Throughout human history, America has agreed on one thing: that every modern birthday celebration is its own will involve in hissing chunks of meat, Springsteen in the ears, smoke in the eyes, sulphur in the nostrils, the red glow of rockets.
Less obvious is how to appropriately celebrate a major anniversary — like America’s 250th birthday in two years — at a time when the country is so politically divided that many Americans are calling it quits on the Great Experiment after November. A Gallup poll this year found that 67 percent of adults feel “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’re satisfied with the way things are: 21 percent in June. Two-thirds of people who responded to a Quinnipiac poll in January said they believed American democracy was on the verge of collapse. Historians are sounding the alarm, and this week, Chief Justice Sonia Sotomayor and two of her colleagues, dissenting from 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 “a king above the law,” upending “the status quo that has existed since the nation’s founding.”
There is a group of people trying to solve the problem of generating feel-good patriotism in an age of bad vibes. Two and a half centuries after 56 white men gathered to scribble their names on a piece of parchment, a 33-member U.S. Semiquincentennial Commission — a bipartisan mix of lawmakers, government officials, and citizens involved in the humanities and business worlds — has been charged with coming up with some kind of celebration that might make the states feel united again.
“I envision countless celebrations that are as diverse as the country we live in. Different people choose to celebrate in different ways,” said Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.).
“This would be an opportunity to celebrate who we are, by including everyone who has made this country great,” said Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-N.J.).
“I mean, we’re talking about parades! And festivals! And fireworks! And ice cream and baseball games and history and storytelling and sharing! And it’s town meetings!” says former Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.), an ambassador for the committee.
Parades, fireworks, ice cream…sure. But those last three things — history, storytelling, sharing — aren’t as inherently unifying as the others. Some of the most heated battles of our time have been over how different parts of our history should figure into the American story as we know it today, and how the details should shape the chapters that follow. Which Americans deserve statues? Whose stories deserve to be preserved in libraries and taught in classrooms? Does the government owe reparations to the descendants of enslaved people? What did the Founding Fathers really mean when they wrote the Second Amendment? When Actually become a democracy, and is there one now?
Congress created the Semiquincentennial Commission at a time in American history that feels both very near and very far away. It was the summer of 2016, when half the country believed that the first black president would be succeeded by the first woman in office. America was in turmoil — Donald Trump had just won the Republican nomination by mocking political norms and snarling at Washington — but Many held on to a sense of inalienable optimism about the country’s future.
While much has changed since the commission was created, its mandate has not. Over the next 730 days, it is to plan “commemorations and activities” to commemorate the signing of the Declaration of Independence, focusing on places associated with “the affirmation of American liberty,” such as Boston; Charleston, S.C.; New York; and Philadelphia. Those events, Congress said, should underscore ideas associated with “the quest for freedom of all mankind.” Congress encouraged the commission to consider big: books, pamphlets, films, documentaries, conferences and lectures spread across the 13 original colonies. Libraries! Museums! Mobile exhibits! Signing ceremonies! A time capsule opened as America turns 500!
The group is looking to emphasize 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 said. “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 celebrate America 250.”
Gardner cited the story of a Japanese-American girl who gave her class valedictory speech while imprisoned in a camp during World War II, about how she still believed in American ideas of freedom. “We did it wrong,” Gardner said, “but we have to fight to make it right. And we will win in doing so.”
Padilla says that while America was “far from perfect in the beginning,” the Founding Fathers would be “quite pleased” with the state of our country today, because they designed principles and constitutional mechanisms to ultimately guarantee equal rights.
But the Constitution also had mechanisms like the Three-Fifths Compromise, which meant that all Americans were not equal. Padilla clarified:
“The ability to pass laws. The ability to amend the constitution. And the structure led to the creation of, for example, public school systems, which almost everyone appreciates.”
Even in these circumstances, common cause is hard to find. Public schools have Also become a battlefield for political wars over history.
One more question before the big 2-5-0: is there a wrong way to celebrate America?
“I think the wrong way would be to fall into the lap of a particular myth,” says Eddie S. Glaude Jr., chair of the African-American studies department at Princeton, who is writing a book about the 250th. “That is, we want to tell ourselves a story about the country in which we are always moving toward a more perfect union.”
“The past haunts our celebrations,” he added. “It’s always been that way.”
And the commission has its own contentious subhistory: 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 she was verbally abused by a coworker “in a drunken, sexist tirade against a colleague,” calling her “an asshole.” She and another plaintiff settled their claims with America250 this year, according to court documents, and the other two are in settlement negotiations.
There has also been some strife within the group about how the commission should operate. According to the 2023 commission In a report to Congress, three commissioners called for the commission to be disbanded. They complained loudly about the way the commission was being run, accusing its leadership of a “lack of fiscal transparency.” Attendance at meetings plummeted, the report said, and the dysfunction made it difficult to solicit private donations. The previous chairman, appointed under Trump and kept in place by President Biden, also resigned (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 charges, and a federal judge in Pennsylvania dismissed the case in February 2024. The plaintiffs filed a notice of appeal, according to court records.)
Rosie Rios, who was appointed by Biden to be the commission’s new chair in 2022, has said the controversies will not distract her or the group of planning the big birthday party. She says when commissioners met in Virginia’s Colonial Williamsburg in March, they “unanimously” approved the planned initiatives.
So, what exactly is this deliberative body planning to do?
There is an online portal where people can upload videos about what being an 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 what it was supposed to be,” Rios says. There will be festivities “from sea to sea,” she says, though she didn’t have many details about what they will look like, other than that local committees (of which there are now 49, state and territorial) would help plan them. They’re still trying to figure out what artifacts will go into the time capsule. There will be community service initiatives, she says. There will be an oral history project, funded in part by a $2.5 million grant from Walmart. There’s an essay contest for schoolchildren to take field trips to places like the Statue of Liberty. There will be a commemorative coin. (Congress has given the commission $49.8 million since its creation.)
When asked how exactly the commission would commemorate the darkest chapters in our history, like slavery, the colonization of indigenous communities, or the disenfranchisement of women, Rios seemed frustrated that “the big story that we hear in the media and pretty much everywhere is how divided our country is.” Instead, she spoke about how, as she travels across the United States, she speaks to children who are hopeful for the country’s future.
“You know, despite the cynicism, the flourishing cynicism on social media platforms and on the airwaves, this is what they see,” she added. “Okay, this is what they are exposed to. But the real story of our country is still being written by these optimists. I am an optimist.”
The committee is working with organizations that will give them input on how to recognize “the good, the bad and the ugly,” as Rios called it, such as the National Congress of American Indians and the National Women’s History Museum. “I want to go beyond the obvious stories of women,” says Frédérique Irwin, president and CEO of the National Women’s History Museum. “I don’t just want to talk about Pocahontas. There’s so much more that women did.”
But before the commissioners get to that point, this year’s presidential election could complicate matters further. Watson Coleman, the New Jersey Democrat, worries that if Trump is re-elected, he will want to project 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 celebration” for the 250th — complete with a huge carnival, a high school sports competition 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 on Memorial Day 2025, would be organized by his own separate task force run out of the White House. Rios said the committee would carry out its own festivities “regardless of who is in office.”
The planners say they want more than fireworks, but perhaps the only obvious way to unite the country is to keep it all spotless.
“I want to engage 350 million Americans,” Rios says. “If that means not everyone agrees with what we do, then we should expect that. Because that’s their choice.”
