I am a sucker for family movies and one that I enjoy every 4th of July (yes, I watch specific movies on specific days of the year!) is The Sandlot. It’s a delightful story filled with baseball, kids and Americana.

My favorite scene is when the neighborhood boys are playing baseball into the evening on the 4th and they stop for a moment to watch the fireworks going off in the sky above them, a scene appropriately set to Ray Charles singing America the Beautiful in the background.  I never get tired of it.

Imagine how far we’ve journeyed from the time when Franklin uttered the words, “We must all hang together or most assuredly, we will hang separately.”

Imagine the tension in the room in Philadelphia as the delegates debated the vote for independence, effectively signing their own death warrants and committing the colonies to certain struggle and an uncertain outcome.

From the winters at Valley Forge and ultimately to victory and then the struggle in fits and starts to decide how to govern.  First Washington leads in war and then he sits alone as President.  There was no precedent. He knew he was the test case and perhaps his greatest yet most unheralded accomplishment was to restrain and constrain what could easily have moved towards an imperial presidency based on his influence alone.

Today, we get excited when change comes to the highest elected office in the land, but imagine the sheer magnitude and gravity of that first peaceful transfer of power as Washington stepped back and allowed the electors to do their jobs and they did, narrowly electing John Adams.

If you’ve not read or watched anything on the American Revolution since high school, consider picking up the outstanding mini-series, John Adams, based on the even better book of the same name by David McCullough.

Ben Franklin’s Autobiography is great seasonal reading, as are any number of well-documented biographies of the “only truly civilized American” of the time.  Washington may have been the heart of the revolution, but Franklin was its creator and ultimately, the architect of the nation.

And after you’ve marveled a bit at what our founding ancestors managed to pull-off, you might just want to pop a copy of The Sandlot into the VCR (my copy is still on VHS) and marvel at a nation that can produce baseball and hot dogs and Ray Charles and the sheer joy of freedom in spite of our many and recently very visible imperfections.  The movie goes best with a cold lemonade next to you.

Enjoy.

Note from Art: I won’t be blogging for a few days, as I’m taking a break, hanging with my family, seeing the sites in this magnificent city of Chicago and of course, watching The Sandlot.  My seasonal reading and my commitment is to finish Doris Kearns Goodwin’s great work, Team of Rivals.  While it is not independence fare, it is at least in the right genre.