Juneteenth: the Great American Novel & the Artificial National Holiday
Read the First, Repeal the Second
Well, my fellow Americans, I hope you had a day off for this year’s Juneteenth, and maybe even the good fortune to make a four-day weekend of it.
But can you tell me what you were celebrating?
Oh, you don’t quite know? Or, you say it’s about the end of slavery, but in a special way, that doesn’t so-much involve Abraham Lincoln?
Oh, and you also want to say it’s about black heritage, but again, in a unique way, one distinct from our celebrating the civil rights movement and its greatest leader, on MLK Day, and from what our school districts do with Black History Month?
Oh, and what’s this? We all must understand that some blacks will say Juneteenth is a capital-B Black Thing, which whites Won’t Understand, but, which all whites ought to celebrate anyhow?
Well, here’s something approaching the official explanation:
In this piece, I will show why we need to repeal Juneteenth the national holiday, and leave it up to local governments and states to retain it for themselves.
My main reason will be that Juneteenth was not adopted by widespread consensus after an extended discussion, and thus, it cannot but add to its commemoration of the end of slavery a reminder of the precipitous and bullying Woke politics of 2020-2021.
But before we get into all that, which might feel divisive, allow me to first tell you about something which I know can unite us. I’m talking about a work of literature, the strictly-speaking unfinished novel by Ralph Ellison, Juneteenth. Here’s a taste of the audiobook version, the first few pages:
Juneteenth the Novel
Juneteenth was taken from a body of draft material Ellison wrote for his second novel—his massive, and never completed, Three Days before the Shooting. It was to contain two main parts or “books,” and possibly three, but the second part, the one made into Juneteenth, was the most complete and polished of these. Ellison died in 1994, but had he worked closely with John F. Callahan, and appointed him his literary executor. It is Callahan who, with the green light from Ellison’s wife Fanny, put together Juneteenth, released in 1999 to widespread acclaim. He went on, in 2010, to arrange and publish, with Adam Bradley, all the material which Ellison had written for Three Days.
If you become smitten with Ellison the way I have, you’ll definitely want this tome (1,101 pages!), the only place to find “Book I,” (Ellison’s experiment with how his story centered on black characters might be seen “from the outside” by a white liberal reporter), or the “Georgia and Oklahoma material,” which might have become a “Book III.” But let’s talk about Juneteenth.
Wikipedia tells us that the “Great American Novel” is an ideal first expressed by an 1860s writer, John William de Forest. It lists the top candidates which critics have felt met its criteria, criteria which call for a “canonical novel that generally embodies and examines the essence and character of the United States.”
Now I think both of Ellison’s novels, Invisible Man and the not-quite-finished Juneteenth, belong to such a list of candidates, but let’s remind ourselves of what the candidates have typically been. In the list below, I’ve adjusted the Wikipedia one, omitting some of its more contemporary or more implausible candidates—such as Alcott’s Little Women—, and ordering it according what I sense is the consensus about which novels best meet the criteria:
1.) Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
2.) Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
3.) Melville, Moby Dick
4.) Faulkner Absalom, Absalom! and The Sound and the Fury
5.) Ellison, Invisible Man
6.) Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
7.) Crane, The Red Badge of Courage
8.) Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
9.) Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin
10.) Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans
11.) Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March
12.) Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
13.) McCarthy, Blood Meridian
14.) Morrison, Beloved
15.) Wallace, Infinite Jest
1-6 do reflect a strong consensus view, though there’ll ever be disagreement about which Faulkner novels to choose. I am quite a bit less sure about the remainder, though I do think The Grapes of Wrath is overrated, and I question the omission of Marilyn Robinson, Charles Portis, and Walker Percy.
Were it only up to me, in fact, I’d put Invisible Man at 3, or even 1, and in any case I’d insist that it is more useful to us today than Gatsby or Huckleberry can be.
But my main comment is that Ellison, like Faulkner, ought to get more than one entry on such a list, given the excellence of Juneteenth, and the way it is all about wrestling with the nature of America.
As Invisible Man did, it provides us with a mythology-like set of archetypal characters and symbols. It is different in its writing style being more decidedly Faulknerian and Joycean—i.e., experimental, and focused on reporting internal consciousness.
