Gary Gallagher: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah. And I think there’s a real cohesion and resilience to the Union, as we’ve talked about. I think people are, despite the discourse and the bickering, there’s a real love of nation that maybe is not often expressed- … explicitly. But there is a sense that we’re all in this kinda together, and that we’re yelling at each other. Kinda like you have a family Thanksgiving dinner where there’s very passionate yelling and arguing, but there’s a kinda assumption that we’re still a family. At least that’s the hope. You know, one of the questions that the Civil War asked is, what is America? So I have to ask you from, from over 50 years of studying the Civil War… like what, what do you think? What is this country? What is this union? What are, what is the core that makes us who we are? Well, I think in a lot of ways it’s much of what it was in the mid-19th century. I still think it’s a magnet for… I mean, we’re in an unbelie- we’re far more diverse now as a people than we were during the Civil War because we continue to act in the same way as it did in the Civil War, only they’re not Germans and Ir- people come from everywhere here now. I mean, they literally come from everywhere here now. And everybody doesn’t find a nice easy road here by any means, and there are lots of things wrong with the United States. But I still think the United States acts… Has a, has a role in the world that’s unlike, I won’t say any other place, but I can’t think of a place that’s quite like it, that has so many people coming from so many places, who somehow manage to fit into this mosaic. And then I think most people do have a way to fit into the mosaic, and then they become part of the old mosaic when the next group of people who are not like them come in, and those are the ones who are the new ones fitting in. Yeah, sometimes I think about, I’m sorry to romanticize it, but because I do think that Barack Obama was one of the great speech makers of my lifetime. And I, I sometimes imagine what Lincoln would have thought if he could attend an Obama speech. If he saw that Obama became president, that an African American became President of the United States of America. It’s, it seems like such a trivial thing to say, but I think it’s not trivial at all. It’s one of the great accomplishments of our country.…

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