My late mother used to inform me the story of the 1948 election for president. It wasn’t told from the statistics perspective or how the media (newspapers) of the day miscalculated Thomas Dewey’s presumed lead over incumbent President Harry S. Truman.

When my mom told me the story of the 1948 election, it was about her decision to vote for Truman. 

She made her final decision to vote for Truman after hearing him speak at a whistle stop on the St. Paul Union Depot when the President stopped in Minnesota during his now- famous train tour across the nation from September to November of 1948. 

The thing concerning the story that has at all times stuck in my mind is the incontrovertible fact that President Truman’s speech actually modified my mother’s mind concerning the election — and about Truman. 

1948 was itself an important moment within the lifetime of america — the nascent movement for civil rights was in its infancy; Truman had by an executive order desegregated the U.S. military. Furthermore, it had been the 1948 Democratic National Convention that witnessed the start of the collapse of the old segregationist wing of the Democratic Party when Strom Thurmond’s Dixiecrats walked out through the courageous civil rights speech by Minneapolis Mayor Hubert Humphrey.

The last word election of Truman in 1948 reinforced the political possibility of more progress toward racial justice in post-war America, albeit within the face of grudging massive southern opposition. 

Perhaps Truman also understood that America as a nation built upon racial division couldn’t stand in a world where freedom could be challenged across the globe. 

Now, 76 years later, the nation stands at a special but equally significant crossroad — one which is as essential as racial justice but perhaps more complex. 

Now this nation must select whether it’ll truly remain a democracy governed by a system of laws. 

It must determine whether it is in a position to live out that creed which, as each Martin Luther King, Jr., and Thomas Jefferson said, has as its true meaning the self-evident proposition that every one persons are created equal, and know that we will govern ourselves as a nation of laws. 

One candidate has agreed to this proposition; one other candidate has avowed that he won’t.

The second candidate has made no less a promise to secede than did those members of secessionist conventions throughout 11 Southern states in 1860. The crisis is as great perhaps since it is less obvious. 

For the promise to undo the Structure is as odious because the promise to depart the Union itself. 

This was the threat and the crisis which caused President-elect Abraham Lincoln to journey across the nation by train 88 years sooner than Truman — not as an overt political campaign, for he had won the election, but to unite the nation in its own explanation for union. 

The nation now faces no less a threat and danger — regardless of that it comes before the election, regardless of that physical and geographical secession just isn’t threatened. 

The threat the nation faces is that one candidate who has already arguably engaged in a political revolt in an effort to illegitimately remain in office has promised by so many words and deeds to accomplish that again. 

As Lincoln knew in 1860, the stakes for the nation are not any longer merely political or partisan; the stakes involve those self-evident propositions of equality and life and liberty — and whether we as a constitutional republic will and may survive. 

Goins lives in White Bear Lake.