During my years at Notre Dame, I had no idea that Albert’s, the dusky tavern on Lincoln Way West we frequented because it didn’t check IDs, sat on the nation’s first transcontinental road, the Lincoln Highway, which was dedicated in 1913 and stretches from Times Square to the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge. But that was the least of the local history I missed.
I also don’t remember learning about the march to Kansas that many of the region’s Potawatomi were forced to undertake four years before the University’s founding. Or Father Sorin’s decision to ban St. Patrick’s Day celebrations to avoid inflaming xenophobic sentiment among neighbors. Or the violent confrontation that erupted in South Bend between Notre Dame students and the Ku Klux Klan in 1924, when widespread hatred of Catholics made the KKK a powerful political force in Indiana and elsewhere.
When history holds darkness, it is often buried. But even when it is full of light, it can, like a fire that isn’t tended, burn out.
“History is not truth; it’s memory,” the Potawatomi tribal member and scholar John Low has said. “And part of memory is considering what we forgot.”
Considering what we forgot was the main reason I wanted to drive the Lincoln Highway in the fall of 2020. With so much media coverage focused on what divides America, I hoped to explore what holds us together — because as political tensions heighten, we are increasingly in danger of forgetting our bonds. And what better way to do that, I thought, than traveling the road named for the man who held the country together through a civil war.
Only a year into our marriage, my wife, Laurel, and I decided to break free from COVID-19 lockdowns by doing something we had never imagined: buying an RV. My only experience in an RV had come during my senior year at Notre Dame, when a group of us rented one to travel to the Kentucky Derby. We broke down halfway to Louisville and had to wait half the night for a replacement vehicle, but the long delay didn’t faze us, since someone had had the foresight to bring along a keg.
Laurel and I found an ad for a used 25-foot Winnebago, the biggest RV we wanted to drive and smallest one we wanted to live in. We set out from New York City on September 11, 2020, recalling the spirit of unity that had arisen from the 2001 terrorist attacks. And while channeling Lincoln’s spirit as our North Star, we began crossing the nation’s increasingly visible fault lines on race, immigration, religion and seemingly everything else, even a virus.
We had no idea what we were in for but learned the art of RV living as we went, sometimes from our mistakes — my mistakes, I should say. While driving on a city street with a fire hydrant, for instance, never attempt a K-turn.
As we crossed the country, we spoke with people from many different walks of life. I didn’t ask anyone about presidential politics but invited them instead to share their perspectives on how national issues play out in their communities.
In Lancaster, Pennsylvania, young people spoke with anger of getting shot with rubber bullets during a police protest the prior night. In Franklin Grove, Illinois, a county board member sadly relayed how hyperpartisanship was ruining friendships. In Fallon, Nevada, a farmer apprehensively described how climate change was lengthening the growing season but also worsening droughts and threatening his ability to grow raspberries.
In Cedar Rapids, Iowa, the immigrant imam of one of the nation’s oldest mosques spoke with grave concern about the same issue I had heard about in Montgomery Township, New Jersey, from America’s first female Muslim mayor: religious bigotry. The issue also came up between those stops when I sat down with Father John Jenkins, CSC, ’76, ’78M.A., at Notre Dame.
Jenkins opened our conversation by talking about Catholics’ long struggle for acceptance as Americans, which gave rise to the “God, Country, Notre Dame” inscription on the Basilica’s World War I Memorial Door, and to murals in the Main Building celebrating the Catholic explorer Christopher Columbus. Allowing the bigotry Catholics long faced to be forgotten — I learned hardly any of that history at Notre Dame — makes it harder to recognize what American Muslims are now enduring, despite the clear parallels.
Jenkins also spoke of why he had decided to cover the Columbus murals with tapestries. It was not to hide from history, but to start considering something else long forgotten: the viewpoint of Native Americans, which the murals had whitewashed.
The Lincoln Highway also led us to some old friends who live along the route. In Denver, Tennaly Fortier and Ryan Smith ’98 kindly welcomed us into their home, where, without having to worry about filling up our wastewater tank, I took one of the longer showers of my life.
On a bright Sunday morning, they took us to their son Kenan’s Little League game. With his team trailing in the last inning, Kenan came up to bat with the bases loaded and a chance to win the game, but it was not to be. Although terribly disappointed, he lined up with his teammates and together they lifted their caps and waved them at the winning side, showing grace and honor.
It was a small act of sportsmanship, but it was much more than that, too, because it taught an essential act of citizenship that would soon hit home.
When we reached downtown San Francisco on Election Day eve, we saw more contractors than pedestrians. They were boarding up shops in fear of postelection violence.
I asked one of them, Steven Aragon, the same question I had asked people all along our journey: What holds America together? People had mentioned the Constitution, our love of freedom, our aspirations and similar things — each answer holding truth. But until I met Aragon, no one had mentioned what makes them all work.
Aragon spoke of a civic virtue that was so commonplace for so long that generations took it for granted, but it’s something that other nations consider, as Ronald Reagan put it in his 1981 inaugural address, “nothing less than a miracle”: the willingness to peacefully concede elections.
Lincoln never lost faith in that miracle, even in the depths of the Civil War. In 1864, when he believed he would lose his re-election bid, he sought to refute speculation that he might not accept the results. “I shall do my utmost,” he said to a crowd at the White House, “that whoever is to hold the helm for the next voyage shall start with the best possible chance to save the ship.”
Every president before and after Lincoln has honored the sanctity of the American miracle, until Donald Trump. As his effort to overturn the election was getting underway, Laurel and I decided to take the long way home, traveling to the Mexico border and through the old Confederacy, which came into being after most of the slave states refused to accept defeat in the 1860 presidential election.
Some of the Confederate monuments we saw in town squares and on courthouse lawns still deny the cause of the Civil War, and still celebrate the war itself as morally righteous. Reading their inscriptions, often paeans to white supremacy, underscored the enduring political power of historical memory, and the continual need to consider what we have forgotten.
We ended our journey at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. With Abe gazing down on us, we met up with an old friend who was a U.S. Capitol police officer, Sergeant Mike Riccardi.
Riccardi’s harrowing tale of being inside the Capitol on January 6, 2021, made for a fitting bookend to 9/11, because the two dates capture a tension we saw and heard all along our route: the resilience and fragility of American democracy. Sustaining our democracy requires calling upon “the better angels of our nature,” as Lincoln said in 1861, to touch the “mystic chords of memory” that remind us of our heritage as Americans.
Our memory of what unites us is being tested once again — and the test will continue, and may even grow more difficult, after the 2024 election.
To save the ship, it is essential that we show the same grace and honor that Little League teams across America show every week — and teach Kenan’s generation, as they grow up to make their own history, to consider what too many in our generation, like Lincoln’s, forgot.
Frank Barry is an editorial board member and columnist at Bloomberg and author of Back Roads and Better Angels: A Journey into the Heart of American Democracy.