Only in America would a story such as Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s be possible.
She was, from the beginning, an unlikely American folk hero.
A reticent, even reserved woman in a land that too often celebrates brash and boisterous men, she did not hunger for the spotlight. In fact, she often sought to avoid it.
Born to immigrant parents in the northeast at a time when her nation celebrated the native-born and the country’s power and money were flowing south and west, she did not fit easily into the mainstream. Nor was she willing to truckle to make that fit any smoother.
Perhaps that, along with her incredible intellect, was what made her such a force — the closest thing, more than one observer of her life said, that we have to a real-life superhero.
Perhaps it was, in the end, the sheer power of her determination, her refusal to be deterred, denied or disregarded, that transformed Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg into “the notorious RBG,” a hero and icon to millions of Americans, female and male — Wonder Woman clad in judicial robes and armed not with a magic lasso but instead with one of the best legal minds of this or any generation.
Hers was a classic American tale, a story of transformation and defiance of historic and artificial constraints of expectation.
Many other good and capable people have pounded on doors of oppression, hoping they might swing open and allow others through.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg knocked down walls and encouraged everyone else to follow her into new lands of possibility.
One of the enduring mysteries of our national experience involves determining where the confidence that animates our peculiarly American geniuses comes from. Often, almost always, in fact, their strength and their achievements spring from their willingness to defy the crowd — to plant their feet and say, "This is who I am and this is what I know to be right," even when the mob conspires to force them to bow beneath the weight of cultural or political inertia.
Only those with spines stronger than steel can withstand that pressure.
What was it in her upbringing that grounded her so she could defy injustice with such steadiness and aplomb? Certainly, much of American society when she was young wouldn’t have encouraged her to think she or her views mattered for much.
A child of immigrant parents who did not have college degrees themselves, she attended as an undergrad Cornell University, which had a small quota of female students it admitted, and Harvard Law, where women at the time were almost as rare as spotted owls. Even as brilliant as she was — she graduated from high school at 15 — she confronted a world that viewed her as a window dressing.
We cannot know what spoke to her and told her that she not only did not have to accept such evils, but that she could confront, even defeat them.
Maybe it was her mother, walking her by the hand to the library as a small child and whispering encouragement along the way. Maybe she just inherently had the power to see a wrong and determine ways to correct it.
Her capacity for transformative insight could be astonishing.
Long before she sat on the bench, she began to transform both American law and American life. She argued to her colleagues that the barriers excluding women from so many parts of our national activity should be labeled discrimination on the basis of gender rather than sex, because the word “sex” carried with it connotations that distracted from the main point which was that discrimination is discrimination.
She won that one.
And so many others.
Along the way, the petite, quiet woman from Brooklyn became the idol of millions, a figure capable of bending history toward justice. She was the best of us, proof that the American experiment can work — that genius and greatness can flower anywhere, provided they can seek out the light of liberty even if their seeds be planted in dark corners.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg died on a Friday after long battles with cancer. Her death touched off another epic political battle over who will replace her on the Supreme Court.
Her life, though, reminds us what we Americans always must fight for.
Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
For everyone, all the time.
John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students. Send comments to editorial@therepublic.com
