After the Parade

On Sunday morning while the vast majority of people on the Vineyard were packing picnics for the beach and putting beer on ice for parties later in the day planned around parades and fireworks, eighty miles away, twenty-seven immigrants stood aboard the U.S.S. Constitution in Charlestown and were sworn in as American citizens. A story in The Boston Globe yesterday took note of the occasion, a quiet reminder of the true meaning of the Fourth tucked onto the third page of the Metro section. What follows is an edited copy of remarks made to a group of new citizens by the late Hon. James L. Oakes in his first naturalization ceremony in Brattleboro, Vermont, in May 1970. Judge Oakes, who was a longtime summer resident of Edgartown, died in 2007. The complete text is on file at the Vermont Law School Library, South Royalton, Vt.

•

Today and at this hour each of you is about to perform the last act of your life as an alien and the first act of your life as an American citizen. This is a happy occasion, to be sure, and we are pleased to welcome you and your loved ones, not just to the United States District Court for the District of Vermont but also to United States citizenship.

This is also a solemn occasion, however, and it is the duty of the court, and a very pleasant duty it is, to remark upon the meaning of citizenship — the meaning of being an American citizen.

This being a first, I have had the opportunity to review in my own mind some of the rights that go with being an American citizen, and to think about the responsibilities that go with those rights.

Make no mistake about it, in a democracy such as ours, for the government to work, for every individual to be able fully to enjoy his rights as a citizen, it requires that each of us also performs his obligations, his duties, his responsibilities to other citizens.

We American citizens — all of us, those of us who have chosen America as our land of adoption and those of us who come from those who did so — have the right to speak freely, to express our views, to think as we choose. But we also have the duty and responsibility to let other American citizens speak, to tolerate the views of others, to listen. We may disagree with another man’s views, but we will in the words of the French philosopher defend to the death his right to speak them, or to print them.

We citizens of the United States have the right to worship freely and as we see fit, but we have the duty to respect the religious views, or lack of them, on the part of others, no matter how unenlightened these fellow human beings may seem to us. In the brotherhood of man, in America, there is no room for religious intolerance.

We have the right as a people, also guaranteed to us by the First Amendment to our Constitution, peacefully to assemble — a right that in recent years has been used more often, particularly by young people and by people seeking equality of citizenship for all. But we have the duty, if we exercise this right, to exercise it peacefully, in short, to tolerate all the rights of other American citizens.

We have the right, as citizens, to vote and to petition the government for a redress of grievances. But we have the duty to educate ourselves as voters and petitioners, to learn about the issues, to get the facts, and we also have a duty to become involved in the business and affairs of our community, our state, our nation.

We have any number of rights when we come into a court of law, whether as citizens in a civil controversy with another individual, or when we are faced with charges in a court of criminal law — such rights as those to a speedy, public trial, by an impartial jury after being informed of the charges against us, a right to counsel, regardless of our financial means, the important right not to be compelled to be a witness against one’s self — all of these precious rights which are among the first to be undermined and ultimately destroyed in totalitarian countries. We have the duty as ordinary citizens to make the sacrifice of time and money to take our turn in serving as jurors, something many of you will be asked to do from time to time. Beyond this we have the duty as citizens to respect the law, and to uphold it, and to respect the courts, to conduct ourselves properly in the courtroom, and to recognize the basic aim of a government of laws, not men, and the basic principle of American justice that every man is presumed innocent until proven guilty.

There are many other rights we have as Americans, rights which are inalienable, that is, which cannot be taken away from us by any other man or group of men — the rights to life and to liberty and indeed the right to the pursuit of happiness, a happy phrase that Thomas Jefferson used in penning the Declaration of Independence. He used this phrase to mean a whole bundle of rights to enjoy this wonderful country of ours and the wonderful people in it, without interference, oppression, or annoyance by others — the bundle of rights that includes the rights to clean air, pure water, economic opportunity for our children, peace in the neighborhood, safety in the streets.

All of these rights . . . are protected and preserved to us by the Constitution and the laws and the courts of this great country of ours; they cannot be denied to us on account of race, color or creed.

This oath you take today carries with it many precious rights — the rights of an American citizen. It also carries with it many duties and responsibilities that can be met by each of us American citizens deeply concerned with our government . . . always to keep the torch of liberty burning brightly with all the rights and responsibilities on which the light of that torch shines.

That torch must be kept burning not just for us, not just for our children, but for future generations of mankind.