Born American, but in the Wrong Place

Bottom Line: Peter W. Schramm, a former education official in the Reagan Administration and Executive Director of the Ashbrook Center at Ashland University, explains what it means to be an American through the story of his family’s escape from Hungary during the ill-fated Hungarian Revolution of 1956.

Civic educator Peter W. Schramm recalls the events that led to his family’s fleeing of Hungary during the 1956 Revolution, in which Soviet forces crushed dissident freedom fighters attempting to take back control of the country. Living through Nazi occupation during World War II (Hungary had sided with the Axis powers), and then a takeover by the Soviets in 1949, the Schramms decided to leave the country of their birth.

Peter Schramm recounts a story that had great significance in his life: he asked his father where he was planning on taking the family once they escaped from the clutches of communism:

“But where are we going?” I asked.

“We are going to America,” my father said.

“Why America?” I prodded.

“Because, son. We were born Americans, but in the wrong place,” he replied.

Schramm then describes the family’s narrow escape, evasion of Russian authorities, crossing the ocean, and relocation to America—and ultimately to California, where his father eventually started a successful restaurant.

But Peter never stopped thinking about the lessons buried in his father’s trenchant observations on America. Their family knew of tyranny; but in America they knew of liberty. Schramm saw the Declaration of Independence as a moral touchstone to which all human beings could look as example: “The embodiment of those self-evident truths and of justice in America was an undeniable fact to souls suffering under oppression.”

As he trained in the ROTC, visited Munich, Germany for a summer, and then came back to America and entered graduate school, he ruminated on what his father had said years before about America. Through his learning, Schramm discerned that the “American Founders insisted on establishing one on universal principles applicable to all men at all times, one established on reflection and choice.” Because of her fidelity to these principles, America was a country in which “human beings could prove to the world that they had the capacity to govern themselves.”

Specifically, he looked to Abraham Lincoln’s July 10, 1858 speech, in which Lincoln described the Declaration of Independence as the “‘electric cord’ that linked all of us together, as though we were ‘blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh, of the men who wrote that Declaration.’” For Schramm, “This is what it meant to be an American.”

Read the full essay here.