The Spirit of Liberty

The greatest American speech you may have never heard of

A few days ago I got a text from my dear friend George Conway.

George sent me a video of a speech he had just given at Washington University about the American character and questioning if we as a people have the mettle to make it through this crisis moment in our republic.

Since George and I met during our time on the Lincoln Project he and I have shared many ideas on just this topic and one of the most enduring ideas that George has imparted on me is the idea that there is no Constitution that can be written strong enough such that if a people won’t fight for it - it is already lost.

The last best guard rails of the US Constitution are the spirit and character of the American people. Not the courts. Not the Congress. Not the Presidency. Not the norms. Not the institutions.

The people.

We are entering a time when that supposition will be tested like no time in our history. But, like most human moments, we have been here before and in the speech he gave George Conway eloquently referred to a previous American moment that I had never heard of before.

I’m embarrassed to say I hadn’t because it is clearly one of the great American speeches, given at a perilous and consequential moment in time to a unique and important audience.

It is known as “The Spirit Of Liberty Speech” by Justice Billings Learned Hand. After watching George Conway’s speech, which I hope you will watch as I’ve embedded it below, I felt moved to write about Justice Learned Hand and the speech. My essay is just below the video…And if you can please contribute to George’s Congressional campaign HERE History is pushing him to the front of a consequential moment that the next Congress is likely to face.

Our country is going to need him.

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Judge Learned Hand delivers The Spirit of Liberty speech to one of the largest crowds ever assembled in American history in 1944

On May 21, 1944, nearly one and a half million people flooded into Central Park for “I Am an American Day.” It was one of the largest public gatherings in the nation’s history.

The spring air was warm, the war in Europe was reaching its violent crescendo, and roughly 150,000 newly naturalized citizens stood in that crowd to take the oath of allegiance. Flags rippled above them. Military bands played. America was flexing its moral muscle before the world.

But the country they were pledging themselves to was fighting fascism abroad while interning Japanese Americans at home. It was liberating Europe from racial tyranny while enforcing Jim Crow segregation across the South. It was storming beaches in Normandy while maintaining segregated “Mexican schools” throughout parts of California and Texas. That was the American moment. And into that contradiction stepped a federal judge named Learned Hand.

His speech would become known simply as “The Spirit of Liberty.” It is short. It is restrained. It is devastatingly clear. And it may be one of the most important civic sermons ever delivered on American soil. But there is something even more consequential: he was not speaking to senators. He was not speaking to generals. He was not speaking to the powerful. He was speaking to immigrants. To the newest Americans. To people who had chosen this country at a time when its moral authority was under strain.

That was not accidental. Hand understood something fundamental about the American experiment: it survives not because of inherited pride but because of chosen belief. He did not describe liberty as chest-thumping patriotism. He did not define it as dominance. He defined it as humility. As the discipline of not being too sure you are right. As the willingness to weigh the interests of others alongside your own.

Democracy, by definition, means you don’t get the world you want - you get the world we can compromise our way to. Compromise is a civic virtue. Perhaps its greatest.

In 1944, that was a radical message. Because certainty was the ideology of fascism. Certainty was what was marching across Europe. Certainty was what built camps and demanded conformity. And America, even as it fought that certainty overseas, was flirting with its own versions of it at home. Japanese families behind barbed wire. Black Americans locked into second-class citizenship. Mexican American children segregated under the theory that they were somehow unfit for integration.

The contradiction was obvious. And perhaps that is why Hand entrusted the future not to the old guard, but to the new arrivals. He was essentially telling them: you understand what is at stake because you have seen what happens when liberty dies. You know the cost. You chose this place knowing its flaws. That choice makes you stewards of its promise.

This flips the entire immigration debate on its head. We talk endlessly about whether immigrants assimilate into America. Hand suggested something far more profound: America renews itself through immigrants. The flame dies without them. They renew the spirit of America as a necessary element of its continuance.

The American project is not static. It is not inherited like property. It is carried forward by people who believe in it enough to choose it.

In that park, on that warm spring day, while the world was at war and democracy felt fragile, the newest Americans were being asked to protect something older Americans were in danger of taking for granted. They were being asked to carry the spirit, not just salute the flag. And here is why this matters right now. We are once again living in a moment of certainty. Certainty that one side alone defines patriotism. Certainty that dissent equals disloyalty. Certainty that demographic change is decline rather than renewal. The loudest voices in our politics today do not preach humility. They preach grievance. They preach cultural panic. They preach dominance. But liberty has never been preserved by people who are sure of themselves. It has been preserved by people disciplined enough to doubt themselves.

That is the throughline from 1944 to today.

At a time when America was segregating, interning, and still denying basic rights to millions, one of its wisest jurists stood before immigrants and said: you are not guests in a finished nation. You are guardians of an unfinished one. That is the American project. Not perfection. Not purity. Not certainty. A constant struggle between our ideals and our failures. A constant renewal driven by people who believe the promise is worth the fight. Those 150,000 new citizens in Central Park were not simply being welcomed. They were being charged. Charged with protecting a spirit stronger than fear. Stronger than ideology. Stronger even than law.

Because constitutions do not save democracies.

People do.

And in 1944, while fascism burned across continents and America wrestled with its own injustices, the country placed its faith in those who had just arrived. Not because they were outsiders. But because they understood that liberty is not a slogan to shout. It is a discipline to practice. And that discipline — the refusal to be too certain of your own righteousness — remains the only thing that has ever kept the American experiment alive.

Judge Learned Hand

Below is the actual text of The Spirit of Liberty Speech:

“We are gathered here to affirm a faith, a faith in a common purpose, a common conviction, a common devotion. Some of us have chosen America as the land of our adoption; the rest have come from those who did the same. For this reason we have some right to consider ourselves a ‘picked body,’ for we have proved our affirmation by qualifying under our laws and privileges. Regardless of our origins, we are here to celebrate our common share in a great heritage.

We have gathered here to affirm a faith, a faith in a common purpose, a common conviction, a common devotion. What then is this spirit of liberty? I cannot define it; I can only tell you my own faith.

The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the mind of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias; the spirit of liberty remembers that not even a sparrow falls to earth unheeded; the spirit of liberty is the spirit of Him who, near two thousand years ago, taught mankind that lesson it has never learned but has never quite forgotten; that there may be a kingdom where the least shall be heard and considered side by side with the greatest.

And now in that spirit, that spirit of an America which has never been, and which may never be, but which the blood of those now dying around the world will help to bring a little closer to realization, in that spirit and in that hope, I ask you to rise and with me pledge our faith in the glorious destiny of our beloved country.”

Read that last paragraph again and again until it makes you tear up. Let it be a reminder to us all of the difficult task ahead and demand that we be worthy of the moment.