Vermont Conversation: ‘Freedom in America is never guaranteed.’ Garrett Graff on America’s many revolutions

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The blue tsunami of Democratic victories in last week’s midterm elections included a number of notable firsts: the election of the first Black female governor, first female Native American governor and senator, the first openly gay male senator, the first Muslim senator, and the first Latina and Latino governors, respectively, for the country’s two most populous states, Texas and California.

These political milestones serve as an important corrective in the American story. When the country’s founders proclaimed that “all men were created equal,” they left out women, people of color and countless others. We have been fighting for a more inclusive democracy ever since.

“The beauty of the system that the founders left us is that we are a country that gets better,” said Vermont historian and journalist Garrett Graff. “We are a country where we have the opportunity as each successive generation to expand the circle of who counts as an American.”

Graff expands on this in his new book, “America in 25 Revolutions: The Story of Our Imperfect Nation’s 250-Year Quest to Become a More Perfect Union.”

The book includes 25 stories of “when the circle of who counted as ‘American’ was erased and made larger,” Graff writes. These include Reconstruction, women’s suffrage, LGBTQ rights, the civil rights movement, the environmental movement, disability rights, as well as the fight to end patronage in the civil service and the movement to end child labor.

Garrett Graff was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for his 2022 history of Watergate. He is the author of 10 books about history and national security, including “When the Sea Came Alive: An Oral History of D-Day,” “The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9-11,” and “UFO: The Inside Story of the US Government’s Search for Alien Life Here ― and Out There.” Graff also shares his writing about current politics in his online newsletter, Doomsday Scenario.

As the United States marks its 250th anniversary, Graff argues that America’s defining story is not a single revolution, but a series of transformative movements that have repeatedly expanded democracy and civil rights.

“Freedom in America is never given, except grudgingly,” Graff said. “It is never guaranteed, and it’s not always linear.”

Graff characterized the MAGA movement as a reaction against profound demographic and cultural changes reshaping the country.

“I have always believed that MAGA, and particularly the white supremacist Christian nationalist wing of the MAGA movement, represented a last gasp rearguard action in an increasingly diversifying America,” he said.

According to Graff, anxieties about racial diversity, gender equality and LGBTQ rights are all part of a broader struggle over the nation’s future identity. “I think for a certain type of voter, for a certain type of American, they see all three of those revolutions as coming at their expense,” he said.

Yet Graff insists such conflicts are hardly unprecedented. The arc of American history, he argues, is marked by advances followed by backlash and retrenchment.

“We are living through one of those moments where we have seen progress and retrenchment across the last 20 years of American politics in a way that is actually very common from across American history,” he said.

A central theme of the book is that some of the country’s most important democratic advances are often overlooked. Alongside well-known movements such as Reconstruction and women’s suffrage, Graff examines reforms like the Americans with Disabilities Act and the battle against political patronage in the 19th century.

He points to Native American activist Sarah Winnemucca as one of the book’s unsung heroes. Her campaign against corruption in federal Indian affairs helped advance what Graff calls a “merit revolution” that established expectations of professional, competent government service.

“America deserved competent government administration,” he said of the reform movement. “We needed a nonpartisan civil service that was focused on professionalism and standards of quality.”

Despite his frequent warnings about democratic erosion in his newsletter Doomsday Scenario, Graff is optimistic. He believes the country’s progress toward a more representative democracy would astonish many of the nation’s founders.

“Look at just who was elected last Tuesday,” he said. “The extent to which America has actually achieved becoming a multi-gender, multiracial, multi-faith, multi-ethnic democracy is really astounding.”

For Graff, that achievement represents the true legacy of the American experiment: not perfection, but continuous expansion of rights and opportunity.

“The incredible thing about what the founders managed to do,” he said, “was build a system where a whole lot of people that the founders would not have considered citizens, either legally or morally, have been able to write themselves into the American story over the last 250 years.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont Conversation: ‘Freedom in America is never guaranteed.’ Garrett Graff on America’s many revolutions.