We celebrate, 250 years later, because it’s a miracle to have inherited the great cause of mankind.
There’s a sullen national mood ahead of America’s 250th birthday that doesn’t meet the magnificence of the moment. A Reuters/Ipsos poll revealed that 38 percent of Americans believe that America will not exist as a single country 250 years from now, and 64 percent agree with a statement that American democracy is in danger of failure. Only 30 percent would consider America the greatest country in the world.
A doubt in both the goodness and staying power of America and its institutions prevails now, but neglects historical fact: Each significant anniversary in American history arrived with its own doubts about the country’s future, oftentimes in far graver or more unpredictable circumstances.
Independence on July 4 was borne out of a great contest with the world’s preeminent superpower. Intrepid men had done the unthinkable, and emancipated their little colony from the greatest empire in the world in defense of the natural rights of man. But a short-lived celebration gave way to the enormous task of building a republic from scratch, and the eleven years of writing, invention, and negotiation that led to the system of political institutions enshrined in the Constitution were bitter, fraught with infighting and disagreement.
Talk about uncertainty. For this time, America had no law of the land and no regime in which to anchor itself, and every reason to doubt that the vision of government for and by the people would be realized.
But a small pamphlet by Thomas Paine called Common Sense was circulating the public, proclaiming the cause of American liberty as the great cause of mankind. And as it was read in homes and gathering places, or recited in public squares, Americans felt their place in history. The citizen’s responsibility to the cause of liberty had become a part of the founding myth that would be wrapped up and handed down through generations.
United in this feeling, Paine wrote that America had established a “family, young and large.” It was this kinship among citizens, who shared the mutual aspirations of the revolution, that kept the country alive before the arms of government gave it structure and legitimacy.
By the 1826 anniversary, most of the original framers had died, entrusting the young, unsteady America to new hands. As if waiting until the final moment to see their country off, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson breathed their last on July 4 of that year. The passing of two colossal architects of America surely left many wondering if the nation could outlast its founding generation. It left unanswered what to do about the scourge of American slavery that would plunge the nation into multiple iterations of civil anguish.
Interparty squabbling and a corrupt presidential deal brought an end to the previous era of political warmth. The Missouri Compromise had drawn the early lines of the Civil War between the slave-owning states of the South and the free states of the North. And though Americans prospered with booming trade and westward expansion across the continent, the disagreement over slavery boiled for decades until exploding into the Civil War.
It is the closest America has ever come to destroying itself. The animosity between the right- and left-wing factions of today pales in comparison to these men who were willing to kill and die for their vision of what America should be. There were 620,000 souls lost in a brothers’ war. Every soldier knew their enemy was their countryman. Somehow, they still kept fighting.
When Union armies prevailed, General Lee commanded his soldiers to accept defeat with humility of epic proportion: “Leave the result to God. Go to your homes and resume your occupations. Obey the laws and become as good citizens as you were soldiers.” The North’s acceptance and distribution of aid to the Confederate armies and states was magnanimous in equal measure. For the continued unity and forward march of the country, both would lay down their arms and embrace the other as citizens and sons of America.
It is this miracle of American kinship that men could so soon come together to clasp hands over that bloody chasm and celebrate the hundredth year of America. Just a decade later, 10 million traveled from around the world to marvel at the American innovation that the country exhibited with pride in the Centennial Exposition. It was as if all had been forgotten, that all had remembered their heritage and the love owed to their legacy.
Innovation accelerated through the next few decades. Technological disruption eradicated whole livelihoods, brought prosperity for most, left too many behind, and plunged America onward. Jim Crow held fast in the southern states. The heralding of July 4, 1926, smack in the middle of the Roaring Twenties, did little to belie the coming Great Depression. No one could have known what was to come; they celebrated anyway. America was pulling away from every other country on earth; always the frontiersmen, everywhere, the American people were the people of ingenuity. They would always find a way.
Then came the years leading up to the bicentennial. World War II had been a tale of good defeating evil, of the impossible valor of the boys of Pointe du Hoc. Vietnam was a mere quagmire. And when Seymour Hersh blasted the hidden massacres by American GIs out into the national imagination, it became America’s ugliest scar. The war soon ended with a whimper, and the ’70s trundled on through Watergate and stagflation, thrown into stark contrast with the ebullience of America after the mid-century boom.
But the bicentennial celebration of ’76 goes down in history as a moment when the country, regardless of a diffusive sense of malaise, was saturated with patriotism. America was still fundamentally good. My editor recently remarked that living through it as a boy made him want to live to 98 years old just to experience the tricentennial. If this enthusiasm is a recent memory, why should it remain just out of reach for us now?
We share great company with generations of Americans that have braved the same anxieties, economic uncertainties, and political divisions that only differ in time. Though America is still the freest, most prosperous, and most sought-after place in the world, such obstacles are pressing and hard. Many appear insurmountable. But American optimism is a remarkable power, and it is the kinship forged out of the American creed that has always outlived the crises of the moment. We celebrate, 250 years later, because it’s a miracle to have inherited the great cause of mankind.