(As prepared.)
Congratulations to all of you, the astounding Penn Class of 2026. happy faces. Honored to be with you. Thank you for having me here.
Glad to see so many Having heard Provost Jackson give me that much-too-kind introduction, I wish I could tell you a heroic tale about myself that will show how, from birth, I wanted to spend my life writing all of these history books on American Presidents.
It would be great if I could tell you that when I was living in Chicago as an infant, my Mother read me books by timeless scholars like Gibbon – or, better yet, books by some of Penn’s many towering history professors. But I can’t.
What really happened was this. True story. When I was seven years old, my parents took me to see the historic sites of Abraham Lincoln in our state capital of Springfield.
I got to walk through Lincoln’s house, where Abraham and Mary raised their sons. guide showed me the chair where Lincoln sat while reading to his boys.
The tour I wish I could tell you that I asked the tour guide about Gettysburg or Lincoln’s views on civil liberties, but I was seven years old. So I asked the guide, “When Lincoln’s boys behaved badly, did he spank them?”
The guide scowled. He told me, “No, Lincoln did not believe in discipline. misbehaved, he let those brats run wild through this house!”
When they From the moment I heard him say that, Lincoln was my man. I asked our town librarian for children’s books on Lincoln and other Presidents. After a while, I slowly realized that this could be my profession.
So with help from some amazing teachers along the way, just like yours at Penn, I’ve gotten to write history books — just as I began wanting to do when I was seven. It’s been decades since I started. I love what I do. Most of the time, it doesn’t feel like work.
Okay, enough about myself. Let me use my skill set, as a historian, and offer you a brief political history of your Class of 2026.
Most of you were born in the twenty-first century. Those who grew up in the United States did so under the shadow of 9/11 — the first major foreign attack on our territory since 1814, when British soldiers burned our Capitol and White House.
As you were growing up, the U.S. government waged two long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. When Hurricane Katrina struck, our federal officials failed. Then came a Great Recession, which destroyed the jobs of millions of factory workers. Many of us never got those jobs back. Millions of American families were broken.
To an earlier generation than mine, the federal government looked pretty good. Roosevelt and Truman led a united patriotic nation to win World War II. Dr. Jonas Salk and some in our federal government saved us from polio. To the generation of the early 1960s, the federal government meant new coast-to-coast highways and sending American astronauts to the Moon. We were winning the struggle with the Soviet Union. In 1965, our President and Congress brought forth a law that was considered almost sacrosanct by Presidents of both parties. That law was called the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Class of 2026, your generation knows our national government for some history that is more bleak. You have been taught about our tragic misadventure in Vietnam, which killed sixty thousand idealistic young Americans. With your own eyes, you have watched a growing gap between rich and poor, and so many frozen out of the American Dream.
We knew the tragedy of Coronavirus, which altered our lives to this day. My beloved son Alex will be thirty-two years old this month. He is with us today. Alex is a doctor who had the honor of being trained at Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine and Wharton’s program in health care management.
Along with his med school classmates, during the Covid pandemic, Alex worked here in local hospitals. Like most of you with your families, we were terrified that our beloved son and his friends might themselves come down with Covid. Did any of us imagine that over a million Americans would perish from that disease?
In 2026, some pollsters tell us that we Americans are on the abyss – that we are divided, pessimistic and furious. I believe that some elements of our national crisis echo those of our Civil War struggle over slavery, as well as the late 1930s, when our citizens argued into the night about mobilizing for war against Adolf Hitler. One friend of mine recalls how at dinner in the 1930s, his parents and brothers would get into shouting matches about the coming war, storm out of the room and go upstairs in anger without speaking or eating.
Here we are in Philadelphia, two hundred fifty years after our Declaration of Independence.
I’d like to reach back into history and talk briefly about six profound American traditions that, I believe, we have to renew if we are to make it safely through what is turning out to be this fateful year of 2026.
My first tradition is rule of law. Freedom from violence. Equal protection so that all Americans are treated with fairness. From our judicial system, no special favors, no special punishment.
Number two is free and fair elections. All legal voters empowered to do their civic duty. Unlike the British monarchy, our Founders gave control of our federal government to our citizens. Every two years, Americans give Presidents and Congress a performance review. That’s what elections are.
During the Civil War and World War II, Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt were urged to cancel our midterm elections. Some demanded that those Presidents send U.S. Army soldiers to occupy various states, surround our polling places and perhaps even impose martial law.
Instead, the wise Lincoln and FDR replied with four words: let the elections proceed. These two men wanted to show Americans and the world that our democracy was strong and durable.
