You can’t lie about your age at your college reunion. Returning to my verdant campus in Philadelphia was like watering a garden of friendship, strikingly lovely in late spring light.

Maybe you went to one, or a joyous graduation put off because of COVID-19.

Yet there’s bitter salt in the air.

Is this my country ’tis of thee, with cold-blooded murders of children a specter in Texas and a racist massacre in Buffalo in the month of May?

The Friends — or Quakers — who founded my college during the Civil War were abolitionists who still speak to us urgently across years.

In the 1830s, 1840s and 1850s, America was not just divided. It was a burning fire of hatred and mob violence against editors and speakers who championed emancipation for the enslaved.

Andrew Jackson’s presidency was a really rough ride for anyone not an enslaver like he was.

My favorite College founder, Lucretia Mott, was an inspired leader who moved multitudes with the power of voice. A Southern pro-slavery mob of young men came to burn her house down one night. She faced the cauldron with calm.

Mott, the greatest woman of her day, was also the founder of the women’s rights movement in 1848.

Comparing notes, I found one classmate is descended from the founder for whom the handsome stone tower is named. The Quaker presence remains, but never brays, bleats or blares about the rich contribution the religion has made to our country.

So let me be righteous. Here’s a thank-you note as we face a fiery trial like the 1850s.

The Society of Friends made all the difference, as the first faith to oppose slavery. (I’ve done my history homework.) They spent 30 years preparing the public mind to vanquish slavery — nonviolently, with their petitions, speeches, safe houses and wealth.

Southern slavery was our “peculiar institution.”

President Abraham Lincoln knew he could not have signed the Emancipation Proclamation without the Friends laying the groundwork for his grand act.

Philadelphia was the hub of the American Anti-Slavery Office. One Virginia slave mailed himself in a wooden box there and cheerfully came to the Mott house to tell of his journey to freedom. The family home was a lighthouse for strangers and sojourners, Black and white.

Compared to Ivy League universities Harvard and Brown, now inquiring into their troubled bonds of slavery, Swarthmore College’s hands could not be cleaner. No ordinary place.

In the tradition of searching for social justice and truth, Harvard professor Robert Putnam ’62 gave a talk on his new book, “The Upswing.”

The famed social thinker gave us a “hard data” graph that showed America hit a peak in the early ’60s of equality and unity. It’s been downhill ever since.

I turned to my friends, saying, that’s when we were born — as children in the ’60s, not children of the ’60s. With the turbulence, the tragic assassinations of 1968 and the Vietnam War, we had little innocence to lose.

Putnam gave no simple answer as to why we’re living in times of racial violence, political extremism, economic inequality and women’s rights under siege.

Speaking for my generation, we were disillusioned young when Watergate broke a fragile faith in government.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower told a lie or two in office. But he was liked and trusted in a booming decade of stability. President John F. Kennedy began a bright new era in 1961.

Sweet pleasures, mixed with deep thoughts, traveled home with me. The singalong where I played the tambourine, man, ended with “Born to Run.”

Another was my first friend, the hip Greenwich Village girl now a Californian, while I’m the California girl gone east. She took me home for Thanksgiving.

You can’t make new old friends. And there they were after a long dry spell.

An ambassador in our class told tales of his travels and travails. The old beau who advised me to take ancient Athens history showed up in the amphitheater. A strong cup of coffee brought us up to 2022.

The morning we all parted, a voice on the hall spoke through the birdsong: “We solved the world’s problems.”

If only we could do as well as the Friends who built the place.

Jamie Stiehm, who lives in Washington, is a columnist and speaker on American politics and history. She is a graduate of Swarthmore College and an expert on Lucretia Mott. She may be reached at JamieStiehm.com.

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