Happy 250th Anniversary! What's Next?

Our America's editor explores what this year's 250th independence anniversary means in context with previous history. This article is part of Bill Dowell's A Different Place series published by Substack.

In his latest book, America, USA: How race shadows U.S. anniversaries, Princeton professor Eddie Glaude notes virtually every major American anniversary has coincided with a major crisis.

The 100th anniversary in 1876 marked the near-collapse of the government due to corruption in the administration of Ulysses S. Grant. Grant had been a brilliant Civil War general, but as president he turned out to be overly trusting of friends and associates.

Much like the Trump administration today, many of them treated public access as a cash machine. Pete Hegseth may not be everyone’s choice for Secretary of Defense, or as he prefers, “Secretary of War,” but Grant’s Secretary of War, William W. Belknap, was involved in so many bribery, kickback, and general corruption schemes that he was finally impeached.

Watergate: using the presidency to get revenge

The 200th anniversary in 1976 wasn’t much better. It found the country still recovering in the aftermath of the Watergate crisis and the collapse of Richard Nixon’s administration. Like Trump, Nixon had compiled a hefty list of political enemies, and he did his best to use the presidency to get revenge against his opponents.

As the country gradually awoke to Nixon’s true personality, the end was not pretty. The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein wrote in their account, The Final Days, that the discredited president spent his last days in office delivering drunken monologues to the White House’s gallery of portraits of former presidents.

Courtesy of Jeff Danziger

This year's 250th anniversary not much better

America’s 250th anniversary doesn’t promise to be much better. After abandoning a self-inflicted war against Iran, and turning Washington’s Reflecting Pool into a gigantic swamp festering in the netherland that separates the Capitol from the Lincoln Memorial, Trump’s garish attempts at landscape decoration ended in the murder of a local population of ducks.

Trump’s artificial homage to a mythical rural America, the “Great American State Fair,” staged on the National Mall, has been universally boycotted by the credible musicians and entertainers that Trump had hoped to hire. In the end, Trump’s only option was to turn the affair into yet another political rally with his less than coherent ego as a substitute star.

Then we have the financial problems of the Kennedy Center, which the public boycotted after Trump put his name on the façade. The name has since been erased, but Washington’s most important cultural institution now faces possible bankruptcy. The bottom line is that this July 4th, promises to find America just as divided as it was during earlier scandal-ridden anniversaries.

Corruption and on being an American

In his book, Eddie Glaude skips over the ever-present political corruption and focuses instead on the problems America has had from the start in dealing with race, the cancer embedded in American politics from the beginning. 250 years after its birth, America is still trying to decide who has the right to consider himself an American.

While previous administrations attempted to discreetly gloss over the question, Donald Trump has been adamant that he thinks America would be better off if it could only be populated by the “right” people. Trump’s definition clearly excludes people of color, especially immigrants from Somalia whom he has famously denounced as garbage. His list of undesirables also includes anyone from Haiti or Africa, which he dismisses as “shithole countries,” and to Mexicans and Hispanics whom he considers to be “criminals and rapists.”

Trump’s nagging problem is that while Republicans have steadfastly relied on predominantly white voters to remain in power, the demographic makeup of America’s population is irreversibly shifting towards greater ethnic diversity.

There is nothing new in that. America has always been diverse. New York was settled by the Dutch before the English arrived and changed its name from New Amsterdam to New York. Philadelphia was originally the colony of New Sweden. Florida was Spanish. Louisiana was French. Territory west of the Mississippi was originally part of Mexico.

Diversity - and resistance to it - has characterized American history

Trump himself is only a third-generation American. None of his grandparents spoke English as their native language. There is nothing unusual in that. Diversity has characterized America throughout its brief history, and resistance to diversity has been just as prevalent. Employment ads in the 1850s stipulated that “No Irish need apply.” The term was so wide-spread that in the end it was shortened to “NINA.”

The Irish, and especially labor leader Denis Kearny, in turn, campaigned against letting Chinese laborers into the country to work on the transcontinental railroad. That resulted in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Exclusion of Asians from U.S. citizenship really only ended in 1965, when the Hart-Celler Act abolished immigration quotas based on national origins.

The country has sought unity since the beginning, but the slogan, “United We Stand,” has always been more an aspiration than a reality. The real question is what and who do we really want to be?

Voting rights for all Americans?

The Declaration of Independence declares that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with inalienable rights. That is an admirable notion, but American women in all the American states did not get the right to vote until the 19th Amendment went into effect in 1920.