Juneteenth is also different in being unfinished, and for many, that should exclude it from any “G.A.N.” list. But by having been taken from the central section of a larger unfinished work, it is much less unfinished than a more typical stopped-at-this-point unfinished novel, such as Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon. You’re given a full story and character-arc, even if the ending of it is not as clear as you’d like. And the fact that you can feel a set of untold stories expanding beyond this core is a plus, not a minus.
Juneteenth’s plot unravels the mysteries and motivations behind an assassination-attempt on a Senator in the Senate Chamber itself, sometime in the 50s. That Senator “Sunraider,” though pro-segregation and consistently race-baiting, turns out to be Bliss, a man of ambiguous racial stock who could pass-as-white (and maybe really is white), but of unambiguous cultural heritage: he was raised by blacks. And in particular, he was raised by a jazzman-become-preacher named Hickman. Bliss’s life-story is told through a series of exchanged reminisces between he and Hickman at his hospital bed after the shooting. It is mainly about how he went astray, astray from his combined Christian and Afro-American-community-serving ministry, getting instead into filmmaking, general “Confidence Man” rambling, and finally, into segregation-friendly politics.
The core event recalled is a tent-revival they both participated in, one connected to a Juneteenth celebration of the 20s or earlier, Bliss as the side-kick child-preacher and Hickman as the main event, “God’s Trombone,” an Afro-American preacher at the height of his powers. That meeting displays both the poignant American/Christian hopes the set of Negroes (Ellison’s preferred term) working with Hickman had for the young Bliss, and, the beginnings of his going astray.1
I am summarizing material whose richness resists it, but I want to especially stress that the section on the tent meeting features what is likely the greatest fictional-sermon in American literature, Hickman’s, which poetically recounts how America destroyed almost to dissolving the cultures of the African slaves, and how, like a resurrection of the dry bones in Ezekiel, a new Afro-American culture arose, and most of all through the slaves’ new music.
I could quote you some of it, but it’s just too beautiful-profound for slicing and dicing—you gotta hear it in full, sounding out in you as you read in your armchair.
So that chapter, chapter 7, is special-enough by itself, as it gives us the greatest fictional American sermon, and one of the deepest meditations on Afro-American identity and music, to get Juneteenth onto any good “G.A.N. candidate” list, I think. And it is not the only section that attains that level of greatness.
Juneteenth the Homegrown Festival
So that’s my main message—take up Juneteenth and read!—and you could just ditch the rest of this if you want. But if you suspect you may eventually have some duty to deal with the politics of Juneteenth the national holiday, alas, you need to keep reading, and to come off that poetic mountain-top with me, down to the low arenas of our “politics.” But, we do get to linger upon one rather pleasant foothill first, the history about Juneteenth the homegrown festival.
Basically, certain Galveston and then Houston blacks, began a June 19th festival in the years after the Civil War, alternately called “Jubilee Day” or “Juneteenth,” to celebrate the end of slavery. The reason some gave for doing it on that date is that in 1865, most Texas slaves weren’t effectually freed until then; and added to this fact was the story that the Galveston slaves hadn’t heard about Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation until that day’s announcement by a Union general.
Celebration of the festival, always organized by the black communities themselves, and often done on their own property, spread all over Texas, as well as into Oklahoma and some parts of Arkansas and Louisiana. And it appears to have been common enough in those parts to have seemed as regular a part of the holiday calendar. For blacks in those areas, up to around 1920, it might have felt something like Utah’s Pioneer Day holiday does for Utah Mormons. That is, it was a big deal, and was regarded as a complement to, and as important as, if not more so than, July 4th. And it was also closely associated with the black churches, which generally ran it. In any case, it apparently spread into yet more areas of the South, such as Alabama, which is where Ellison depicts it happening in Juneteenth. There was a waning of the celebration’s practice on a large scale in the 20s/30s, in many areas even to extinction, but interest perked again after WWII began, and then really picked up in the 1970s, when the Black Power movement was influential. Texas adopted it as a state holiday in 1979, and many other states followed suit with some kind of official observance in the 1980s and 90s.
I’m getting a lot of this from this fine lecture, by the historian Shennette Garret-Scott:
I’m getting little help, though, from the AI engines. If I ask them “what percentage of black Americans celebrated Juneteenth in the 20th Century?” they say it cannot be estimated but must have been widespread, and if I ask “how many documented Juneteenth celebrations were there” in a certain period, they likewise balk.
