Is America 250 Not Really in 2026?

W hat if all 349 million of us are going to be celebrating America’s 250th birthday not merely on the wrong day but in the wrong year?

William F. Buckley Jr.’s teacher and mentor — a senior editor of this magazine during its first eight years — believed 1776 is the wrong national start date. “The Declaration of Independence did not, as Lincoln proclaims, establish our independence as a nation,” Willmoore Kendall wrote in The Basic Symbols of the American Political Tradition, the book he co-authored with Georgetown political scientist George Carey. “Rather what it did was establish a baker’s dozen of new sovereignties.”

And whether one fixates upon the Declaration’s “United Colonies” verbiage or the reference in the same sentence to “Free and Independent States” may hint at a verdict on Kendall’s point.

Kendall argued that the ideals of the Declaration of Independence later highlighted by Abraham Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address, and still later seized upon by backers of diverse (and even conflicting) causes, found little continuity in governing documents in America from the Mayflower Compact through the Constitution. The former document, for instance, points to the glorification of God, the advancement of Christianity, to honor king and country, and “our better Ordering” as the community’s purpose (in other words, authority and order — not equality and rights — ranked as the motivators). The latter document does not mention equality. Its subsequent Bill of Rights omits that word, too; it includes rights, but amendable and not inalienable ones. Based on this and more, Basic Symbols judges “a total ignorance of the tradition that both preceded and followed the Declaration.”

Political concerns, Kendall and Carey argued, warped the present’s conception of the past. “These plants were lavishly fed and nourished, sometimes unwittingly, after the Civil War,” the pair wrote, “so that by the turn of the century the so-called progressivist historians and political scientists could burst forth with their notions about the central symbols of the American tradition.” For Kendall, the “symbols” — a term he borrows from Eric Voegelin to convey the myths and traditions that provide meaning — included the Declaration but not as the alpha and omega of America. And if posterity warped the Declaration for its own ends as Kendall posits, his skeptics note that his majoritarian inclinations perhaps colored his interpretation of the Declaration, the Bill of Rights, and other documents that constrained the 50-plus-one rule.

Like America’s origins, the origins of Basic Symbols appear complex and open to debate.

That book, not The Conservative Affirmation “greatest hits” package bound between two covers or the posthumous, perfectly titled Contra Mundum (which translates to “against the world”), stands as Kendall’s great achievement as an author within the postwar conservative milieu. Its publication owed a great deal to George Carey, who rescued much of the underachieving Kendall’s work for posterity. Both Kendall’s widow, Nellie, and sister, Yvonna Kendall Mason, aggressively sought to keep his ideas in circulation after his death. Whereas others rebuffed attempts to Dr. Frankenstein into life Kendall’s scattered and unfinished works, Carey jumped at the chance. Why? Christopher Owen, in Heaven Can Indeed Fall: The Life of Willmoore Kendall, lays down some breadcrumbs. As an undergraduate at Northwestern in 1954, Carey witnessed guest speaker Kendall’s brilliance; as a junior faculty member at Georgetown in 1961, Carey witnessed his drunkenness. More so than most he understood the Oklahoman child prodigy’s potential and why he never reached it. Basic Symbols perhaps symbolizes one friend’s boost to a fallen friend to reach a spot in death that eluded him in life.

Other figures on the postwar right aside from Carey unwittingly played a role in bringing Basic Symbols to publication. A thousand letters between Kendall and Frank Meyer discovered in a warehouse during research for The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer add to its creation story.

“Just accepted an invitation to deliver 4 lectures at Vanderbilt this Summer along the lines of my remarks at the Chicago Voegelin conference,” Kendall, alienated from National Review by this point, wrote senior editor Meyer in the spring of 1964. “First friendly gesture from [Vanderbilt visiting professor Gerhart Niemeyer] in many years.”

Meyer wondered whether Kendall’s four talks related to his own two on “Communism, etc., etc.” at Vanderbilt on June 30. They actually pertained to the origins of the world’s bulwark against “Communism, etc., etc.,” the United States of America. Kendall delivered five Vanderbilt lectures, a final one described as essentially impromptu by his co-author, that — along with Carey’s contributions — resulted in Basic Symbols, published three years after Kendall’s 1967 death.

The book, like Kendall himself, starts arguments rather than settles them. Foremost among these involves the place of the Declaration of Independence in the American tradition. So, when did the birth of the United States take place according to Kendall? He believed the Constitution offered a stronger case than the Declaration for being the document that truly marked the country’s birth.

Still, as Matthew Cantirino, an assistant professor at the University of Dallas who studies Kendall’s thought, points out, Kendall did appreciate the Declaration of Independence. He just did so more for concrete reasons of self-governance than abstract ones pertaining to equality. “The Declaration is thus a birthday, he might say, but it is not America’s year zero,” Cantirino points out.

So, would Kendall’s interpretation of the American Founding have sparked in him a 2026 “America 250” boycott? “Of course Kendall would celebrate the 250th,” Cantirino answers. “He was an American patriot. And political independence is a mighty achievement.”

Six decades ago, University of Dallas students wore blue sweatshirts with yellow “Kendall for King” (so much for majority rule!) lettering that bracketed the creased visage of their campus Socrates. One surmises that the philosopher-king of Irving, Texas, would indeed heartily celebrate independence from the British king. And to make up for the progressives who do not celebrate America 250 this year, perhaps it makes sense for conservatives who share Kendall’s view to celebrate two birthdays for America.

Maybe party like it’s 2037 in 2026. Or does “Constitution 250” happen upon the anniversary of ratification in 2038?

Like the fall of Rome, the birth of America remains difficult to pinpoint.