The 15th Amendment gave American males the right to vote, regardless of race or ethnic origin, in 1870, but it was not until the 1965 Voting Rights Act that African Americans were free to vote in most southern states. The Supreme Court, packed with a conservative majority due to the refusal of the Republican Party’s senate majority leader, Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, to accept a nominee of President Barack Obama, has done its best to roll back the act, which had offered at least some degree of political equality to Americans of African descent.

Even with that setback, African Americans are better off today than they were when the U.S. Constitution was first drafted. Apportionment to Congress’s House of Representatives was based on population. To avoid being outnumbered, the southern states demanded that slaves, i.e., Africans, be counted as part of the population, even though most American southerners did not consider anyone who was black to be equal to someone who was white.

The compromise was to count each African slave as 3/5ths of a human being. So much for the contention that all men are created equal.

African Americans have a right to be upset at the contradictions and injustices that were prevalent when what was to become American society was just beginning to define itself. In the end, however, the Africans fared better than the indigenous population that was brutally displaced by the European struggle to colonize what to them constituted “the New World.”

The signers of the Declaration of Independence make a long list of grievances against the King. At the end of their list of complaints, they state, “He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.” To the signers of the Declaration, the American Indian was a savage to be eradicated, and consequently not really human.

Hardly anyone remembered that in the French and Indian War, fought between 1753 and 1763 in a major colonialist grab for more territory, it was the French and English who paid Indian tribes hard cash for each scalp ripped from an opponent’s head. If the natives were indeed savage, Europeans had sought to use the savagery for their own purposes and in the process had accelerated the carnage.

Coming to a realistic understanding of our history

Eddie Glaude’s take on all this is that at this past 4th of July celebrating American Independence, the United States has just begun to deal with some of its more urgent issues 250 years after its birth.

We are only now beginning to come to terms with a realistic understanding of our own history. That understanding is necessary if we want to move forward. It is easy to feel depressed at the injustices of the past, but to a great extent we have moved beyond some of the most painful parts of that past.

A great deal remains to be done, but as Eddie Glaude says, as a country, we are still in our adolescence. Much of the divisiveness of the present is due to the fact that for the first time in our history, we are beginning to look at our own history in realistic terms, rather than as a fictional myth intended to create a false sense of unity. Trump and the MAGA crowd have denounced our newfound historical honesty as “woke” and unpatriotic. Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s International editor who has had a great deal of experience reporting in America, calls it “clarity.”

The real question is: knowing what we know now, do we still feel that all men are really created equal? Do we feel that they should be endowed with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, or do we think that some are better than others, and that there is not enough of the pie to go around, so let’s exclude those who are not strong or wealthy enough to play in the big leagues?

What it means to be American

One of the most eloquent comments on what it means to be an American came in a BBC interview with Abdi Nor Iftin, who emigrated to the U.S. from Mogadishu, Somalia, after receiving a “golden” visa in 2014. Abdi had not graduated from high school in Somalia, but in America he first attended a community college and then graduated from Boston College, one of the city’s most prestigious universities.

After graduation, he published a best-selling book, I Am an American, and then went to work for an NGO helping other refugees integrate into American society. Trump cut funding to the NGO, which ceased operation, but Abdi found numerous speaking engagements and other assignments that have kept him busy. He told the BBC that, of course, he does not like the racism that has characterized some members of the Republican Party since Trump took over, but on the whole he still finds Americans in general to be friendly, helpful, and encouraging.

His brother had hoped to emigrate from Somalia to the U.S., but Trump made that impossible, so his brother emigrated to Canada instead and is now a Canadian citizen. “Canada is a beautiful country,” Abdi said, “and I like it very much, but given the choice, I still prefer to be an American.” In a sense, Abdi’s affirmation says it all.

Life in a deeply divided America is not easy for anyone, but the fact that we are finally able to discuss our differences openly is a good indication that we have come a long way. That said, we still need to decide who we really are and, more importantly, who we want to be.

An argument can be made that the human race faces global existential issues ranging from climate change to a scramble for diminishing resources to the menace of a new pandemic that wipes out much of the race the way the bubonic plague decimated human populations in the Middle Ages. The only way to handle these problems is through global cooperation, which means looking beyond national, ethnic, and racial characterizations and thinking of ourselves as human beings rather than members of opposing factions.

The U.S., if it wants, has a head start on everyone else thanks to our diversity and the best notions of the political system that the Founding Fathers gave us. Despite the pettiness of a Donald Trump, we can still be the leader of the Free World if we want to be. We may not be there yet, but at least we’ve made a start.

Foreign correspondent and author William Dowell is Global Geneva's America’s editor based in Philadelphia. Over the past decades, he has covered much of the globe, including Iran, for TIME, ABC News and other news organizations.

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