I ask these questions, because 2020’s demand for Juneteenth was rather sudden, and as far as I can learn, most blacks outside Texas and Oklahoma seem to have not heard much about the holiday prior to that. Yes, some probably recall talk of it in 1999, when Ellison’s book was being publicized. I do know that neither The Bill Cosby Show of the 80s nor Martin of the early 90s ever mentioned Juneteenth, though Black-ish devoted one episode to it, in 2017. And in the three volumes of Taylor Branch’s America in the King Years, the indexes indicate no mention of the holiday over its 2,300 pages of detailed reporting.2 (Though, if you listen to Garret-Scott’s lecture, you’ll notice that Branch’s recounting of one major King campaign, the Poor People’s March, likely should have mentioned it.)
Someone probably has done the real research, but on the basis of my scouting, it looks like the basic story of awareness and practice of the festival is this: 1) a 1866-1920 period of grassroots practice, touching many parts of the nation, but concentrated in and around Texas, and at its height perhaps involving as many as 10-40% of America’s blacks, 2) a 1920s-1960s period of lower interest and more modest practice, with celebration ceasing in many areas, 3) a 1970s-2019 revival, but one that, because it was driven by activists and the acts of state-level politicians, was probably more under-the-radar of average blacks than our media types want to admit.
Juneteenth the Virtue-Signal
There were, however, some blacks who felt it should be a national holiday. Resolutions with little support were periodically put forward in Congress in the 90s and 00s, and one Texan activist, Opal Lee, began a campaign for it in 2016, undertaking a dramatic walk to DC as an elderly woman and organizing a petition in late 2019. That eventually gained 1.6 million signatures, but likely only had a few ten-thousand prior to May 2020, as I’m guessing it was one of things folks white and black glommed-onto in the wake of George Floyd’s death “as something they could do.”
Bills were submitted in February 2021 to establish Juneteenth as a federal holiday, and in June, the Senate passed its, by the special “unanimous consent” procedure, and the House passed its the next day, by a 415-14 vote. And of course Biden signed.
Do you recall any national debate or discussion of the issue?
I don’t either, but apparently, the House did have one hour of debate.
What Bugs Some Blacks & Historians about the Usual Juneteenth Story
Two things. First, the story about the Galveston slaves not knowing, for nearly two-and-a-half years, about the Emancipation Proclamation and that it would mean their freedom if the Union won, is pretty preposterous when you start to think about it. Listen to Baba the Storyteller if you need this point hammered home. (As a Texan black, Baba also gives you some recollections about how the festival was celebrated in his lifetime.)
As for why that story caught on, well, it could serve to encourage racist ideas of utterly ignorant black slaves, but it could serve other purposes also. Maybe it was a way to underscore the idea that June 19—a conveniently early summer date, and with symbolic adjacence to July 4th—was the best one for Texan blacks to fix a celebration upon. That is, if a historian could trace the fibbed-detail of “hearing for the first time!” back to its very first tellers, these might be white or black.
Second, when we say that June 19th was the final end of slavery in America, we are ignoring and covering-over the hard truth that slavery remained in effect in Kentucky and Delaware until the ratification of the 13th Amendment on December 6th, 1865, and, apparently—see Officer Tatum above—in the Choctaw Nation of the Indian Territory until even later.
The Case for Repealing Juneteenth as a National Holiday
A.) It was adopted precipitously, with no real discussion. In that sense, America did not choose it. Its hasty adoption spoke far more to the Democratic Party’s determination to deliver a legislative virtue-signal to blacks, and to the cowardice of Republicans before the pressure of the racially-loaded conventional-wisdom of the hour, than to either party’s considered weighing of how to commemorate our history.
B.) It commemorates an event, the ending of slavery, which was already partly honored in America by those states which celebrated Lincoln’s birthday, prior to the consolidation of his and Washington’s birthday, in 1968, into one holiday. That points toward another holiday-choice we could have made in 2021 to celebrate slavery’s end, and still could: restoring Lincoln’s day as a distinct one.
