America is a beautiful country filled with extraordinary people pursuing happiness within a system of law and self-government. America is a truly romantic place. It is a land in which you can dream any dream for yourself or your children, and the rest of us will defend your right to pursue that dream. Ours is a country that enables people of all backgrounds, from all cultures and ethnic groups, to live side by side and pursue better futures with an energy and optimism unknown in other countries.

But for me to fully explain what America means to me, I must describe a personal journey, because my emotional experience of America was deeply shaped by my birthplace and my relatives. I think most Americans - whether they were born here or emigrated - have personal ways to understand our country.

I was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in 1943. My mother has always claimed that I was born in the only air raid in Harrisburg's history and she remembers first seeing me by the light of an emergency lamp. This may have been a mistaken memory on my mother's part, but it certainly set up a pattern of historic awareness that has stuck with me to this day.

 My relatives were all patriots who loved America. They were hard working people without much money. Many of them had grown up on farms, and some of them were old enough to remember a world without electricity or telephones. I still remember being at my great grandmother's house on High Street in Middletown. She had a black, cast iron wood-stove that was closer to the revolutionary war than to the microwaves we use today. My baths were drawn from a pan of hot water taken directly off that wood-stove. Our cabin in the mountains near State College had an outhouse and only cold running water. Another wood-stove provided heat, hot water and cooking for the mountaineering vacationers.

I grew up surrounded by people who believed that freedom was a very rare thing and that people like us, people without money, power or landed estates, could find a better future in America than anywhere else in the world. Their patriotism was in part a gesture of gratitude to a country that had given them greater opportunities and greater protections than any country in previously recorded history. They reveled in the sense of equality before the law, freedom of speech, the right to use their vote to hire and fire those to whom they loaned power, and the notion that united, we Americans could protect each other from just about any threat. Their patriotism was real, emotional, and visceral, and these attitudes were passed on to me.

Harrisburg can be a wonderful city in which to learn patriotism. It is, of course, the capital city of Penn's colony. Founded by William Penn as a refuge for religious liberty, it was initially populated by refugees from persecution and those who would risk crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a small ship to seek a freer, better life.

The history of Pennsylvania itself is, in many ways, a history of the emerging American Republic. Pennsylvania was not only the keystone state for the emerging American union (located in a key geographic position between the northern and southern colonies) but it also was a key state for the spirit of freedom.

 An hour and a half to the east of my birthplace is Valley Forge, the crucible in which George Washington and the Continental Army decided that we would become a country, by refusing to surrender or desert their post through a brutal winter in which their cause seemed hopeless. It was from Pennsylvania's shore that Washington crossed the Delaware to surprise the British and Hessians on Christmas Day, and win a victory that literally saved the revolutionary spirit after a year of defeats. It was in Philadelphia that the Continental Congress declared our independence. Today you can still see Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell, and imagine the courage and wisdom of the Founding Fathers who made that momentous decision. It was in Philadelphia eleven years later that the Constitutional Convention came together. 55 Americans met in secret and drafted a self-governing contract, which is today the longest lasting government of any major power in the world. Thus it was easy for a young man growing up in Pennsylvania to imbue a deep sense of the freedom that is at the heart of the American tradition.

That tradition was made richer and more vivid to me when I read of a young man who migrated to Philadelphia from Boston at 13 years of age named Benjamin Franklin. The young Franklin was out to earn a fortune and live an interesting life. He found Philadelphia a great city to do both. At that time it was America's largest city. Franklin started as an apprentice printer and rapidly learned to be a writer, printer, businessman, scientist and citizen in a rich energetic life that is arguably the most interesting of any of the founding fathers.

