A Book Review… Finding Evidence That U.S. Journey In World History Nurtured By Divine Guidance

By DEXTER DUGGAN

The American Miracle: Divine Providence in the Rise of the Republic, by Michael Medved, Crown Forum, crownforum.com, New York, ISBN 9780553447262, 416 pages hardback, $29.00, 2016. Available at amazon.com.

In 1815, the Ursuline nuns feared the powerful British would overwhelm the American troops and destroy the Ursulines’ city at the Battle of New Orleans.
During a night of tears and prayer to Our Lady of Prompt Succor, the nuns’ prioress made a public vow to have a solemn Mass of thanksgiving every year henceforth should Gen. Andrew Jackson’s soldiers somehow manage to overcome the hopeless-seeming odds against the renowned royal fighters.
Win the Americans did, killing, among others, the famed 36-year-old Gen. Edward Pakenham, who had brought a secret royal commission from England with him, making him an earl and governor of Louisiana when he achieved the anticipated triumph.
Also accompanying him to the New World was his aristocratic young fiancée, waiting on a ship in the Gulf of Mexico for the British victory celebrations to begin. As the general died on the battlefield, “his adoring fiancée anxiously awaited news of triumph.”
She would not have the same happy memories of that day in New Orleans as the nuns did, receiving the Eucharist in gratitude.
Now look forward to another war 50 years later.
A handsome, wealthy young celebrity engaged to be married gives it all up, including his life, as he opposes a tyrant who has brought great suffering to millions. The celebrity unsuccessfully had planned to kidnap the tyrant, to demoralize that ruler’s troops and reinvigorate the tyrant’s flagging foes.
Then the opportunity arises to shoot him, with the ruler’s security man apparently absent and imbibing at a nearby tavern.
The gunman succeeds in firing a fatal shot, but soon is tracked down and killed, with a photo of his fiancée in his pocket and a request to tell his mother “I died for my country.” That sounds like heroic self-sacrifice, except the wealthy young man viewed African slavery as a great blessing for all in this “favored nation.”
He was assassin and famed actor John Wilkes Booth, while his victim he viewed as a terrible tyrant was Abraham Lincoln, whose unsuspecting last words before he was shot at Ford’s Theatre may have been a hope to visit Jerusalem someday, “and see those places hallowed by the footsteps of the Savior.”
The American Miracle: Divine Providence in the Rise of the Republic is likely to leave the reader glad he’s not God, whose perfect justice through the ages must sort out, among various considerations, the mixed motivations, sincerity, and grasp of reality and truth of each individual, sometimes at another’s throat, at the time of Personal Judgment.
However, this hefty book by national radio talk host, writer, and historian Michael Medved leaves no doubt of the author’s view — and that of many historical figures he cites — that the United States was led by divine guidance to its prominent position in the world.
Toward the end of the book, Medved — whose own Ukrainian grandparents believed their coming to the U.S. was “part of the cosmic plan” — cautions against confusing “the reality of American exceptionalism with fantasies about American perfectionism.
“To argue that a higher power directed the United States to a unique and valuable role in the world isn’t the same as insisting that our national saga unfolded without flaw, folly, or failure,” Medved writes, adding:
“The confidence that this nation has been distinctively blessed doesn’t mean that it’s been exclusively blessed — or that it has provided an unmitigated blessing to each citizen, or to all nations, at every moment in its history.”
Although this nation’s leaders long shared the concept of the U.S.’s special role, Medved notes the growth of a more recent “emphasis on guilt over gratitude in our teaching of history.”
It doesn’t take a miracle worker to recognize that with the rise of New Left culture in the 1960s — the leftist-poisoned generation into which little Barack Hussein Obama was born — the U.S. was cast as a scheming villain, often due to its opposition to Communist aggression in Southeast Asia.
The days were dying of the “cold war liberal,” like Democratic President John F. Kennedy, apparently assassinated by a fan of Communist revolution in 1963.
After beginning with the early days of this nation then looking back to colonial settlers, Medved pretty much ends our foundational decades with the assassination of Lincoln in 1865, which is fitting for a book whose title notes the rising years of the republic, not the nation’s entire span of existence until now.
Miracles may not be recognizable just when they occur. “Like Americans of prior generations, we’ll find it difficult to spot signs of divine intervention until history has already moved past the moment of deliverance,” he writes.
Indeed, Medved, guesting on the Seth and Chris Show on March 23 on the Phoenix-based KKNT Radio (960 AM), said the most frequent question he has gotten since this book came out late last year is whether Donald Trump’s election was divinely providential or a curse. And Medved’s answer is, “We’ll see.”
