STRAFFORD, Vt. — A week ago, one day after the Republican party committed itself wholly to a certain vision of America, I went up through the winding roads into the mountains here to gather with some people and talk about another one — an older one, a vision of a country of the unbound imagination in which the concept of a political commonwealth was both binding and limitless, a vision of a less selfish country, and one in which the notion of a political commonwealth was neither a punchline for a television spot nor, worse, something we all no longer could afford. I came up through the mountains to talk once again about the Morrill Act, which is 150 years old this year. There was a symposium held in the town of his birth and in which he is buried, in a family crypt at the top of a hill.

Justin S. Morrill was a blacksmith's son who became a well-to-do shopkeeper in this place and, later, a representative in Congress and a U.S. senator from Vermont. He was a man who believed in public spaces, and he was instrumental in the development of the National Mall, the Smithsonian Institute, the grounds of the U.S. Capitol, including Statuary Hall, and the completion of the Washington Monument. One of the king ironies about the Capitol is that each state is allowed to place two statues of prominent citizens in Statuary Hall, and Justin Morrill is not one of the people chosen by Vermont to be memorialized in the public space he helped create. His monuments are elsewhere. His monuments are at Iowa State University in Ames, and at Auburn in Alabama. They are at the Universities of Oklahoma, and Illinois, and Idaho, and Hawaii. They are at Michigan State, Kansas State, Mississippi State, Montana State, North Carolina State, and New Mexico State. They are at Cornell, and Purdue, and MIT. His monuments are the generations of people who passed through these places as well. The farmer's child who became a biologist. The miller's child who became an engineer. The lumberjack's grandchild who became a theoretical physicist. And the farmer's great-grandchild who simply became a better farmer.

In July 2, 1862, with the Civil War going very badly, President Abraham Lincoln signed the first of the Morrill Acts, which set up a system of land-grant colleges throughout what was left of the United States. Under the terms of the act, each state not presently in rebellion received 30,000 acres of federal land from which it was required to create a public institution of higher learning. (The Act first had been proposed by Morrill in 1859, but had been vetoed by President James Buchanan.) The Morrill Act was a commitment by the country — dead in the middle of the greatest crisis in its history, but, ultimately, a product of that crisis as surely as the rifled musket was, as we shall see — to the idea that higher learning was something that the citizens of the country owed to each other. In the time of the greatest peril to the idea that the country was created by We, The People (and not We, The States), at a time in which what Lincoln would come to call "a nation so conceived" was perilously close to dissolving into its squabbling component parts, the Morrill Act was a public statement of belief that something more solid would come out of the bloody carnage that resulted from the historic national denial of what the country truly was.

There was a land mine present in our founding. We could not base a country on the ideas of the Declaration of Independence and forever maintain a system of chattel slavery. Even the slave-owning founders knew that. (By the end of his life, James Madison got positively gloomy at what he saw as an inexorable dilemma.) We preached universal freedom but practiced a version of it that could not abide. Freedom becomes free. That's the undeniable truth of it. You cannot forever hem it in with nuance and exception, with carefully crafted compromises that say that freedom is one thing in Wisconsin, but another thing in Tennessee, and maybe both things in Kansas and Missouri. And it was not merely over the gigantic issue of slavery in which this most basic American conundrum was contested and resolved, Americans also found their freedom bounded by class, by a structured social system in which higher education remained pretty much the province of the well-to-do, and pretty much glued to the eastern part of the country. Freedom, however, will make itself more free because people, together, through the free government that is the clearest expression of the political commonwealth, will make it so.

At the symposium, speaking in the Strafford Town Hall, which has been in continuous use as a public meeting space since 1809, Dr. Clement Price made the point that the Morrill Act was in keeping with what he called "the revolutionary age" in which it was signed. He listed it along with the Emancipation Act, the Homestead Act, and the Pacific Railroad Act as that age writ large in public policy, and he noted that none of them would have been possible had the Southern states not seceded and taken their insular vision of what the country meant with them. They passed because that vision of America had absented itself from the discussion. They passed because that truncated, aristocratic vision of America, now and then, had no place for the political commonwealth fostered by the Morrill Act.

