My two boys recently got new passports. The little books are gorgeously designed.

On thick paper, drawings are etched of wheat fields and farmers, statues and monuments. Quotes from great Americans – former Presidents George Washington, Theodore Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy, as well as the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., — top each page. The security measures are a marvel of modern ingenuity: watermarks and holograms, color-changing ink, stamps and microtext. Combined, it represents a vision of what the United States of America is, or, increasingly, what it should be.

Admiring the artistry and the technology of the passport, I flipped through to the end. There, I came upon a quote, the only one inside from a woman: “The cause of freedom is not the cause of a race or a sect, a party or a c

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