July 25, 2016
“I see America not in the setting sun of a black night of despair … I see America in the crimson light of a rising sun fresh from the burning, creative hand of God,” wrote poet Carl Sandburg, who died July 22, 1967.
A son of Swedish immigrants who worked on the railroad, Carl Sandburg left school after 8th grade, borrowed his father’s railroad pass and traveled as a hobo.
Carl Sandburg volunteered for military service, was sent to Puerto Rico in the Spanish-American War, and then attended college on a veteran’s bill.
Carl Sandburg wrote children’s fairytales, called Rootabaga Stories, and mused of his wanderings in American Songbag. He wrote:
“A baby is God’s opinion that the world should go on.” …
In his Complete Poems, for which he won a Pulitzer, 1951, Carl Sandburg wrote: “All my life I have been trying to learn to read, to see and hear, and to write. At sixty-five I began my first novel… It could be, in the grace of God, I shall live to be eighty-nine…I might paraphrase: ‘If God had let me live five years longer I should have been a writer.'”
Carl Sandburg wrote: “When a nation goes down, or a society perishes, one condition may always be found; they forgot where they came from. They lost sight of what had brought them along.”
President Ronald Reagan stated in his State of the Union Address, January 25, 1984: “Each day your members observe a 200-year-old tradition meant to signify America is one nation under God. I must ask: If you can begin your day with a member of the clergy standing right here leading you in prayer, then why can’t freedom to acknowledge God be enjoyed again by children in every school room across this land? …
Carl Sandburg said,’I see America not in the setting sun of a black night of despair… I see America in the crimson light of a rising sun fresh from the burning, creative hand of God.'”
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