Ashley Elizabeth Miller

1:00 p.m. Manhattan

Sixty-three years ago today, on Friday, January 20, 1961, 86-year-old Robert Frost stood before a crowd of over one million Americans on the cement steps of the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., to recite a poem before President John F. Kennedy’s well-remembered inaugural address. The winter winds whipped around the podium, and after stumbling through an attempt at a recently written rhyme, Frost reverted to a recitation recalled from memory: “The Gift Outright.”

Frost shared Kennedy’s vision for civil liberties. “This land was ours before we were the land’s.” In this introductory line, Frost pokes at the unjust societal standards cemented by Jim Crow, saying that we, too, were once colonized by Britain. And yet, we continue to colonize indigenous people and suppress the Black population. Frost and Kennedy shared a vision for equality.

“Something we were withholding made us weak

Until we found out that it was ourselves

We were withholding from our land of living,

And forthwith found salvation in surrender.”

Frost does not glorify the role of American ego in stealing the land from indigenous people but humbly accepts the sins of history’s past and asks Americans to do the same. But to never forget where we have been. The route to progress is learning from the past. Remain humble. Find salvation through surrender.

When Dwight D. Eisenhower, a civil rights-advancing Republican, better known as “Ike,” concluded his two terms of eight years in The White House, he issued a warning to the American People: beware of the military regimes taking shape across the globe; do not let violence overturn civil liberties. After Ike, John F. Kennedy beat out Richard Nixon for the 35th Presidential election.

Following Frost’s recitation, Kennedy delivered his speech — remembered in John Irving’s “A Prayer for Owen Meany” — in which he rallied morale among his constituents: “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country… If not you, who? If not now, when?”

The Gift Outright

The land was ours before we were the land’s.

She was our land more than a hundred years

Before we were her people. She was ours

In Massachusetts, in Virginia,

But we were England’s, still colonials,

Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,

Possessed by what we now no more possessed.

Something we were withholding made us weak

Until we found out that it was ourselves

We were withholding from our land of living,

And forthwith found salvation in surrender.

Such as we were we gave ourselves outright

(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)

To the land vaguely realizing westward,

But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,

Such as she was, such as she would become.