On a spring Sunday, eighty years ago in Manhattan’s Central Park, a hundred and fifty thousand newly naturalized citizens gathered to recite the oath that they would “bear true faith and allegiance” to the United States. They made their declaration as part of a celebration of “I Am an American Day,” created by Congress to salute the blessings of citizenship. In attendance were almost a million and a half people, who heard speeches by an immigrant from Prussia, Senator Robert F. Wagner, and by the Greenwich Village-born son of immigrants from Italy, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia.
Leading everyone in the Pledge of Allegiance, after brief remarks, was Judge Learned Hand, who was seventy-two and in his twentieth year on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in Manhattan. Until then, most Americans had never heard of him, though Hand was well known in legal circles. His remarks—barely five hundred words—turned him into a revered public figure.
Hand spoke in a mid-Atlantic accent, reflecting his upbringing in a family of lawyers and judges in Albany. You can hear him talking, in a hearty, singsong voice, at the end of a short Library of Congress recording made two years earlier, of him singing a Civil War ballad that he had learned as a boy. Hand’s remarks, titled “The Spirit of Liberty,” came a couple of weeks before June 6, 1944—D-Day and the beginning of the end of the Second World War in Europe. His subject was what the United States was fighting for in that global war—what it meant to be an American. (He did not, in addressing the new citizens in the park, acknowledge the Native Americans here first or the enslaved African Americans who hadn’t chosen to come here.)
He began:
We have gathered here to affirm a faith, a faith in a common purpose, a common conviction, a common devotion. Some of us have chosen America as the land of our adoption; the rest have come from those who did the same. For this reason we have some right to consider ourselves a picked group, a group of those who had the courage to break from the past and brave the dangers and the loneliness of a strange land. What was the object that nerved us, or those who went before us, to this choice? We sought liberty; freedom from oppression, freedom from want, freedom to be ourselves. This we then sought; this we now believe that we are by way of winning.
The heart of his message was this:
What then is the spirit of liberty? I cannot define it; I can only tell you my own faith. The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the mind of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias; the spirit of liberty remembers that not even a sparrow falls to earth unheeded; the spirit of liberty is the spirit of Him who, near two thousand years ago, taught mankind that lesson it has never learned but never quite forgotten; that there may be a kingdom where the least shall be heard and considered side by side with the greatest.