C.) To the extent that people want Juneteenth to celebrate the black community and its history of activism, that already happens with 1.) the national holiday MLK Jr. Day, and 2.) with the observance of Black History Month by most school districts.
D.) We should not encourage the pattern of national holidays (such as Columbus Day), or unofficial observances very-like national holidays (such as St. Patrick’s Day) being used to honor ethnic groups prominent in our national life. It is unfortunate that to some—if debatable—extent Columbus Day was used that way with Italian-Americans, and that the unofficial holiday of St. Patrick’s Day was clearly used that way with Irish-Americans. And notice: as (unofficial) Cinco de Mayo has been abandoned by most school districts, and as Hanukkah is both unofficial and technically religious, there are presently no national holidays, official or unofficial, honoring three ethnic minorities of great numerical or historical importance to our nation: Mexican-Americans, Jewish-Americans, and Native-Americans. Nor is there anything like an Anglo-American day. Thus, there is probably no avoiding the crude complaint which future activists and politicians could use, that “Blacks get three holidays/observances, while my group gets none!” Obviously, both MLK Day and Juneteenth can be justified, and better than Columbus Day can, as key to the general American history, but the risk we are now taking that our new holiday schedule could at some point elevate ethnic tensions, is nonetheless real.
E.) There is a concern raised by some, that Juneteenth was primarily pushed by the left for the sake of weakening the celebration of the Fourth, and generally stoking division. Consider the case black conservative The Officer Tatum makes:
I do not quite buy his theory about the motivations of most leftist leaders here, but without question Juneteenth has and will function for a minority of blacks as an alternative to, and thus a rejection of, July 4th. And some, like Tatum, would say I am naive to be ignoring the plain text of the act, which bizarrely says the holiday’s name is “Juneteenth National Independence Day.” Tatum would say there’s nothing bizarre about that language when you admit to yourself the real intention.
My best reply, I think, would be that Juneteenth the homegrown festival of the 19th century was a beautiful thing, but that even then, it had a contradiction—of commemorating both the shocking fact of American slavery and the hope-engendering American liberation from it—at its heart, but nonetheless, it did not serve to divide our nation. Ellison’s poetic depiction of one of its celebrations hints at why it did not, and how it could be celebrated in harmony with the 4th.
And yet, my sense is that there is something about declaring, and through federal government sanction, that all Americans should honor Juneteenth, which ups the chances that the divisive potentialities which have always been present in it will rise to the surface. Though I quickly add that any kind of commemoration or education that faces what American slavery was, contains that potentiality. While we should all want that facing of facts to occur, perhaps it is better suited to classes and somber commemoration ceremonies, than to national holidays. We perhaps fool ourselves when we think we can devise an event which simultaneously documents our nation’s greatest sin, and which celebrates the way our nation’s creed led to its end.
(Works of literature can do that, however.)
In any case, Tatum and I both think, though we oppose the national holiday, that many black families and communities should continue to celebrate Juneteenth, so long as they celebrate it in a spirit that does not oppose it to July 4th.
F.) Juneteenth as a national holiday is an artificial one. Congress’s act inflicts that artificiality both upon all Americans, and upon those who were already celebrating Juneteenth in its organic mode.
This is a core issue. The spirit of real festivity is allergic to the fake and the forced. I derive this from what I’ve learned from a German Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper, in his marvelous little book In Tune with the World: A Theory of Festivity (1963). I once explored its insights in two pieces, here and here, but we’ll start with this:
…the reason for joy, although it may be encountered in a thousand concrete forms, is always the same: possessing or receiving what one loves, whether actually in the present, hoped for in the future, or remembered in the past. Joy is an expression of love. …True as it is that a real festival cannot be conceived without joy, it is no less true that first there must be a substantial reason for joy, which might also be called the festive occasion.(23)
It is clear what that occasion was for the homegrown Juneteenth! And even as Reconstruction hopes were dashed and the de facto second-class citizenship of Segregation rose up in the 80s and 90s, the freed slaves knew this: they had been slaves, and an event occurred, after which they were no longer. God was owed thanks for that, and it was something to celebrate, regardless of the correct degree of gratitude also owed to Lincoln, the Republicans, the Union soldiers white and black, and the slaves who did things to undermine the Confederacy from within.
