Only devoted students of history have heard of him, but in the years leading up to the American Declaration of Independence, John Dickinson, next to Benjamin Franklin, was probably the most famous American. He was renowned as a champion of American rights and liberty. His writings during this period did more than any others to defend and define the American Cause. But one decision would cast Dickinson from fame into obscurity.

Sergeant York, the highest-grossing movie of 1941, opened in American theaters in July and was still playing after the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7. A biographical film starring Gary Cooper as the WWI hero Alvin York, it would receive 11 Oscar nominations and win two. Young men went directly from watching the movie in theaters to the enlistment offices, to sign up for the war that had just come to America. And the hero who inspired them to join the fight was a man of peace. 

On New Year’s Day 1863, President Lincoln signed the proclamation he had promised a hundred days before. Lincoln understood better than anyone the constitutional challenges to emancipation. He took the greatest care to draft the proclamation in terms that could be defended before the highest court in the land. Then in the last weeks of his life, he “left no means unapplied” to getting the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery, approved by Congress.

January 1, 1942 had been set aside by President Roosevelt as a Day of Prayer. He had good reason for doing this; it was a dark time. The Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor just a few weeks before. Then Hitler declared war on the United States. America was suddenly at war with the greatest military powers in Europe and in Asia. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was Roosevelt’s guest at the White House for strategic discussions. They spent a memorable, and very American, New Year’s Day together.

From August to the last week of December, as David McCullough writes, “1776 had been as dark a time as those devoted to the American Cause had ever known.” As the year ended, despite the stunning and historic victory at Trenton the day after Christmas, there was good reason to fear that Washington’s army would dissolve and with it any hopes for the American Cause. Washington pleaded with the men to stay on another month. The fate of liberty depended on them.

By summer 1776, the most powerful navy in the world was conveying the greatest British expeditionary force in history across the ocean to suppress the American rebellion. George Washington’s ragtag Continental Army seemed no match for this great force. They suffered one defeat after another. Winter was coming on. Enlistments would expire at the end of the year. On December 20, Washington wrote Congress: “10 days more will put an end to the existence of this army.”

John Wayne began life as Marion Morrison in Winterset, Iowa. After his family made its way to L.A., and an injury sidelined him from USC football, he began working full-time as a prop man for movie studios. His natural strength, good spirit, good looks, and determination carried him through nearly a decade of B-movies before he became a star. Thirty-five years after his death, he was still listed as one of America’s five favorite movie stars; he became “indivisibly associated with America itself.”

Among the countless millions of human events postponed, rescheduled, or cancelled in the long hard year 2020, one was a gathering scheduled for an eight square mile volcanic island in the Pacific Ocean. The gathering was to be a “Reunion of Honor” commemorating the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Iwo Jima.

Abigail Adams recorded that when her husband and Thomas Jefferson visited Shakespeare’s birthplace, Jefferson fell upon the ground and kissed it and John Adams cut a chip from Shakespeare’s chair. Jefferson and Adams both revered Shakespeare, as did Abigail, and they all understood how necessary it was for a free people to revere what deserves reverence. As this story shows, they also understood that true reverence needs to be complemented by good humored irreverence.

Every president since Lincoln has issued a Thanksgiving proclamation every year, but on September 25, 1789, when the U.S. House of Representatives had only been operating for about six months, not everyone was sure that Thanksgiving was a good idea.