The New Yorker:

Eighty years ago, Americans embraced a new definition of their common faith. “The spirit of liberty,” a then little-known judge said, “is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right.”

By Lincoln Caplan

On a spring Sunday, eighty years ago in Manhattan’s Central Park, a hundred and fifty thousand newly naturalized citizens gathered to recite the oath that they would “bear true faith and allegiance” to the United States. They made their declaration as part of a celebration of “I Am an American Day,” created by Congress to salute the blessings of citizenship. In attendance were almost a million and a half people, who heard speeches by an immigrant from Prussia, Senator Robert F. Wagner, and by the Greenwich Village-born son of immigrants from Italy, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia.

Leading everyone in the Pledge of Allegiance, after brief remarks, was Judge Learned Hand, who was seventy-two and in his twentieth year on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in Manhattan. Until then, most Americans had never heard of him, though Hand was well known in legal circles. His remarks—barely five hundred words—turned him into a revered public figure.

Hand spoke in a mid-Atlantic accent, reflecting his upbringing in a family of lawyers and judges in Albany. You can hear him talking, in a hearty, singsong voice, at the end of a short Library of Congress recording made two years earlier, of him singing a Civil War ballad that he had learned as a boy. Hand’s remarks, titled “The Spirit of Liberty,” came a couple of weeks before June 6, 1944—D-Day and the beginning of the end of the Second World War in Europe. His subject was what the United States was fighting for in that global war—what it meant to be an American. (He did not, in addressing the new citizens in the park, acknowledge the Native Americans here first or the enslaved African Americans who hadn’t chosen to come here.)

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