To visit central Philadelphia is to encounter Franklin's America. His interest in the community led to the Post Office, the Philosophical Society, the study of science and technology (the Franklin Institute is a monument to his genius), insurance companies, voluntary fire departments, the list is almost endless. As the discoverer of electricity he was a world-class scientist, and recognized as such by the Royal Society in London. As a practical inventor, his contributions of the lightening rod, bifocal glasses (the descendent of which you may be using to read this article), and the Franklin stove were simply some of his contributions to an easier, more comfortable life. As a writer, his annual Almanac was a best seller in colonial America. His autobiography remains worth reading today, especially for young people who would like a witty but wise introduction to the active life. His political activities began with colonial politics in Pennsylvania, extended through missions to Britain and France and ended with the Constitutional Convention. Together with Washington he personified the new America for many people. As a young man I grew up in Harrisburg entranced by the personality of Franklin, the history of early America in the Philadelphia area, and the sense that we in Pennsylvania were in touch with the very foundations of freedom.

My family has a long heritage in the central Pennsylvania Mountains and we spent a lot of time in the Millroy area. I grew up thinking much more of the frontiersman tradition rather than of cowboys and the west. My immediate references were the French and Indian Wars, the disastrous campaign of Braddock against the French and Indians (fought in west central Pennsylvania), Washington being required to surrender Fort Necessity to the Indians (again in Pennsylvania), and the founding of Fort Pitt and the creation of modern Pittsburgh. For me as a child the mountains of Pennsylvania were the romantic land of James Fenimore Cooper's "The Last of the Mohicans" and "The Deerslayer" (they actually take place in upstate New York but the geography of the mountains and woods was more than adequately similar for a young boy). These mountains, like the mountains of Scotland and Ireland from which my ancestors had migrated, were bastions of individualism and freedom. The spirit of independence in some ways grew more from the remote regions of the mountain people than it did from the big cities.

Yet the beginning of America is only the first part of the story. I have long opposed high taxation and called for a maximum peacetime tax burden of 25% on all Americans. I truly believe that, in peacetime, in a free society, if all governments - state, federal, and local combined - take 25% of your income, that is enough. If you work for the government all of Monday and part of Tuesday, you ought to have the rest of the week free to work for yourself, your family, your favorite charities, or your own retirement. If we got into a major war there might be a need for higher taxes but that is clearly not the case in peacetime.

This vision of a limited tax, strong volunteer America has many of its roots in de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, and his description of the lean government, strong volunteer society he witnessed in the 1830s. It also has a strong basis in Pennsylvania history.

It was in Western Pennsylvania shortly after the new government was founded that farmers banded together and began what was called the whiskey rebellion. Farmers in that era in the Pittsburgh area had no way to ship their corn east. There were no railroads or canals, and the mountains made the cost of transporting corn prohibitive. So, farmers turned their corn into whiskey, which was worth more and weighed less. To pay for its costs the new government 'back east' (as western Pennsylvanians would have thought of it) decided to levy a tax on whiskey. The Western Pennsylvania farmers felt they were being discriminated against in favor of the eastern farmers who had good transportation and could reach the markets with unprocessed corn. People who had only a few years earlier rebelled against the venerable British monarchy over the issue of taxes were dismayed to find themselves being taxed by their very own new government. There was talk of refusing to pay taxes and rising against the government; Finally Washington himself threatened to call out an army and lead it against the Western Pennsylvania farmers. They backed down and agreed to pay the tax, but the new federal government learned to be very careful in how much it asked its citizens to pay. This sense of limited taxation is still within me, and my relatives drummed into me the lessons of the revolutionary war (caused in part by taxation) and the whiskey rebellion (caused again by taxation). A lot of my own passion for limited taxation and greater personal freedom has its roots in these western Pennsylvania hills.

American history is a history of continuing change and struggle. Harrisburg has a vivid reminder of that reality just 50 miles to its south at Gettysburg. This three-day battle was the military and psychological high point of the Civil War. I had ancestors who fought there, and as a boy I grew up in a patriotic spirit that was keenly aware that freedom had survived by the narrowest margin.

That sense of "embattled freedom" was expanded by my own childhood growing up in the shadow of the Second World War (where my father served in the navy and, after my mother divorced and remarried and I was adopted, my stepfather served in the army). Most of my uncles served in the armed services, and there was a pervasive sense when I was young that freedom is always threatened by violence, that the innocent are threatened by evil, and that the weak have to be protected from predators.

