To the Citizen Who Inherits a Republic,
Tomorrow marks two hundred and fifty years since a small collection of colonies declared before the world that liberty was not the property of kings, but the right of ordinary people. Two and a half centuries is an impressive birthday for a republic, and Americans may be forgiven a little cake, considerable noise, and enough fireworks to alarm every dog in the country.
We should celebrate.
We should also remember what we are celebrating.
Nations, like people, generally prefer stories in which they have behaved admirably from the beginning. History is less accommodating. The generation that declared that all men were created equal included men who enslaved other human beings. Women possessed few legal or political rights. Native peoples were displaced, excluded and subjected to policies entirely incompatible with the liberty being proclaimed. The government eventually created under the Constitution was remarkable, but neither the country nor the men who established it were perfect.
Acknowledging that does not diminish the founding principles. It demonstrates how powerful those principles became.
The words proved larger than the men who wrote them.
Generations of Americans who had been excluded from the original promise eventually took its language seriously enough to demand that the country do the same. Abolitionists challenged a nation that spoke of liberty while permitting slavery. Women demanded political standing in a republic that governed them without their votes. Civil-rights advocates insisted that equal protection mean something beyond ink on parchment. Workers, immigrants, disabled Americans, gay Americans and countless others have continued the same argument in different forms: if liberty and equality are American principles, then explain why they should stop at my door.
America’s progress has therefore seldom come from pretending that we had already perfected the republic. It has come from citizens noticing the distance between our principles and our practices and insisting that the distance be shortened.
That is a less comfortable national story than uncomplicated triumph, but I think it is a better one. A country capable of correcting itself has something more durable to celebrate than a country that merely congratulates itself.
There are presently those who speak as though America is hopelessly broken, and others who regard nearly any criticism of it as an insult. Neither position asks very much of the citizen. Despair relieves us of the responsibility to improve anything; nostalgia relieves us of the responsibility to notice what still requires improvement. Self-government permits neither luxury for long.
A republic is not an heirloom we place upon the mantel and admire because our ancestors left it there. It is an inheritance that arrives with maintenance instructions.
Those instructions are not terribly mysterious. Citizens must remain willing to distinguish truth from convenience, principle from party, public service from personal ambition, and disagreement from enmity. We must be capable of criticizing leaders we voted for and recognizing fairness in people we did not. We must preserve institutions when they frustrate us, because someday we may be exceedingly grateful that they can frustrate someone else.
Most of this work is rather ordinary.
The republic is present when an election worker carefully counts a ballot cast for a candidate she dislikes. It is present when a teacher gives a child the tools to question what adults confidently tell him. It is present when a journalist publishes an inconvenient fact, when a public servant refuses an improper order, and when neighbors who disagree about politics still help one another when the storm takes down a fence.
None of these things makes particularly impressive fireworks.
They are nevertheless closer to the substance of self-government.
Our predecessors in 1776 could not know what would become of the declaration they signed. They certainly could not have imagined all the people who would eventually claim its promises as their own. They left later Americans principles broad enough to expose their own contradictions, institutions capable of amendment, and an argument about liberty that subsequent generations have never quite stopped having.
Now the argument belongs to us.
Two hundred and fifty years is long enough to know that republics do not improve because improvement is inevitable. They improve because ordinary people refuse to accept the distance between what their country promises and what their country practices.
So tomorrow, celebrate loudly. Hang the flag. Attend the parade. Eat something cooked over a fire and watch the sky light up.
Then, when the smoke clears, remember that we inherited more than a birthday.
We inherited responsibility for what America becomes next.
Our predecessors had their turn.
This one is ours.
I remain, in expectation,
Prudence C. Wilder
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