Connected to this, it is additionally clear that the freed TX, OK, LA, and AK blacks also came together on Jubilee Day/Juneteenth to celebrate their own communities. To speak Pieper-ian, festal “joy is the response of a lover receiving what he loves,” (23) and the freed blacks now had real room to express their love for themselves and their own. Not that all was sweetness and light—as common sense knows, and as Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God or Durand Jones’s Wait ‘til I Get Over, illustrate, a small community is a small community—even if it is a black-owned town—and some individuals, either for good reasons or bad, are going to chafe at celebrating it. But, when it’s sweet, it’s sweet, and sometimes the festival-time’s moments of fraternal love remind one of the proper aim of one’s community.
The local Afro-American communities were but part, of course, of the larger community, America, and given all the injustices it had and still wreaked upon blacks, especially at the local level, this posed a basic challenge to their democratic faith, to speak as Ellison sometimes did. Or as Pieper would frame the problem:
Not even the idea of freedom can inspire a people with a spirit of festivity, though the celebration of liberation might—assuming that the event though possibly belonging to the distant past, still has compelling contemporary force. Memorial days are not in themselves festival days. Strictly speaking, the past cannot be celebrated festively unless the celebrant community still draws glory and exaltation from that past, not merely as reflected history, but by virtue of a historical reality still operative in the present. (24)
Could blacks festively celebrate their past liberation? Was slavery’s end “still operative” in their present? As the South slid into the worst decades of segregation, the 1890s-1920s, you can see why not a few blacks answered no, and called Jubilee Day/Juneteenth a “gaudy illusion,” as Bliss on his bed (initially) does in Juneteenth. We could say that such despair is one of the things Ellison has his Hickman and all the Juneteenth revival’s organizers fighting against in the souls of black folks, including in their own, for the sake of America and their connection to it, yes, but more importantly, for the sake of their faith in God’s goodness, and life’s value.
What sort of faith in America is salutary for blacks? Well, there are many particular American factors involved in this tough question, but it also touches on universal, and even existential, issues:
Can we festively celebrate the birth of a child if we hold with Jean Paul Sartre’s dictum: “It is absurd that we are born”? Anyone who is seriously convinced that “our whole existence is something that would be better not being,” (Schopenhauer) …can no more celebrate the birth of his child than any other birthday… (25)
That is, if our demands upon life are set in a Sartre-ian or Schopenhauer-ian spirit, we can join in no festival. Similarly, if the demands of a black individual upon American life/history are set in such a spirit—Lord knows he’d have had more justification for that than those modern philosophers did—and not in one more like Ellison’s, he can never truly join in the celebration of July 4th or of Juneteenth.3
Related to this, is the fact that fake festivity is an ever-present possibility:
The pallor of merely “legal” holidays is evident from the fact that there is much discussion of how they really should be “celebrated.”(34)
The characteristic trait of the [French Revolution’s] new festivals [ones designed to replace Catholic ones] was their coercive nature. Those who did not participate made themselves suspect… Contemporary accounts…reek of boredom, the infinite boredom of utter unreality…the bombastic declaration of platitudes… (64-65)
Regarding Juneteenth now, those last two quotes most apply to Americans who had not previously celebrated it, or who are not black, and thus cannot honestly be part of the “celebrant community” for whom the remembered liberation is the occasion of the festival. Ask a group of white-, Mexican-, or Korean- Americans, what Juneteenth means for them, and the honest answer is: we might get a day off.
I should add that I don’t think the national Juneteenth has taken on the “coercive” aspect of the French Revolution’s festivals. Sure, that could come, but it hasn’t really happened yet.
But my primary concern here is not despotism itself, but how an ideological spirit throttles the festive one. Thus, to those Afro-Americans who did celebrate Juneteenth prior to 2021, I do say this: that cloud of artificiality and official ideology over the holiday in the less-black precincts of America could waft over into your good time.
