America’s 250th anniversary has become a partisan tug-of-war, like everything else. Trumpians overly romanticize American history, while the president’s opponents wallow in grievance.
To transcend this poisonous polarization, let’s learn from the past. Especially at each half-century mark, Americans traditionally toasted the new, all-American marvels that have made America, the Land of Liberty, the “United States of Possibility,” too.
By July 4, 1826, America had blossomed. The 2.5 million Revolutionaries spread out along 13 colonies were building a continental colossus. Twelve million people lived in 24 states. And the Erie Canal, the Cumberland National Road, and the first charters granted to construct railways, kept shrinking the distance between the developed East and the western frontier.
America the war-weary in 1876 – just 11 years after the Civil War – makes America today look calm, loving, united. Still, transportation and communication advances were reuniting the nation. America’s first World’s Fair, the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, proclaimed: “No North, No South, No East, No West—The Union One and Indivisible.”
Showstoppers included a 700-ton Corliss steam engine, a mechanical typewriter with the QWERTY keyboard, and Thomas Edison’s electric telegraphic “dotting and dashing” 1,000 words per minute. Yet Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone upstaged them all. “My God, it talks,” cried the emperor of Brazil, Dom Pedro II, dropping the receiver as Bell’s voice emerged from a wire.
In 1926, The Roaring Twenties’ celebrations saluted “consumerism,” a term coined five years earlier. Philadelphia’s 1926 Sesquicentennial International Exposition featured a Luminous Liberty Bell merging liberty with prosperity. This 80-foot-tall replica glowed with 26,000 15-watt Westinghouse light bulbs. Radios, refrigerators, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and Model-T Fords heralded a “New Era,” defined by the increasingly popular – yet perilous – slogan, “Buy Now, Pay Later.”
America’s Bicentennial in 1976 seemed doomed. The chaotic sixties spawned the sour seventies. Inflation raged. Crime soared. Morale plummeted. America had just lost its first war, in Vietnam, and experienced its first presidential resignation, as Gerald Ford replaced Richard Nixon following Watergate.
Unexpectedly, the Bicentennial became a healing moment. CBS TV ran Bicentennial Minutes, giving celebrities 60 seconds to describe the events that triggered the American Revolution. Meanwhile, the American Freedom Train crisscrossed the country with George Washington’s copy of the Constitution, Abraham Lincoln’s stovepipe hat, Martin Luther King’s pastoral robes, and Judy Garland’s gingham Wizard of Oz dress. A moon rock evoked the earlier celebrations of technological and scientific wonders.
True, their fellow citizens had recently put men on the moon, launched satellites, structured DNA, programmed computers, and split atoms. But 50 years ago, Americans needed reassurance, reconciliation, and national revival. Similarly, today, many Americans have lost that essential fuel for improving their democracy – hope.
From celebration to a search for hope
Today, when many reject celebrating 1776 and Thomas Jefferson because of the shadow slavery cast until the Civil War, America-the-polarized should first celebrate red-white-and-blue hardware, not software. Americans are more likely to feel comfortable championing America by emphasizing their ancestors’ technological wizardry, infrastructure advances, and growth talk.
American-generated miracles most people take for granted include hand-held computers, talking GPS navigators, and lifesaving, coronavirus-defeating, mRNA vaccines.
But what this despairing generation most needs to hear – in America, the West, and Israel – is that the most seemingly insoluble problems of 1976 are now solved and forgotten.
In 1976, Americans feared nuclear annihilation by the Soviet Union. Most smoked like chimneys, choked on smog, and feared cancer and heart attacks as death sentences. George Wald, a Nobel Prize-winning Harvard professor, predicted that overpopulation, pollution, or nuclear war would destroy civilization by 2000.
Yet in 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed. Today, Americans’ life expectancy has jumped from 72.8 years to 79. Only 11% smoke, as opposed to 40% then – with secondhand smoke barred from bars, airplanes, and indoor workplaces. Air pollution emissions dropped 70%. Atmospheric lead levels dropped 98%: Acid rain has mostly gone away. The massive hole that was tearing open the Earth’s ozone layer is closing. Heart attack deaths are down 89%, while cancer death rates have dropped 33%.
Although scientific breakthroughs led the way, these achievements required bold, creative political and cultural leadership. In 1976, Time magazine called the mission to cut smoking rates “FIGHTING FIRE WITH IRE.” And, as Americans learned to “Give a Hoot, Don’t Pollute,” and “Every Litter Bit Hurts,” roadway litter plummeted by 61%, discarded glass bottles dropped by 86%, and people now pick up their dogs’ droppings.
To honor the 250th, I am publishing an e-book, 250 Reasons to Thank America, with David Suissa, publisher and editor-in-chief of TRIBE Media’s Jewish Journal.
The first 200 thank-yous are divided into five bundles, each covering a half-century. They offer broad reasons that liberal democrats enjoying the fruits of modernity should toast America. Blessings include the Declaration of Independence, baseball, penicillin, and ice-cream cones.
The final 50 are particular reasons Jews should thank America – most, naturally, resonate just as widely, from defeating Hitler to creating public parks.
In our lists, the ideological, the political, the technological, the sociological, and the economic dance together.
Like Israel, America could not have achieved what it has scientifically and financially, without the kinds of political freedoms, social stability, capitalist rewards for success, and sheer hope that characterize both countries.
That’s why, for all the tensions of the moment, Israelis and Americans should celebrate America’s 250th, toasting both countries as miracle-makers that keep making the impossible not just possible but routine – often because of our neighbors and political rivals, sometimes even thanks to them, not despite them.
The writer is an American presidential historian and a senior fellow in Zionist thought at the Jewish People Policy Institute in Jerusalem. For America’s 250th, he is publishing with David Suissa 250 Reasons to Thank America; and with the JJPI, The Essential Guide to the US-Israel Partnership, the 250th Anniversary Edition.