that title upon the monumental work, a gift from the French people that was dedicated in New York on Oct. 28, 1886.

Bartholi did not name the statue “Conspicuous Consumption Enlightening the World,” or “Dogmatic Religion Enlightening the World.” He didn’t call her “Disproportionate Use of Natural Resources Enlightening the World.”

Nor did he connect a record number of incarcerated citizens to the enlightenment of the world, the spending of $13 billion a year for cosmetic surgery or a national household average of nearly eight hours each day during which a television set is on.

“Liberty is what Bartholi saw as the United States of America’s strong suit, its greatest contribution to the advancement of civilization. His statue — female, serene-but-stalwart, right arm raised and holding a torch, not a sword — bespeaks the modeling of liberty as the most effective method of spreading its virtues.

Broken chains at her feet, a tablet inscribed with the date of U.S. independence in her left hand, the figure does not convey, “Liberty Whipping the People of the World into Shape Whether They Like it or Not.”

Google “liberty quotes,” and scores of compilation sites materialize. Everyone from Aristotle to Oscar Wilde has weighed in on liberty. Thomas Jefferson weighed in often and can sound like two or three people of different dispositions on the subject.

Resonate to his free-speech sentiments? Well, you might not like the bloody refreshment quote. Cheer his praise of education? His snarky comment about the clergy might rub you the wrong way.

Among Jefferson’s declarations:

“Educate and inform the whole mass of the people … They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.”

“In every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty.”

“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

“The liberty of speaking and writing guards our other liberties.”

Not surprising, I am particularly fond of that fourth quote. It speaks to me, professionally and personally.

I feel equally strong about the second verse of “America, the Beautiful,” written in 1913 by Katharine Lee Bates to music by Samuel Ward. For all the times I’d sung that wonderful song, I seemed to really hear Bates’ words only after Sept. 11, 2001. (“Thine alabaster cities gleam, undimmed by human tears,” was especially poignant in those first months.)

But it is the second verse, which begins with pilgrim feet beating a thoroughfare of freedom across the Wilderness, that articulates my vision of my country:

America! America!

God mend thine every flaw,

Confirm thy soul in self-control

Thy liberty in law!

Reading through so many liberty quotes online, I was reminded (again) what a Rorschach the word can be. Seemingly simple — It means free, right? The opposite of in chains? Not prohibited? — liberty really is opaque beneath its clear surface, a milky invitation for individual projections.

Take Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Separated by just a generation, both Wilson and Roosevelt were well-educated intellectuals who managed to get elected President of the United States more than once. Both Democrats and war presidents, they had much in common. But here are their thoughts on liberty.

Wilson — “Liberty has never come from Government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of it … The history of liberty is a history of limitations of governmental power, not the increase of it.”

Roosevelt — “The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism — ownership of government by an individual, by a group.”

Instead of becoming dismayed at the many, often contradictory, concepts of liberty, the more I read, the more I appreciate the profundity of “liberty.” Like “God” and “love,” its meaning is shaped by institutions and individuals, for better and for worse.

Our notion of liberty can encompass whole hemispheres or be confined to our back yards where we see our neighbors’ right to freedom stopping at the stockade fence that separates our properties.

Back in the fourth century B.C., millennia before the USA was a gleam in any human’s prefrontal cortex, Aristotle observed, “The basis of a democratic state is liberty.”

Simple, no-nonsense words. Easy to say, a little harder to realize and execute on a national, let alone global, scale. Yet there stands our statue in New York Harbor, a Frenchman’s vision of a country not even 100 years old when he made his first sketches.

Liberty Enlightening the World. Our nation’s blessed burden.

Stephanie Salter can be reached at (812) 231-4229 or stephanie.salter@tribstar.com.