As we approach the first anniversary of the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., merely to mention the date conjures up powerful and painful pictures in most minds. Our memories will soon be reinforced by countless television programs that replay the visual horror in lower Manhattan on that fateful day. September 11, like December 7, has become another "date which will live in infamy." History surely happened to us last year, but our collective memory is still too recent and raw to allow September 11 to become history.
While the first anniversary of the tragedy is an occasion to revisit our memories and pay respect to the innocent victims, it is also the appropriate moment to begin a conversation about the abiding significance of September 11. Beyond our mutual experience of trauma, where does the event fit in the larger and longer sweep of national crises that have shaped our history as a people?
Politicians and pundits have described September 11 as the start of a new chapter in the American story, suggesting that it marks the moment when the American homeland first became vulnerable to attacks from foreign enemies. This is patently untrue.
From 1775 to 1815, the United States was vulnerable to invasion by British armies, and the nation's capital was burned to the ground on that occasion. True enough, the Atlantic Ocean provided a protective shield against surprise attack for more than a century afterward, but the shield disappeared in 1949, when the Soviet Union detonated a nuclear bomb. Or, perhaps, more accurately, America's providential sense of invulnerability ended when Soviet bombers, then intercontinental missiles, became capable of striking our cities during the Cold War.
September 11, then, is less a new chapter in American history than a disturbing reminder of our exposed condition. The exposure was present at the start of our existence as a nation and has prevailed throughout the lifetimes of most citizens not collecting Social Security.
Moreover, at least four events in American history posed more serious threats to the survival of the republic: the American Revolution, the Civil War, the Great Depression and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Some historians may wish to expand this list, but the distinguishing features of these four crises were that failure to resolve them would have meant the destruction of the United States as a viable nation.
Most historians would rank the Civil War as the greatest crisis and Lincoln as the greatest president for preserving the Union. For me, the American Revolution would top the list, because the prospects of 13 colonies defeating the dominant military power of the era were remote in the extreme.
But quibbles about the relative severity of these crises ought not obscure the larger comparison with September 11. The terrorist threat puts lives and lifestyles at risk, but it does not constitute a serious threat to the survival of the United States or to its continuing to be the most powerful nation on the planet. To believe otherwise is to embrace the fundamentalist fantasies of the Islamic terrorists themselves.
In short, our current fears, while both heartfelt and widely shared, are probably excessive. Our predecessors faced more ominous challenges and met them successfully. If they had not, we would not be the kind of unprecedented superpower that so enrages our enemies.
The lessons of history usually exist only in the minds of the beholder, but my own mind sees two such lessons, which I propose as a starting point for our national conversation. First, as we remember September 11, let's bring perspective as well as poignancy to the occasion. Second, as we contemplate expanding the powers of the Executive Branch, to include a vast new bureaucracy for homeland security, let's go slow. As with the security-driven decisions to imprison Japanese Americans in the 1940s and hunt down communists in the State Department in the 1950s, the threat is likely to look different with the passage of time.
Joseph J. Ellis won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize in history for "Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation." His biography of Thomas Jefferson, "American Sphinx," won the National Book Award for nonfiction in 1997.