(Although, truth be told, most of the rebellious states took full advantage of the subsequent Morrill Acts once they returned to the Union. This was balanced somewhat by the provisions in subsequent Morrill Acts that required the creation of what are now called the country's "historically black" colleges and universities. Mississippi State is a land-grant college, but so is Alcorn State, which began as Alcorn A&M.)

"These acts," Price said, "set the stage for the great social movements of the 20th century. Those came to their fruition in part because of the wide dispersal of educational opportunities created and fostered by the Morrill Act.... We are in a time now of anti-government rhetoric and the invoking again of the idea that American greatness should somehow not be based on a broad public effort but on a clarion call to something fainter. In that sense, the legacy of the Morrill Act must be protected.

"We must see these institutions not only as a seedbed for learning, but also as the seedbed of the kind of militancy it usually takes to move a democracy forward."

You see, you really didn't build it by yourself, no matter what they tell you. You stood on the shoulders of other people while you did it, the people like Justin Morrill, who helped construct a political and social context within which the opportunity for individual initiative and entrepreneurial risk could be rewarded and, as much as it may be popular to deny it, the government was very much a part of it because the government is the clearest manifestation of the political commonwealth that made that political and social context possible.

It is almost comical that we have come to a point in our history where mere economics is thrown up as a barrier to the continued progress of that commonwealth, that something as mundane as the national deficit has come to be seen as insurmountable. The night before the symposium began, the Republican party committed itself to the old, constricted vision of America all gussied up in its bright-eyed new vice-presidential candidate, who believes, whatever he says today, that the government's legitimate functions do not include the creation and maintenance of the institutions of political commonwealth. It is the vision that caused James Buchanan to veto the first attempt at the Morrill Act, and the vision that kept the Southern states in opposition to things like the Morrill Act because they would set freedom free in the new territories, and would grant the general government the power to do so, and because they knew that Lincoln was right, that the house divided could not stand, and that they would lose the argument. Zombie-eyed granny-starving has a long history in this country's politics. It is not bold, and, even less, is it new.

To close the symposium, Rolf Diamant, the founding director of the Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Park, pointed out that the following measures were undertaken over a four-month period in 1862: slavery was ended in the District of Columbia; the Department of Agriculture was created; the Homestead Law was passed; slavery was banned in all territories of the United States; the Pacific Railroad Act was passed; the Confiscation Act was passed, allowing slaves escaping to Union-held territories to stay there; Lincoln showed the first draft of the Emancipation Proclamation to his Cabinet; and the Morrill Act was passed. The contest between the two dueling visions of America would go on for three more terrible years, but, within the government that would survive those years, one vision already had triumphed because the other one had abandoned the field. "The war," said Diamant, "became less one for the Union, and more one for a more perfact union." And, Diamant pointed out, it was while the war was still raging, in June of 1864, that Lincoln signed into law the creation of what would be the country's first national park, in Yosemite.

We are now in the middle of a strange political campaign in which the very existence of a political commonwealth seems to have been made into a matter of open debate. There are places that we all own together. There are things that belong to all of us. Yosemite belongs to us. So do Iowa State and Cornell and Purdue, and everything that is taught in all those places. The government is one of those things. So are the national parks. So are the land-grant universities, born 150 years ago this summer, and delivered by a guy who doesn't even have a statue in the hall of statutes he helped to create. Knowledge, Justin Morrill believed, knows no class, no race. It is part of of what belongs to all of us, because none of us, not one of us, built anything by ourselves. We decided that question once before. It is to our discredit as a country that we're arguing about it again.

MORE ON OUR COMMONWEALTH: I Dream of Common Wealth, a Prayer for the Defenders, the Post Office Lives, the Public Trust of the Parks, and the Post Office Dies

PLUS: Complete Coverage of the Zombie-Eyed Granny-Starver Paul Ryan >>

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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