G.) The story told about Juneteenth is too complicated for a workable national holiday. I get why a holiday pegged to the Emancipation Proclamation would be rejected by most blacks, given its limitation of who it was freeing right then, but as we saw, it turns out that a similar problem applies to June 19th. (The best date for celebrating the end of slavery would be December 6th, but very few organic festivals arose around that date.) Added to that confusion, there are the ones deriving from the fairy-tale about the Galveston slaves not having heard the news. Then there is the Lincoln issue—why didn’t we just return to celebrating Abe’s and George’s birthday’s separately, and let Lincoln’s stand as much as any American wanted it to for the end of slavery also? But that would be objected to in the name of cherishing instances of “black agency,” and abominating any hint of the “white savior” figure, right? So is Juneteenth about celebrating such agency but diminishing Lincoln’s? Not a few leftists talk that way. And yet, what Mrs. Lee said during her campaign was this:
…Yes, Juneteenth originated in TX, but 47 states now have it as a state day of observance to commemorate the ending of slavery... I believe Juneteenth can be a unifier because it recognizes that slaves didn't free themselves and that they had help, from Quakers along the Underground Railroad, abolitionists both black and white like Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison, soldiers and many others who gave their lives for the freedom of the enslaved.
So it’s about both black agency and help from non-blacks? But still not about help from Lincoln?
My point is that even the top proponents of the national holiday cannot get their story straight. We already have some degree of trouble and tension regarding holidays whose basic object of celebration is immediately clear, such as Christmas and Columbus Day, but Juneteenth seems resistant to quick comprehension.
And, in addition to such confusion, is the question of non-blacks celebrating it, a question which is not going to be settled by the platitude that “of course it’s for everyone.” Its history indicates otherwise, and presently, most non-blacks don’t know what to do with it. And given the insanity identity politics arrived at circa 2014-2024, you’ll forgive me for suspecting that if significant numbers of non-blacks were to begin holding actual celebrations on their own, and not just day-off leisure activities, distaste at how they’d do so on the part of some blacks would be expressed, and perhaps in the mode of condemning “cultural appropriation.”
That the holiday worked well-enough when it was a regional, organic, and blacks-centered one cannot tell us whether it will do so for the entire nation.
Conclusion
So those are my arguments for repealing it. I think we should do so as soon as we can, mainly to signal a national repudiation of the Woke and elitist politics of 2014-2024, a “politics” coming generations of conservatives will forever regard as one of the low-points of U.S. history. I know many Democrats and moderates-so-called do not yet understand that, but those who have any serious desire for national reconciliation must come to at least see why that view is plausible and widespread.
Maybe the repeal could be part of a larger holiday-rework, one which might—these are proposals I’d be open to, but do not judge one way or the other here—remove Columbus Day, add a celebration of the 19th Amendment’s (August) ratification (Susan B. Anthony’s birthday is, inconveniently, February 15th), and return Lincoln’s and Washington’s holidays to distinct dates.
And while we don’t hold holidays for or big commemorations of literary giants in America, if we began to, I say we should put Ralph Ellison at or near the front of the line. For we Americans of all ethnicities have so much to learn about ourselves from his wisdom, and Juneteenth really is a work for the ages.
Final point: what does all of this have to do with the standpoint of Covid/Vax-Disaster-haunted Dissident Conservatism? Well, as that disaster has shaken our conservative faith in America in a fundamental way, and forced us to learn how to live-side-by-side with those who have retreated into denial and mendacity rather than permit a real Reckoning, a tad like all those whites—including eventually most Republican ones—who pretended that segregation was as normal/American as could be, we likely have a good deal to learn from those Afro-Americans who long celebrated Juneteenth, about how to rebuild such faith, albeit now in a more tragedy-attuned key.
It was Callahan who picked the title for Juneteenth. I like it, but a case can be made that something like “Hickman and Bliss” would have been a better one.
FWIW, the same happens with other Afro-American tomes, such as the collection of King speeches titled A Testament of Hope, and Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters. Juneteenth was important to Ellison, but possibly not to most 20th-century black thinkers and leaders. More research on this is needed.
While Ellison’s essay “What America Would Be Like without Blacks” is primarily aimed at whites, its very title forces blacks to face the fact that had there never been an America, they, both as individuals and as a people, never would have been either. And the last two sentences of that essay are these:
They are an American people who are geared to what is and who yet are driven by a sense of what it is possible for human life to be in this society. The nation could not survive being deprived for their presence because, by the irony implicit in the dynamics of American democracy, they symbolize both its most stringent testing and the possibility of the greatest human freedom.
Really great post, Carl. You've done your homework!