In the book, Medved looks back to recall that the vision “of our abiding national purpose has impressed countless observers around the world,” including Pope Pius XII shortly after WWII, who said, “America has a genius for great and unselfish deeds. Into the hands of America God has placed the destiny of an afflicted mankind.”
There’s a wealth of facts throughout the book, including more than one may wish to know about Sam Houston, first president of the Republic of Texas, unless the reader is deeply interested in the history of the Lone Star State. However, various prominent figures in the original 13 colonies are entirely ignored.
Still, Houston’s life helps show that the American past is nowhere as simple as leftist grievance-mongers would have you imagine, with arrogant white oppressors lined up against everyone else.
As a teenager, Houston, who loved Greek mythology, had run away to live among Cherokees on an island not far from where Chattanooga has grown in Tennessee, dressing and hunting like the Indians. Local chief Oolooteka adopted the respectful Houston as his son and named him “the Raven,” a significant symbol of good luck.
Years later, when the politically experienced Houston was on trial for beating a congressman with his cane in Washington, D.C., the Raven stayed at the Indian Queen Hotel and showed up every day for the proceedings wearing some element of Indian garb, bringing a demand from then-President Andrew Jackson to go buy a decent suit of clothes.
Although a Southerner who favored states’ rights, Houston fought courageously to keep Texas from seceding from the Union over the slavery issue, but was removed from office by secessionists, some of whom unsuccessfully called for his execution for treason.
With a decidedly mixed romantic and religious personal history, Houston had started to get his moral life in order when he married a fervent 20-year-old Baptist lady, 26 years younger than himself. Despite predictions this match never could last, they stayed together the remaining 23 years of the Raven’s life and had eight children.
In a sense, Houston even could provide a necessary example to lax U.S. Catholic bishops whose so-called Catholic politicians are okay with receiving the Eucharist no matter how much the pols defy basic Church morality.
Although attending church regularly, Houston told a pastor that he refrained from receiving the Protestant communion because he still had religious doubts, and had heard that unbelievers who took the Lord’s Supper would suffer eternal torment. When the pastor explained the difference about defiant reception, Houston agreed to full-immersion baptism.
Although 21st-century secular multiculturalists who have such sway on campuses and in newsrooms profess their respect for Native American heritage, one wonders what they make of the Indians’ clear belief in divine guidance in ordering their lives.
As one example, when Houston returns to Oolooteka and his Cherokees, the chief knows that his adopted son had fallen on hard times and departed from “the white path you were walking. . . . I am glad of it — it was done by the Great Spirit. . . . We are in trouble and the Great Spirit has sent you to us to give us counsel.”
Or perhaps the multiculturalists’ respect for Native Americans goes no deeper than their professed love these days of Third Worlders whose traditional morality is under unending assault by globalist abortionists and apostles of sexual disorientation.
The Third World, you know, is purer than the Western world, except when it’s so pure that it needs hammering into immoral conformity by International Planned Parenthood and corrupt George Soros’ LGBTQ militants.

Lincoln’s Theology

Among so many other points that one might mention in this book, it’s interesting that the Mexican government came to fear that the yanquis it had invited in to help develop the state of Coahuila y Tejas in the early 19th century would feel closer to their country of origin than to coup-ridden Mexico City.
The Mexicans were correct, and the independent Republic of Texas started simmering as an idea. Just a note when twenty-first-century Americans are mocked as racists for fearing that unending illegal immigration northward can have a negative effect on the U.S. future.
Although it generally took a month for dispatches to travel from Mexico City to Washington, D.C., back then, anyone can phone anywhere in the world in a few seconds now. But the issues and arguments can be pretty much the same.
In his brief, deft second inaugural address, little more than a month before he was assassinated, Lincoln leaned heavily on a religious view and mentioned God 14 times in 701 words, Medved writes, adding that many influential journalists were disappointed in the re-elected president’s remarks.
The New York World complained that Lincoln’s “theology” sounded as if he were in the Dark Ages as much as the Pope, seeking “refuge in piety.” Whether in print then or delivered electronically now, how similar such media sneering sounds.
With its great cast of powerful characters, Medved’s educational book is worth the time.