12/14/2025
Editor’s View: On Thinking, Remembering, and Doing
By Shanna Francis
We’re often told, “We are what we think.” However, two-time Pulitzer Prize winning author David McCullough notes, no less important is what we do. And that the real test in life is in what we value and what we want.
Regarding America, our value as a nation—as a people and our rise as the greatest nation ever built--was founded on the now institutionalized phenomenon, “The American work ethic.”
McCullough notes in an essay titled “The Good Work of America” in his History Matters (2025), “… nothing of lasting value or importance in our way of life, none of our proudest attainments, has ever come without effort. America is an effort.” He continues, “Work got us where we are. Easy does it has never done it for us and never will. We are the beneficiaries of men and women who toiled ten, twelve hours a day on farms, on railroads, in mines, in mills, at kitchen sinks, and drafting tables. We like to work; we judge one another by how well we work, because at heart we are an extremely industrious, creative people. And it is from our accomplishments, from our best work, that we’ve found our greatest satisfaction and sense of worth as a people—not from ease or comfort or from owning things, though we do go through spells when we forget that. The rolling-up of sleeves to tackle the new and difficult in America is not just poster art; it’s been our story, in fact.”
However, McCullough also notes the need for pairing our work ethic with the cultivation of the mind. This is where the real magic happens. As an example, he relates the story of Wilbur Wright. He and his brother Orville grew up in a small, humble home—no running water, no indoor plumbing, no electricity, no central heat, and no telephone. However, it was filled with books and articles. Their father, an itinerant preacher, believed in the value of a liberal arts education; thus, the home overflowed with books and articles, a collection of great literature, history, biographies, theology, and science, including studies on ornithology, which Wilbur was assiduously drawn to.
In McCullough’s best-selling book The Wright Brothers, we learn of the dogged persistence and hard work of the two siblings that combined to provide the world with its first successful airplane that led to the first powered flight of a heavier-than-air aircraft on December 17, 1903 at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.
McCullough notes, “How lucky we all are to live in this great country, where freedom of speech, the rule of law, and representative government remain the way of life. Where the love of learning holds strong. Where there are public libraries free to the people in virtually every city and town. No less than seventeen hundred public libraries.” Today, in 2025, that number has risen to approximately 19,255!
It is knowledge and hard work, as McCullough reminds us, that “built the Panama Canal and the Golden Gate Bridge, the Mount Wilson Observatory, the Library of Congress, [the] Lincoln Center. We invented jazz and the general hospital. We grew strong making steel and automobiles. Our productive power turned the tide of world history in this century, in the Second World War. We are the people who devised Voyager II, the unmanned spacecraft that succeeded in photographing the planet Uranus, in the dark, while traveling at a speed of forty thousand miles an hour.”
A child looks down from an airplane preparing to land in Minneapolis and says, “Look at all the farms.” A grandmother responds to the child, “Yes. And what work it took!”
It was not government or politicians who built America. It was the collectivized individual! Each individual family member—a mother, a father, and a child who knew how to work, then how to work a little more, a little harder, a little more creatively and efficiently. Institutionalized governments and bureaucracies are established to protect a nation and to protect individual rights. Too, we've agreed that they may be, at times, a safety net—a type of repair shop for when the car engine needs a little oil or a minor tweak with a wrench to get it up and running again. It was never meant to be the engine that runs the country and never can or will do as efficiently or effectively as the American people. This is why utopian Communist and Socialist efforts have always failed.
America’s system of government was never meant or intended to be the source of building a nation, or even a small community like Ogden Valley. Government and government funding should never be the driver of growth and development, nor the funders for or investors in developers’ efforts. It is good ol’ American capital, not citizen tax dollars, that keeps the great American engine of ingenuity, progress, and development running at full capacity. It is the resourcefulness and inventiveness of the hardworking, creative individual—not government handouts or a nanny state.
McCullough concludes, “All great civilizations have had at least two things in common: confidence and a sense of continuity.” Government assistance and intervention provide neither, because government efforts and aims are always in flux, shifting and changing direction by the various push and pull of politics. In reality, both confidence and a sense of continuity are gained “from our sense of the past. We are confident because we know who we are. We know what we have done. We know we have been there before. And because we know what has been done in the past [our great American past], we know what the standards are. We know what we must live up to. And if we have a sense of the past, then we also have a sense that what we do will be looked at in the future as the standard by which to measure one’s performance. How we wish to be measured in the future is a concept that can only come to those who have some sense of measuring themselves against the past. And continuity, of course, is the essence of writing history and caring about the future.”
As Americans, our past was built on a strong work ethic, ingenuity, resilience, creativity, and Christian moral values. No one can ever take this heritage away from us. Only the people themselves can unwittingly or irresponsibly throw it away, erase it and adopt a revisionist history, or ignore, or forget it.
Remember and live it! Let’s roll up our sleeves, and as H. L. Mencken is known for saying, “Spit on our hands, and take a fresh holt [grip].”
