A Day We Are Not Likely to Forget

By Jim Klobuchar

We watched the inaugural of Barack Obama in a public room that looked out on the modest homes of urban Minneapolis families, some of them badly hurt by the economic crisis. Two huge television screens hung from the ceiling recording one of the extraordinary hours of American history.

Not many of us knew each other. But there were faces in that room that reflected some of the enduring times of American history.

They were the faces of men who had served America during its wars; the faces of men and women whose African ancestors slaved in cotton fields and stood on the auction blocks of Jamestown; there were men and women whose immigrant forbears had come to America in the steerage of ocean ships, some headed for steel mills and coal mines, others for the farm fields in places now called Nebraska, Kansas and the Dakotas; There were two or three people whose ancestors came here earlier than that, in the very first years of settlement, and their ancestors where there in the Revolutionary War and in the founding of our America.

I saw faces that linked us with the struggles of the Native Americans of 150 years ago, and their struggles now. And women who had devoted part their lives to lifting the horizons of the women of America, and the world; other faces that joined us with the pride and excitement of the Asian and Hispanic men and women who now call themselves Americans.

And we were together.

Barack Obama was speaking. An African-American president. Could Roosevelt have imagined? Could Lincoln? Could Martin King? I remembered the day in my childhood in northern Minnesota when I sat with my parents and listened to the voice of Franklin Delano Roosevelt coming to us on the Philco radio, telling us that America would come out the Depression and there would be jobs again and the farms would produce again.

And I looked over to my father and mother, who were not demonstrative in their love but now were holding hands. My father, who worked 1,500 feet underground in an iron mine in northern Minnesota, nodded when Roosevelt said:

“We'll work our way out of it. ”

And now Barack Obama was saying: “We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our founding fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the flood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expediency’s sake. And so to all other peoples and governments who are watching today, from the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born: know that America is a friend of each nation, and every man, woman and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and that we are ready to lead once more.”

Slowly a few in the room stood, and now all were on their feet, some of them in tears, and all were applauding. Why? Because this was a voice of an America of our immigrant grandparents, and those who came before them, the America they had envisioned and then lived. It didn’t give them gold or nor even much comfort.

It gave them respect, and a life, and it gave their children a school.

This was not only an orator’s America or a politician’s America, but the restatement of an America that still strives today in the midst of struggle to rediscover itself and to renew itself; and to hold out a hand not only to its people but to the world and say: “We have something to share; not only our hope and some of our strength but willingness to lead, not to dominate."

If you had any familiarity with the times of Roosevelt, you knew that the oratory would disappear into the libraries, and the inevitable conflicts over direction would come. But what came out of that day more than 70 years ago was a conviction: that one way or another this country was going to find itself again, that it would find work for people who needed it, food for those who do not have enough, and a surging new energy for itself and the world. The war came. America led. It became strong. But strong is not necessarily forever. Nor are the lilacs and rosebuds of an idealized society

What we have today is a reality, that we, the world, need healing and new strength--and America's people again can offer it.

You have the feeling of a goal that somehow can be reached. If so, it cannot be reached in a year. But road is open today.

It was defined eloquently enough by Barack Obama, but I thought just as memorably by the old preacher who gave the benediction, with some hidden whimsy for an American-style windup. He was beseeching The Almighty “to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get back, when brown will stick around, (the laughs started coming about here) when yellow will be mellow, when the red man can get ahead, man (more laughs) and when white will embrace what is right.”

Without, he probably was thinking, fright.

Was it one of those days to engrave?

It was all of that.