Since my stepfather was a career soldier I left Harrisburg and moved to a series of Army posts. Each taught lessons about freedom and patriotism. At Fort Riley Kansas, where Custer's horse was exhibited in the Post Museum as a reminder that arrogance can get your command massacred, and where the local bank had a plaque declaring it the site of the northernmost Comanche raid in 1855, I was reminded again and again of the struggle for freedom and safety, which is a continuing story throughout American history.

Living in France and Germany in the late 1950s as an army dependent I learned vivid lessons about the danger of war and the power of the American dream. We thought of America as the land of the big "P.X." (Post Exchange, where you bought things) and were stunned by the World War Two battle and bomb damage. I played with French children whose parents had died in the Second World War and some who had lost grandparents in the First World War. We were in Europe to protect our allies from the real danger of a Soviet attack, and it was obvious that freedom was under threat. Anyone who believes freedom is irrelevant, or something to take for granted, need only ask themselves what would the world have been like if Hitler, Mao or Stalin had won, living in a police state with no freedom of thought or speech, where our dreams (or nightmares) would be defined for us by a foreign conqueror. It is easy to shrug those dangers off as a world that never happened, but it is a world that could have happened. That image presents a vivid alternative to the story of Franklin, Washington, Lincoln, and freedom that created the positive world in which I lived.

We were assigned to Fort Benning Georgia when I was a junior in High school and I found a local Republican party eager for volunteers, and excited to have newcomers get involved. I fell in love with the beauty of Georgia, the friendliness of the people, and the opportunities of an emerging Atlanta that was a city "too busy to hate." As a high school student I began to think about going to college in Georgia and ultimately seeking office so I could serve the cause of freedom that had been instilled in me. I was a young man with a strange name and accent (by Georgia standards), no family money, a Republican in a Democrat stronghold and, in later years, an environmental studies college professor. Clearly I was a very unlikely prospect to succeed. Yet my childhood in Pennsylvania and my experiences in Army dependent schools had convinced me that anything was possible. Why shouldn't I dream of a wide-open future of amazing possibilities? After all, I was an American.

I studied history in the tradition of "reverence for the past as a key to the future" that my relatives had instilled in me. I ran for Congress with the romantic sense of the promise and possibility of America, which sustained me through two defeats, then through a frustrating 16-year effort to become a majority. My determination to balance the budget, reform welfare, cut taxes, strengthen our defense and intelligence capabilities was the determination I had learned by studying Franklin and the other Founding Fathers who had worked so long and so hard against such odds to achieve our freedom. My love for nature was imbued by the mountains and rivers of Pennsylvania and strengthened by the mountains and coasts of Georgia. From Lake Erie to the Okefenokee Swamp, I have been lucky enough to see how fascinating and intricate nature can be. My commitment to a better environment was drawn in part from the Theodore Roosevelt-Gifford Pinchot (former Governor of Pennsylvania) Republican tradition of conserving our environment for our grandchildren. My passion for zoos and museums was drawn from the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia and the Pennsylvania State museum in Harrisburg (where I was allowed to work as an unpaid intern as a teenager and reveled in every minute behind the scenes) and by the Philadelphia Zoo (second oldest in America and one of the best) and ZooAmerica at Hershey. You see, in my America there are constant marvels of natural and human achievement, and life is a perennially fascinating and exciting venture.

I hope you have come to see some of the same romance for this wonderful country that I have. As you enjoy this Fourth of July let me urge you to think about the beauties of your country - the physical beauties, as well as the political freedoms and opportunities for you and your loved ones to pursue happiness. As you enjoy this Fourth of July, let me encourage you to think about the history of freedom in Pennsylvania and in America that you are celebrating.

 Finally, let me draw on my background as an army brat and ask you to say a prayer and spend a moment thinking of all those young American men and women in uniform across the planet who are standing guard so we can be safe and free. After all, it is their devotion to duty, their patriotism, and their courage that we rely on to allow us to relax and enjoy our national holiday. For just a moment let's remember them and their sacrifices and the sacrifices of their families in our prayers.

This is what America means to me.