My fellow citizens,
Today, America turns two hundred and fifty years old.
Two hundred and fifty years ago, Americans announced a proposition so troublesome that governments have been arguing with it ever since: political power does not belong naturally to rulers. It belongs to the people. That was a dangerous idea in 1776, and properly understood, it remains one.
Today we will celebrate with flags, parades, cookouts and fireworks, as Americans have done in one fashion or another for generations. I have no objection. A nation ought to celebrate its survival occasionally, and two hundred and fifty years is no small accomplishment for an experiment whose participants have spent much of that time disagreeing rather vigorously about how it ought to work. But Independence Day deserves more from us than celebration. It deserves remembrance of what independence actually meant.
The great achievement of the American founding was not that a collection of extraordinary men created a perfect nation. They did nothing of the kind, and several million Americans living at the time could have supplied evidence. The achievement was that they placed into our political tradition an argument more durable than their own limitations: government derives its legitimate authority from the governed, individual liberty places boundaries around public power, and those entrusted with authority remain answerable to the people from whom that authority came.
We have spent two and a half centuries discovering how demanding those ideas really are. Americans who were originally excluded from the country’s promises took those promises seriously and insisted upon their share of them. Slavery was abolished. Citizenship expanded. Women gained the vote. Segregation was challenged in law. Civil rights were extended through constitutional amendment, legislation, litigation, protest, journalism and the persistent refusal of ordinary people to accept that yesterday’s injustice must become tomorrow’s tradition. None of this happened because America naturally becomes better with age. Countries are not cheese. Progress required citizens willing to notice contradictions their neighbors preferred not to discuss.
That remains our responsibility. Patriotism is sometimes presented as though it requires an agreeable disposition toward whatever the country is presently doing. I find that definition rather convenient for those presently doing it. A citizen does not demonstrate devotion to a republic by pretending its government is incapable of misconduct. She demonstrates it by caring enough about the country’s principles to object when those entrusted with power depart from them.
The distinction becomes particularly important during periods of political division. We are encouraged every day to regard one another as enemies: rural against urban, conservative against progressive, native-born against immigrant, one race against another, one generation against the next. There is always someone available to explain why our difficulties would disappear if only some other group of Americans possessed a little less influence, visibility, protection or voice. A free people should be suspicious of anyone who requires us to despise our neighbors before he can persuade us to trust him.
The republic has survived profound disagreements before. It has survived war, depression, corruption, assassination, scandal, violence and periods in which Americans wondered whether the constitutional experiment had finally exhausted itself. Survival was never guaranteed. It depended upon institutions sturdy enough to restrain power and citizens stubborn enough to insist that those institutions continue doing their jobs. That stubbornness is part of our inheritance too.
The flag we raise today belongs as much to the citizen who questions government as to the citizen who praises it. The Constitution belongs to the person whose candidate lost as surely as to the person whose candidate won. The liberties we celebrate are meaningful precisely because they do not depend upon the approval of whichever faction temporarily possesses power. That is the promise worth celebrating: not that America has always been right, not that Americans have always agreed, and not that our institutions have never failed, but that generation after generation has inherited an unfinished republic and been given the right—and the responsibility—to argue over how it might better honor its own principles.
Today that inheritance is ours. So enjoy the parade. Raise the flag. Eat too much potato salad. Comfort the dog when the fireworks begin. But somewhere between the celebration and the smoke, remember what Independence Day asks of us. The people are not spectators to the American experiment; we are its custodians. Tomorrow morning, when the flags have been folded and the streets swept clean, the republic will still be waiting for us to behave like it.
I remain, in expectation,
Prudence C. Wilder
