Great has more than one meaning in American history 

Donald Wright

Against the backdrop of the American election, and the vow to make America great yet again, I am reminded that there is a competing, and more expansive, definition of great with a long and inspiring history.

But first, Donald Trump. He has co-opted the word, made it his own, and compelled it to do his bidding. Make America Great Again isn’t just a political slogan, it’s also a movement in search of some stolen golden age, before porous borders, higher taxes, liberal judges, out-of-touch elites, and free trade agreements weakened America from within.

Drawing on a long tradition of racism, nativism, and fear of the Other in American history, MAGA offers a narrow, parsimonious, and mean-spirited definition of great.

It was this definition that was on full display, proudly and for everyone to see, at Mr. Trump’s profanity-laced, hate-filled Madison Square Garden rally in October: a comedian’s racist jokes about Puerto Ricans, Latinos, and African Americans; Tucker Carlson’s abhorrent comment about Kamala Harris’s mixed-race heritage; and Mr. Trump’s appalling references to migrants. “The United States,” he said, “is now an occupied country.”

Fighting his last election, an unleashed Donald Trump pushed his rhetoric to new extremes, even for him, and it clearly worked.

Kamala Harris pushed back – with dignity and assuredness – when she appealed to Americans’ better angels. This is not who we are, she would say. And she was right, but only to a point. 

After all, Mr. Trump’s nativism and racism are part-and-parcel of the American experiment. It was present at America’s founding when the promise of equality existed alongside the practice of slavery; it took root after the Civil War when emancipation, the end of slavery, and Reconstruction were met with sharecropping, Jim Crow, the KKK, and the unspeakable horrors of lynching; and it was present across much of the 19th-century and into the second half of the 20th-century as America at once welcomed new immigrants and contested – often violently, sometimes legally – those immigrants that it deemed unassimilable and therefore undesirable.

The contradiction at the centre of the American experiment is the contradiction between the promise of freedom and equality and the reality of racism and nativism

In the 1950s and the 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement set out to resolve this contradiction. In the streets and at lunch counters across the South, it imagined a better and brighter future. In February 1960, for example, a group of young men and women at Fisk University and the American Baptist College in Nashville, Tennessee – two historically Black institutions of higher learning – decided that enough was enough. Led by John Lewis, then a twenty-year-old student at the Baptist College, they began a years-long series of eat-ins, watch-ins, kneel-ins, and sleep-ins at Nashville’s segregated lunch counters, movie theatres, churches, and hotels, often at tremendous risk to themselves.

In a November 1962 demonstration, two young people carried signs that read, “Make Nashville Great Desegregate.” Like Donald Trump’s red baseball hats, their simple, handwritten signs drew on a long tradition in American history, or what Kamala Harris, in her concession speech, called America’s “extraordinary promise.” And it’s this tradition that offers a wide, generous, and gracious definition of great.

The struggle to desegregate Nashville, to make it great, launched the remarkable career of John Lewis who became a national civil rights leader, voting rights advocate, and a long-time member of the House of Representatives. 

When Mr. Lewis died in 2020, Barack Obama reminded America of his friend’s courage and example, and described him as “a founding father of a fuller, fairer, and better America.” Mr. Lewis, he said, “loved this country so much that he risked his life and his blood so that it might live up to its promise.” For his part, Donald Trump made it about himself, noting that Mr. Lewis had not attended his inauguration.

In a posthumous essay published in The New York Times, John Lewis issued a challenge to all Americans. It was the same challenge that the Civil Rights Movement had issued. “When historians pick up their pens to write the story of the 21st century, let them say that it was your generation who laid down the heavy burdens of hate at last and that peace finally triumphed over violence, aggression, and war. So, I say to you, walk with the wind, brothers and sisters, and let the spirit of peace and the power of everlasting love be your guide.”

In the coming years, MAGA’s definition of great will be proclaimed, over and over again. But in those handmade signs carried by Nashville civil rights activists in 1962 lies a competing definition that is at once reassuring and empowering.

Donald Wright is president of the Canadian Historical Association | Société historique du Canada.