America is approaching its 250th birthday. Whats worth celebrating?

August 22, 2024

In the course of human events, America has come to agree on one thing: that any modern birthday celebration of itself will involve sizzling hunks of meat, Springsteen in the ears, smoke in the eyes, sulfur in the nostrils, rockets’ red glare.

What’s less self-evident is how to appropriately mark a big birthday — like America’s 250th, two short years away — at a time when the country is so politically split that many Americans may be ready to declare the Great Experiment kaput after November. A survey this year by Gallup found that 67 percent of adults feel either “very proud” or “extremely proud” to be American — down from 85 percent in 2013 and 90 percent in 2003. A much lower percentage say they are satisfied with the way things are going: 21 percent, in June. Two-thirds of the people who responded to a January Quinnipiac poll said they believed American democracy was in danger of collapsing. Historians have been sounding alarm bells, and this week Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor and two of her colleagues, dissenting against the court’s ruling that presidents have absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts, said the court’s conservative majority had just made the president into “a king above the law,” upending “the status quo that has existed since the Founding.”

There is a group of people trying to solve the problem of generating feel-good patriotism in this era of bad vibes. Two and a half centuries after 56 White men got together to scribble their names on a piece of parchment, a 33-member U.S. Semiquincentennial Commission — a bipartisan mix of lawmakers, administration officials, and private citizens involved in the humanities and business — has been tasked with figuring out what kind of a celebration might make the states feel united again.

“I am envisioning countless celebrations as diverse as the country that we live in. Different people choose to celebrate in different ways,” says Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.).

“This would be an opportunity to celebrate who we are, by including everyone that we are that made this country great,” says Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-N.J.).

“I mean, we’re talking parades! And festivals! And fireworks! And ice cream and baseball games and history and storytelling and sharing! And it’s town meetings!” says former senator Cory Gardner (R-Colo.), an ambassador for the commission.

Parades, fireworks, ice cream … sure. But those last three things — history, storytelling, sharing — are not as inherently unifying as the others. Some of the most vicious fights of our time have been over how different parts of our history should figure in to the American story as we understand it today, and how the details should shape the next chapters. Which Americans deserve statues? Whose stories deserve to be kept in libraries and taught in classrooms? Does the government owe reparations to the descendants of enslaved people? What did the founders really mean when they wrote the Second Amendment? When did America actually become a democracy, and is it one now?

Congress created the Semiquincentennial Commission at a time in American history that feels both very close and extremely far away. It was the summer of 2016, when half the country believed the first Black president would be followed by the first woman in that job. There was major agita in America — Donald Trump had just won the Republican nomination by sneering at political norms and snarling at Washington — but many clung to a sense of unalienable optimism for the nation’s future.

Although much has changed since the commission was created, its mandate has not. Over the next 730 days, it must plan “observances and activities” commemorating the signing of the Declaration of Independence, emphasizing places associated with “the assertion of American liberty,” such as Boston; Charleston, S.C.; New York; and Philadelphia. Those events, Congress said, must underscore the ideas associated with “the quest for freedom of all mankind.” Congress encouraged the commission to think big: books, pamphlets, movies, documentaries, conferences and lectures sprinkled throughout the 13 original colonies. Libraries! Museums! Mobile exhibits! Signing ceremonies! A time capsule to be opened when America turns 500!

The group is on a quest to underline the positive aspects of our history. Nothing too divisive: Democracy. Freedom. A bright future for the children.

“I mean, America is strong and resilient. And I think that’s exactly what the celebration will be,” Gardner says. “And, I mean, January 6th, [2021], — that was obviously a very sad day to see. But I don’t want that to overshadow the fact that we’re going to be celebrating America 250.”

Gardner brought up the story of a Japanese American girl who gave her class’s valedictorian speech while incarcerated at a World War II camp about how she still believed in American notions of freedom. “We’ve done it wrong,” Gardner says, “but we’ve got to fight to make it right. And we will prevail with that.”

Padilla says that, even though America was “far from perfect at the outset,” the Founding Fathers would be “very pleased” with the state of our country right now, because they fashioned principles and constitutional mechanisms to eventually guarantee equal rights.

But the Constitution also had mechanisms such as the Three-Fifths Compromise, which meant that all Americans weren’t equal. Padilla clarified:

“The ability to pass laws. The ability to amend the Constitution. And the structure led to the formation, for example, of public school systems, which nearly everybody values.”

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Even by these lights, common cause is hard to come by. Public schools have also become a battleground for the political wars over history.

