Teamwork made America great. Everything worthy requires a team.
The “right” wing adopts a tough luck attitude – you’re on your own.
But universal public education gave us the world’s most prepared workforce, organized amazing science, transformed agriculture, water supply and much more, not by saying dig your own rain-catchers and cisterns but by making modern improvements available to everyone, built by every level of government. The Post Office has provided rural free delivery. Cities, states and the federal government organized the electric grid. Garbage collection is a public service for most of us. We don’t purify our own water with chemical pills – that’s a public service before the water gets near us.
The weather service wasn’t the product of one great weatherman – it took national vision and public investment to gather information from as many places as possible.
New York built the Erie Canal which laid the path followed by the early railroads and industry in what we now call the rustbelt, but was once the thriving engine of America. President Lincoln’s vision generated transcontinental rail during the Civil War. The original states developed major educational institutions in the eighteenth century. Lincoln signed the law that built colleges and universities all across our country. Farmers benefited from agricultural research generated in those schools ever since.
Teamwork and sharing the wealth underlie most American progress. Roosevelt didn’t just say tough luck to the unemployed during the Great Depression of the ‘30s but organized and hired people for major projects – dams in the west, a national road system, and more. We’ve never sat on our haunches just saying tough luck. When we see a problem, we get moving – from building canals, roads, railroads, and education to microprocessors now.
Americans take for granted the benefits of public investment but we’d be a third world country without it.
Each new group had to struggle through the prejudices of those already here. Still, they were able to work, educate their children and take their places in America while progress increased as they did.
Americans are only dimly aware of the most persistent exception to the great American team – the fine schools and colleges former slaves created all over the country. The father of one of our Black friends ran a medical center for the Black community in a former slave state. By the early 20th century Blacks had developed a large, well-educated middle class and occupied many positions of responsibility.
Then President Wilson segregated the government workforce and forced most Blacks out. White riots destroyed many prosperous Black communities whole. In addition to exclusion, riots and segregation, what we whites called urban renewal tore down communities that didn’t look how we wanted, separating people from their religious congregations and leaders, doctors and professionals from patients and clients, businesses from patrons and their supply chains. The wealth of stable, peaceful and prosperous Black communities was destroyed across the country. Blacks were rarely allowed to keep their gains.
We can help storm and fire victims, the needy and the handicapped but heaven forbid we try to protect Black gains against surges of white prejudice. If we expect people to take care of themselves, we must first stop taking their well-earned gains away. We need to include everyone in the team effort. As Dodger captain Pee Wee Reese told his teammates after Jackie Robinson joined the Dodgers in 1947, we’re not going to win in spite of Jackie, we’re going to win because of Jackie – six pennants and a World Series in Jackie’s decade with the Dodgers. Teamwork.
Steve Gottlieb’s latest book is Unfit for Democracy: The Roberts Court and The Breakdown of American Politics. He is the Jay and Ruth Caplan Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Albany Law School, served on the New York Civil Liberties Union board, on the New York Advisory Committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, and as a US Peace Corps Volunteer in Iran.
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