A DIVIDED AMERICA CELEBRATES A BIRTHDAY

 

July 4, 2026, will mark a major event in the nation’s history. It is the two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence and our landmark semi-quincentennial birthday.

In less divisive times, the focus of the event would be on the meaning of the American Revolution, how we have grown as a nation, and where we go from here. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has attempted some positive spin by proclaiming, “2026 is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to foster unity, celebrate our nation’s progress, and to identify our goals for the next 250 years.”

However, next year, there will be little unity, sparse agreement on the nation’s progress, and major arguments on future goals. Finding any common ground cannot happen in an environment where there are constant deployments of National Guard to American cities, masked ICE agents hauling immigrants off the streets, and American fighter jets blowing fishing boats out of the water. To add to the tension, there will be critical and contentious mid-term election campaigns occurring across the country.

Community civic organizations will make attempts to provide exhibits, parades, lectures, and picnics. Fireworks, hotdogs, and patriotic costumes will be on full display. But museums and educators across the country who receive federal funding, are confused and often terrified about what to present in explaining the Revolution and its 250-year aftermath.

This is because the Trump Administration holds the purse strings and wants to present its own MAGA version of our history, without debate. In the months before the event, the national institutions that would normally take the lead on planning for the nation’s birthday celebration have either come under attack or been dissolved. Trump has fired the Archivist of the United States and the Librarian of Congress. He has demanded that the Smithsonian Institute bow to his curatorial bidding.  The National Endowment for the Arts has been gutted. National Public Radio and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting have been defunded.

To replace these respected historians and institutions, Trump has signed an executive order establishing himself as chair of a White House “Taskforce 250.” The taskforce’s website touts a series of videos produced by Hillsdale College, a conservative Christian institution in Michigan. One of the videos seeks to compare Trump with Lincoln.

A few ventures have survived the Trump purge and successfully presented an unvarnished story of our improbable beginning and history. At the privately owned Philadelphia nonprofit, the Museum of the American Revolution, the exhibit “Declaration’s Journey” opened on October 18^th. To set the tone it features two borrowed artifacts. First is the Windsor chair in which Jefferson is believed to have written the Declaration of Independence. Second, a rusted metal prison bench, from which Martin Luther King wrote his “Letter from a Brimingham Jail.”

The six-part, twelve-hour Ken Burns PBS documentary, “The American Revolution” somehow escaped Trump’s authoritarian censors. In the opinion of Harvard historian Jill Lepore, “It restores truth and sanity to American history.” The Trump Administration has made it clear that it wants a clean and neat national origin story that praises its version of the good guys. “The American Revolution” documentary is not that story.

Lapore praises Burns for his ability to present “a political carrousel, a teeming moving, terrifying story, relating a chain of events forged in bravery and betrayal, of ferocity and torment, of ambition and terror, and yet a chain held together by a single organizing idea, of possibility.” In many respects, the Burns documentary is an act of defiance by PBS that pushes back against Trump’s white-washed version of history.

Amid our ongoing cultural divide, what important messages should come from the story fostered by the American Revolution? First, our nation is based on a written creed, not on a single ethnicity or religion. Citizens with ancestors who go back many generations are no more American than recent ones. Unlike European nations there is no “fatherland” to explain the formation of the state.

Second, now is the time to reflect and study the Founding Fathers and their legacy. Each of them has been the focus of outstanding biographies from reputable historians in recent years.

Overall, the Trump presidency would stun and anger the Founders who were reacting to the abuses of a monarch and his “accumulation of all powers in the same hands” (Federalist Paper No.47) They conceived of a decentralized and restrained executive, not an authoritarian Trump, supported by a weak Congress and ideologically driven Supreme Court.

Third, for those who believe in the central position of race in the national story, there is the New York Times “1619 Project.” This Pulitzer winning historical study argues that for 250 years, slavery has profoundly shaped every aspect of American society, from its founding principles and economy to its culture.

Lastly, if our semi-quincentennial birthday gives new meaning and momentum to the “No-Kings” movement against the president, much has been accomplished. What better way to breathe new life into our Declaration and its principles?

I only wish I could fit the following words, written by Thomas Paine, on a tee-shirt or protest sign. “Let them call me a rebel and welcome, I feel no concern from it. But I should suffer the misery of devils, were I to make a whore of my soul by searing allegiance to one whose character is that of a sottish, stupid, stubborn, worthless, brutish man.”