Let me tell you a story about the Liberty Bell. But first let me tell you about Mike Tait, who is a tour guide for a private company that offers walking tours around Independence Hall and environs. For the last two summers Mike and I have stood side by side in the IVC (Independence Visitors Center) at Sixth and Market Sts. trying to hawk tourists to take our walking tours (I work for a competing company). We don't hawk so much as stand there holding up tour maps for ten minutes before our scheduled tours. We talk weather, mostly, or American history. I trust him completely on either subject. Mike is one of the veteran guides who went to federal court to prevent the city from taxing tour guides the same way Parliament tried to tax paper in 1765 by the infamous Stamp Act. As I explain it on my tours, "The Stamp Act was a tax on paper, a tax on communication, a tax on free speech. That's where we get this taxation versus freedom thing in the same breath."
The proposed Philadelphia Guide Act would have required guides to pay an annual fee, take a test, be certified as "knowledgeable." Mike and two other guides fought in federal court on the grounds that this was an infringement on free speech in the very shadow of Independence Hall. They lost. Last week the judge dismissed the suit -- not because it was frivolous but because it was moot. The city of Philadelphia doesn't have the money to set up a testing program or enforce sanctions. Which means anyone can continue to tell you what they think about a city or a building or a bell. Even if that anyone is wrong.
So here is my Liberty Bell story. It took me a lifetime to understand it. And it's all about the crack. That scar across the face of Liberty. The words from the Bible on the crown of the Liberty Bell are about freeing slaves: "Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land and Unto All the Inhabitants Thereof." The bell was cast in 1751 in honor of the 50th anniversary of William Penn's Charter of Privleges, sort of Pennsylvania's Bill of Rights. When the bell developed a hairline crack in 1846 they tried to repair it by drilling out the almost invisible fissure so the metal wouldn't rub together and cause a buzzing sound. It didn't work. So they retired the bell, brought it downstairs, and for the first time on almost 100 years, people could read the words that had been ringing unseen above them all those years. "Proclaim Liberty. . ." And the crack! The crack represented slavery, the original sin that divided this country. It wasn't the Revolutionary War that made the Liberty Bell famous, it was the Civil War. Afterward the crack represented the great wound of a war that killed 650,000 Americans. Today the crack represents America's broken heart, the proud scar we bear, the price of Liberty lost and regained, a constant reminder that we are both human and capable of magnificent change. That crack is America's conscience. That crack is proof of our better nature, both flawed and honest, our attempt to heal from suffering denied or ignored. That crack is America's promise to the world: we have felt the pain, we have learned the lesson. But then, that's exactly the sort of crazy kind of stuff I tell people on my walking tours in Philadelphia because here -- in the birthplace of the United States of America -- there's still no law against it.
Leave a comment