The third tradition is our Founders’ dream of a political system that showed honesty, candor, competence, ethics, compassion, decency and self-sacrifice. Presidents John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan quoted from John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, who once said that we Americans must always conduct ourselves like a “City upon a Hill” and be ever vigilant that the “eyes” of the world are upon us.
Over on Walnut Street here in Philadelphia, Thomas Jefferson dreamt of a political culture so clean, thrifty, honorable and efficient that what he called our “contagion of democracy” would spread around the world.
Number Four is robust leadership from every part of our society – not just Washington, D.C. In 1776, the big British decisions were made by their King. Our Founders hoped, by contrast, that if our citizens disliked the actions of a President, Congress or Supreme Court, they would come to our national rescue by getting more active in politics.
As Harry Truman used to say, in America, the most powerful job title should never be “Mr. President.” It should always be “Mr. Citizen.”
Let me put this in my own way. I say that all of us should remember that, under our Constitution, we Americans do not work for a President – a President is supposed to work for us.
Number Five is the place in American society of those of us who are historians and scholars. Most of our Founders hoped that our historians would study past leaders and citizens with both sympathy and skepticism.
Unlike in monarchies and dictatorships, the Founders aspired for us to correct our society through constant self-criticism. The critics of America’s past and present, they believed, deserved at least as much honor as the sycophants.
I believe that the job of an American historian – every day – is to study and learn from both our successes and our disasters. I bless Benjamin Franklin, our gracious host in this stadium. What did Franklin tell us? Franklin said that “the first responsibility of every citizen” is “to question authority.”
In 2026, some D.C. politicians would prefer that American historians perform for them like obedient circus clowns. They want our historians to ignore or make excuses for any fault or blemish we discover in our American past. Our Founders would be horrified by this demand, which does not fit a democracy.
Right now, at museums and historic sites across the United States, there is growing federal pressure to destroy signs, labels and exhibits that show things about our history that may not conform to what is now handed down from Washington, D.C., as the official version of American history.
This official pressure from Washington, D.C., is painfully obvious with the history of slavery and Black Americans. There is growing evidence of a compulsion by some federal politicians to pressure scholars to shrink or even erase crucial elements of Black history.
This malign attempt to deprecate Black history is wrong. It is not the American way. We have to demand that it stop.
The last of my six traditions is national unity. Our Founders hoped that we Americans would lift tankards of ale and wrestle with one another about politics. That was what was missing from the British system, where the orders were handed down from the palace.
Our Founders made our President both chief of state and political leader. With the flawed but noble George Washington as their model, they hoped that our leaders would strive, whenever they could, to unite our fractious nation – the nation that Jimmy Carter, on our American Bicentennial in 1976, aptly called “a beautiful mosaic.”
My prayer for our country today is this: no matter how bruising our political differences, we will never forget that we are all members of the same big American family. We are all bound forever by what Lincoln called “our bonds of mutual affection.”
Okay, one more story — then I will be quiet. Let’s all travel in time back to a starlit historic night here in Franklin Field — June 1936.
The backdrop of that evening was the effort by Adolf Hitler and some American demagogues to push our world and nation toward fascist autocracy.
Here in Franklin Field, at the end of the 1936 Democratic convention, Franklin Roosevelt accepted his second nomination for President. In a famous address, FDR told the crowd that in 1936, they faced “a Rendezvous with Destiny.”
Few people know what happened to FDR in this stadium just before he spoke. Devastated by polio, the President was eager to preserve the public illusion that he could walk. So before making his grand entrance, he straightened the heavy steel leg braces hidden by his baggy trousers.
He gripped the arm of his eldest son Jimmy and that of another helper. He rose to his feet and slowly swung his legs back and forth to convince the jubilant crowd that he was walking. But then something terrible happened. Just before the President reached his lectern, he slipped and fell.
Luckily for FDR, few people saw him collapse. Had live TV cameras been there, as they would have been a decade later, Roosevelt’s secret incapacity would have been exposed to every American voter.
Exposed in all his human frailty, fallen to the ground, FDR might conceivably have lost the 1936 election. And with no Roosevelt as President in 1940, it is possible that the Allies might have lost World War II.
What is important in this story is not that Roosevelt fell, but that he got up. He asked his son Jimmy to dust him off and get him back on his feet. Like the generation of 1936, the Penn Class of 2026 has your own Rendezvous with Destiny this critical year. Be sure to save our nation and world. (No pressure!)
And remember that during your lives, which I hope will be long, you will feel disheartened or knocked down. It happens to all of us. When it does, remember the lesson that FDR accidentally provided you ninety years ago next month, right here in Franklin Field. Straighten yourself up, dust yourself off, get back on your feet. As you do so, remember: that kind of resilience is exactly what our beloved nation has shown for two-hundred and fifty years.
