Challenging the Wrongs for the Good of the Land

”. . . and crown thy good with brotherhood, from sea to shining sea.”

--From “America the Beautiful”

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One of the lessons of history is that being wronged by America is no excuse for giving up on America.

It is a lesson I sense powerfully as I walk the Mormon Trail--and think about as this nation observes Independence Day.

In the face of persecution in Illinois and Missouri a century and a half ago, Brigham Young led the vanguard company of Mormons toward what they hoped would be a new land, a promised land.

As they headed west into what was then wilderness area, he sent Jedediah M. Grant back to buy a great quantity of red, white and blue material to make an American flag. Young promised that the new land they were going to would one day be a part of the United States of America.

He believed that however wrongly the laws or policies of the country were enacted, the country itself was good.

Among the indignities the early Mormons suffered: Gov. Lilburn Boggs of Missouri issuing an Extermination Order, declaring that they must be driven from the state or exterminated.

But there is much that has happened in our country that doesn’t sound like what we prefer to think of as America. Slavery, the extermination of Native American nations, internment of Japanese citizens during World War II, secret medical testing, manufacture of biological weapons--the list of the evil that men do and have done is long.

I read through the journals and life histories of my pioneer relatives and find account after account of injustice. My great-grandfathers write of their houses and barns being burned, of being chased by mobs, of wives and mothers-in-law dying from exposure after repeatedly being left homeless and driven into the elements, and finally, of packing up and walking out into the wilderness when the government would not offer them the protection of law.

Reading my grandfather’s matter-of-fact recitations of their tribulation leaves me in shock. Reading the accounts of my grandmothers hits me even harder. And yet, though they were forced to flee America, they believed in America.

Their leader, Joseph Smith, was sitting in a freezing cell in the Liberty Jail in Missouri when he wrote, “The Constitution of the United States is a glorious standard, it is founded in the wisdom of God. It is a heavenly banner; it is to all those who are privileged with the sweets of its liberty, like the cooling shade and the refreshing waters of a great rock in a thirsty and weary land. It is like a great tree under whose branches men of every clime can be shielded from the burning sun.”

Later, in 1844, Smith and his brother, Hyrum, were killed by a mob that stormed the Carthage, Ill., jail.

I find it difficult to reconcile Smith’s view of the Constitution with what was happening around him.

Most amazing to me is the account of the Mormon Battalion, a contingent of 500 men recruited from among the refugees as they waited at Winter Quarters on the banks of the Missouri River. The people had just become pioneers--they were mustering supplies for the trek further west.

As my great-great-great-grandfather William Draper said, “Five hundred of our most able-bodied men were marched away to fight the battles of the United States, from which we had just been driven.”

Recruited to fight the Mexican War, they marched from the Illinois border to San Diego.

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On July 4, 1847, members of the battalion raised the first American flag over Los Angeles. Then they marched back toward Winter Quarters to meet up with their families, who still faced their trek across the plains.

There are many groups and individuals who have been wronged by the government in the history of our country. In fact, the condensed history of America sometimes reads as a history of wronging one another by turn.

But just because there are wrongs doesn’t mean we are justified in turning our backs.

I remember when, as an 18-year-old, I became so disillusioned that I ran crying to an older friend of mine, saying that this whole country was off-track, I was fed up with it and I was leaving.

Rather than laughing at me for discovering what a lot of people already knew, he asked me three questions:

1. Do you think that you are the first person to realize that there is a difference between America and perfection?

2. If all of the people who realize that things should be different leave, how will anything ever change?

3. If you leave, and things do get better, what right will you have to come back and enjoy that better America--having left just when there was work to be done?

*

As we walk through what is still a wilderness here in western Wyoming, I can’t help thinking about how my pioneer relatives must have felt. Being run off their farms back East, out of their beautiful cities in Kirtland, Ohio, Independence and Far West, Mo., and Nauvoo, Ill., they walked across desolation toward more desolation. How could they have not been angry about having to give up their birthright to take land that couldn’t sustain life?

But they came, and they brought material to make a flag honoring the country that had run them out, and they sent their best men to be soldiers, and they believed in the Constitution even though in their particular case, the enforcement of the Constitution was found lacking.

And eventually, in 1896, their new land did become a state, and they branched out to found more than 700 settlements throughout the western half of North America.

Retracing their travels, we sing a lot in the handcart company. We sing hymns and folk songs and show tunes and patriotic anthems.

A few weeks ago it occurred to me as we were singing “America the Beautiful” that to sing a song “and crown thy good with brotherhood” is not such a helpful request. It seems to me that we need more than that. As we are none of us all bad, so are none of us all good, though we have enough of both sides in our nature to keep us shedding tears of joy and anger and frustration and gratitude. Brotherhood being what we need, there’s no sense reserving it for “the good,” whoever they may be.

So, even though it ruins the rhyme, now when we march down the road behind our flag we sing it differently:

America, America, God shed his grace on thee.

And crown us all with brotherhood--from sea to shining sea.

* Kathy Stickel, 27, of Huntington Beach is filing periodic reports from the Mormon Trail Wagon Train, which is retracing the 1,000-mile route of the Mormon migration from Iowa to Utah 150 years ago.