Another question, ahead of the big 2-5-0: Is there a wrong way to celebrate America?

“I think a wrong way would be to just fall into the lap of a certain myth,” says Eddie S. Glaude Jr., chair of the Department of African American Studies at Princeton, who’s writing a book on the 250th. “That is to say, we’d like to tell ourselves a story of the country in which we’re always already on the road to a more perfect union.”

“The past haunts our celebrations,” he added. “It always has.”

And the commission has its own contentious sub-history: In February 2022, four former female executives filed a wide-ranging lawsuit against the Semiquincentennial Commission and America250 alleging cronyism, financial waste, retaliation and a “toxic” work environment under previous leadership. (America250 has denied the allegations.) One of the plaintiffs alleged that she was berated by a fellow employee “in a drunken, sexist tirade to a work peer,” calling her “a b----.” She and one other plaintiff settled their claims with America250 this year, according to court filings, and the other two are in settlement talks.

There has been infighting within the group, too, over how the commission should work. According to the commission’s 2023 report to Congress, three commissioners wanted the commission disbanded, loudly complaining about how it was run and accusing leadership of a “lack of fiscal transparency.” Attendance at meetings was dropping, the report said, and the dysfunction was making it hard to raise private donations. The previous chair, who had been appointed under Trump and kept in place by President Biden, also stepped down from his post (he remains on the commission) and he and the commission’s former executive director later sued those three colleagues for defamation, among other claims. (The ex-commissioners objected to the allegations, and a Pennsylvania federal judge dismissed the case in February 2024. The plaintiffs filed a notice to appeal the case, according to the court’s docket.)

Rosie Rios, whom Biden appointed as the new chair of the commission in 2022, has said that the controversies won’t distract her or the group from planning the big birthday bash. She says that, when the commissioners met in March in Virginia’s Colonial Williamsburg, they approved the planned initiatives “unanimously.”

So. What is this deliberative body planning to do, exactly?

There is an online portal where people can upload videos about what being American means to them, announced last year at a baseball game. “We did it with a light touch: baseball, hot dogs and apple pie. It was Main Street America, and it was exactly the way it should have been,” Rios says. There will be celebrations “from sea to shining sea,” she says, though she didn’t have much detail as to what those will look like, except that local commissions (of which there are now 49 state and territorial ones) would be helping to plan them. They are still trying to figure out which artifacts will go in the time capsule. There will be community service initiatives, she says. There will be an oral history project, sponsored by part of a $2.5 million grant from Walmart. There’s an essay competition for schoolchildren to take field trips to places such as the Statue of Liberty. There will be a commemorative coin. (Congress has given the commission $49.8 million since it started.)

When asked how exactly the commission would memorialize the darker chapters of our history, such as slavery, the colonization of Indigenous communities or the disenfranchisement of women, Rios seemed frustrated that “the big narrative that we’re hearing in the media and pretty much everywhere is how divided our country is.” She talked instead about how, as she travels around the United States, she speaks to children who are hopeful for the country’s future.

“You know, despite the cynicism, the rampant cynicism across social media platforms and airwaves, this is what they see,” she added. “Right, this is what they’re exposed to. But the real story of our country continues to be written by these optimists. I’m an optimist.”

The commission is partnering with organizations that will give them input on how to acknowledge “the good, the bad and the ugly,” as Rios put it, like the National Congress of American Indians and the National Women’s History Museum. “I want to go beyond just the obvious stories of women,” says Frédérique Irwin, president and CEO of the National Women’s History Museum. “I don’t want to talk about, you know, just Pocahontas. There’s so much more that women were doing.”

But before the commissioners get to that point, this year’s presidential election could complicate things even further. Watson Coleman, the New Jersey Democrat, worries that if Trump is elected again, he might want to put forth his own impression of “what America is and has been.” In a campaign video last year, Trump announced his own plans to throw a “most spectacular birthday party” for the 250th — complete with a big fair, a high school sports contest called the “Patriot Games” and a garden filled with 100 statues of national heroes (a pet project from his final months in office, later squashed by Biden). He said a year of festivities, beginning Memorial Day 2025, would be organized by his own separate task force run out of the White House. Rios says the commission will carry out its own festivities “no matter who’s in office.”

The planners say they want more than fireworks — but perhaps the only self-evident way to unite the country is to keep it all unobjectionable.

“I want to engage 350 million Americans,” Rios says. “If that means not everyone’s going to agree with what we’re doing, we should expect that. Because that is their choice.”

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