As the United States of America prepares to celebrate its 250th birthday on July 4, it’s a natural thing to look back over the nation’s history and try to determine whether the generations that followed the founders who signed the Declaration of Independence would recognize the republic they created.
Those first 13 colonies represented a country where a person’s own efforts meant more than one’s birth. There was no rigid class society as in other nations. There was —at least for white men at the time — the opportunity to create one’s own success.
It would require more than a century and the deadliest war in American history before the doors of opportunity would open to the hundreds of thousands of enslaved people who helped build the nation, and even longer than that before women were included as well.
The founders, however, laid the groundwork for a nation where the people, not only the rich and privileged, decided the course of action. They designed a system of checks and balances, with the executive, legislative and judicial branches holding equal power so that members of one could stop the excesses of another.
Not every Founding Father imagined the nation they helped create would still be in place 250 years later. John Adams, the first vice president and second president, warned “… there never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” Adams feared greed and lust for power would topple the early republic.
George Washington, the first U.S. president, deserves credit for holding the infant nation together. Any other person who might have served as the first president could have allowed the sense of power and privilege to benefit himself, causing the new nation to stumble and fall. Washington’s honesty and commitment to the ideals of public service helped America find its footing and survive those early years.
Washington recognized the potential problems the fledgling nation faced. When he stepped down after eight years in office, he issued a farewell address with cautions that still hold true today.
“The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural in party dissention, which in different ages and countries has perpetuated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism …” Washington wrote. “It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms. Kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection … There being constant danger of excess, the efforts ought to be by force of public opinion, to mitigate and assuage it.”
In other words, allowing politicians to create false threats intended only to divide the public could destroy our republic.
Washington had to deal with his own version of these issues as his political opponents released attacks as vicious — and often worse — than what we see today. Yet he kept his focus on what he considered to be the best policies for the most people, not just the rich.
As we celebrate next weekend, it’s worth remembering Washington’s warning. We all need to make an effort to see past the political rhetoric meant to divide us. America still stands as a beacon of freedom and opportunity. The challenge of today’s generations, and those to follow us, will be to keep those ideals solidly in place.