Dick Hubert’s Worldview: In 2026 it will be just 250 years since the Declaration of Independence!

How young a nation we are, still with growing pains

August 29, 2024 at 2:05 a.m.

Lakota warrior Steven Standing Bear’s painted mural of the Battle of Little Big Horn on display in the American Indian section of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. (Courtesy photo of Metropolitan Museum of Art website)

You can never stop studying and understanding history. Especially our own.

Last week’s Westmore News highlighted the collective efforts to teach current day Americans about the Marquis de Lafayette’s 1824 tour of the then United States—45 years after the end of the Revolutionary War he fought in and helped win with French support.

A Lafayette reenactor marking the 200^th anniversary of Lafayette’s stop in what is now Port Chester was pictured on our front page shaking hands with Rye Town Supervisor Gary Zuckerman.

It immediately brought to mind the famed march through Paris of our just landed soldiers soon to fight with the French against the Germans in World War I.

To quote from the Pritzker Military Museum’s description of the occasion: “ On July 2, 1917, United States troops made a symbolic march through Paris ending at the grave of the Marquis de Lafayette, who had convinced the French to aid in the American Revolution. Standing in front of the tomb, Colonel Charles Stanton famously declared, ‘Lafayette, we are here!’ This phrase was largely attributed to General Pershing, though he did not say it.”

We have readers whose sense of history is so narrow that one of them, Thomas F. Ceruzzi, took to these pages to denounce France and announce his personal boycott of all things French after watching the Olympic opening ceremony from Paris and finding one sequence he didn’t like.

His ancestors might very well have passed through Ellis Island and on the way felt tears of joy come into their eyes as they saw the Statue of Liberty—France’s gift to the U.S.

As the French would say, “C’est la vie.”

I wish that Mr. Ceruzzi could have served with me in the United States Army during my tour of duty in the northeastern French city of Verdun in 1962-64. France was still recovering from both WWI and II, and our presence was welcomed by everyone except then French President Charles de Gaulle. But the people—ah the people, loved us. And we loved them back.

France and the U.S. have had a special relationship that will be celebrated again in 2026—the 250^th anniversary of our Declaration of Independence.

Which has brought me up short thinking: good grief, 250 years. Are we that young of a nation? What a tumultuous 250 years it’s been! And continues to be.

Rethinking where we’ve been
as a nation

A visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “American Indian” exhibition last week brought back vividly to me how we’ve been rethinking our “national founding” story and our own history.

Featured prominently is a pencil, ink, and watercolor on muslin of the Battle of Little Big Horn, where on June 25, 1876 a combined force of Cheyenne and Lakota warriors destroyed the army of Lt. Gen. George Armstrong Custer (“Custer’s Last Stand,” as it was taught in my American History course back in the day).

The artist, Steven Standing Bear, took part in the battle as a 16-year-old warrior. Forty years later he created what the Met curators call “this sweeping representation...combining six conflict episodes into one scene.”

    Making amends for its decades long refusal to acknowledge the artistic talent of Indigenous peoples, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s American Indian section now displays art like this: the traditional dress of Pacific Northwest Indigenous women.
 By Dick Hubert   

Where once the Indians were the “bad guys,” today we understand that the colonists were the bad guys taking land away from the Indigenous people who had lived here for thousands of years.

All those broken treaties with the Indian peoples have led us in this era to combine Columbus Day with Indigenous People’s Day. The collective guilt of our treatment of Indigenous people is finally catching up with us.

In those 250 years we’ve also had a reckoning with our country’s other initial sin: its enslavement of Black Americans.

But the progress to right these wrongs continues in fits and starts.

We now have a candidate for President on the Democratic Party ticket who could be not only our first woman President, but also our first of Black and Asian descent.

And if she and her Vice-Presidential running mate (the Governor of Minnesota) are elected, the ascending Governor of Minnesota (now the Lt. Governor) will become the first Native American governor of a state in American history.

And we have a chance as voters to affirm this historical progress.

Are you ready, dear readers, to cast your vote?

Calling Dr. Miriam Levitt Flisser

Prior to major elections I try to interview candidates for our Congressional District and for major offices in Westchester County.

But that does require the candidates to answer e-mails, phone calls, or even provide on their website the means for those of us in the media to reach them.

So it has been especially frustrating to try to contact the Republican candidate for the 16th Congressional District, Dr. Miriam Levitt Flisser, a renowned pediatrician and the former Mayor of Scarsdale.

Her web page (https://miriam4congress.com/) provides the opportunity to make a donation but has absolutely no contact information save for a Post Office box.

A web search shows the last time she gave an interview to a publication was in her run for Congress in 2022.

I remember vividly reporting at the time that the Republican Party, while nominating her, provided zero financial support.

That seems to be the same situation this time around, as all Republican fundraising efforts in the 16th District that have come to my attention have been for Congressman Mike Lawler, who is running for re-election in the neighboring 17th District against our former Congressman, Democrat Mondaire Jones.

I have a lot of questions for Dr. Flisser, and I’m sure there are readers who want to know why she is running against the Democratic nominee, County Executive George Latimer, and how she feels now that Donald Trump has Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s support for his campaign.

So, if any of you know Dr. Flisser and can communicate with her, tell her she’s missing an opportunity to state her case in these pages.

Again, I’d like to interview her, and I’m sure I’m not alone in the local media in that regard. 

Dick Hubert, a retired television news producer-writer-reporter living in Rye Brook, has been honored with the Peabody Award, the DuPont Columbia Award and the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Journalism Award.

Editor’s Note: This column, written by Dick Hubert, represents his opinion and not that of this newspaper.