America 250: The History Wars are Raging, Jeopardizing America’s Future
Getting America’s Story Right Today Matters More Than Ever Before
By Caleb Franz
On the eve of her 250th birthday, America is in the midst of an identity crisis. Two very distinct visions of the nation’s founding and development are competing for dominance. One emphasizes American greatness and exceptionalism, highlighting a positive, almost perfectionist view of the American story that starts to sound like it was ripped from a fantasy novel. The other reflects a growing sense of nihilism becoming increasingly apparent in western culture. It views the founding as nothing more than a hypocritical exercise in settler colonialism, advancing a privileged class while oppressing various minority groups. Under this view, America has never been good, and has committed far too many sins to ever hope for redemption.
The former position has been amplified on the American right, especially since the reelection of President Trump. Certain decisions and statements by individuals in the administration, including the President himself, have indicated an aversion to the darker elements of America’s past, even at the expense of some of the more heroic figures of these darker episodes. Earlier this spring, for instance, the National Park Service made headlines for the removal of Harriet Tubman on its webpage featuring the Underground Railroad. It replaced the prominent abolitionist with a feature about the “White/Black” cooperation between conductors and slaves seeking freedom. Tubman’s feature was eventually restored, but it wasn’t a good look, even if what they temporarily replaced it with was factual.
President Trump himself sparked more direct outrage when he took to Truth Social in August, lashing out at the Smithsonian Institute for allegedly focusing their exhibits on “how horrible our Country is” and “how bad Slavery was… Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future.” Even a charitable interpretation of the President’s approach to American history — wanting to focus on and highlight the “brightness” and “success” of the American story — can’t avoid the unfortunate theme of these decisions. The Trump administration’s attitude seems to be that any reference to the darker episodes of American history, like slavery, is “woke” revisionism.
Yet as misguided as many of the stances taken by the Trump administration have been in the months since his inauguration, they don’t exist in a vacuum. It is an overcorrection, but it’s a direct response to the decades of anti-American and anti-western sentiment that have been prevalent in the media and higher education. Generations of young people have been taught to believe that America, by nature of its founding, is inherently racist and oppressive, and that rather than pride, they should feel shame because of it.
This historical revisionism most prominently took center stage in August of 2019 (the 400th anniversary of the first slave ship arriving in Jamestown, Virginia), when the New York Times Magazine published the ongoing 1619 project. Spearheaded by Nikole Hannah-Jones, the project seeks to make slavery central to the American story, reframing its origin from 1776 to 1619.
Certainly, slavery is at the center of many of the early struggles in American history, and it’s hard to overstate the influence that the institution had on civil and social society at that time. But the 1619 project took things a step further, suggesting that slavery was part of the cause of the revolution. “One of the primary reasons” claimed Hannah-Jones, “(that) some of the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.” Certainly some of the colonists were in favor of slavery more so than others, but the suggestion that the continuation of slavery was a driving factor in the push for independence is simply bad history.
Her argument truly falls apart when one considers that slavery was legal in every colony prior to independence. Yet before the end of the American Revolution, five states had already abolished the institution (either immediately or gradually). By the first few years of the nineteenth century, the entire north had implemented a plan for emancipation of some kind. This progress was a direct outcome of independence, driven by many of the same founders who were responsible for independence.
Neither the Trump administration’s approach to craft a fluffy, fairy tale-like narrative about American history, nor the decades long effort to deconstruct and reframe the American story to one centered around oppression are accurate or healthy for a maturing nation. The truth of the American story is both heartbreaking and heroic.
As an author, I’ve had the opportunity to chronicle some aspects of this great struggle over liberty and slavery in my latest book, The Conductor: The Story of Rev. John Rankin, Abolitionism’s Essential Founding Father. In this writing endeavor, a very clear picture of the American story came into view for me. America’s history with slavery is unquestionably ugly, in a way that it’s hard for us to even comprehend today. We shouldn’t shy away from that history, and discussing the horrors of that era does not negate the “success” or “brightness” of America’s overarching narrative. Still, we don’t need to invent an alternate history in order for people to understand how atrocious slavery was.
Among the most compelling elements that I explored throughout the writing process for my biography on America’s “father of abolition” was the source of inspiration for those in the movement. There were certainly some abolitionists who took a “burn it down” approach. William Lloyd Garrison, for instance, infamously burned a copy of the constitution on the Fourth of July in 1854, calling the document a “covenant with death” and an “agreement with hell.” It’s an act that wouldn’t sound terribly out of place at a modern ivy league university protest.
But importantly, Garrison was in a minority with this approach. Indeed, the movement as a whole would not have been nearly as effective if they did adopt Garrison’s attitudes. John Rankin understood that, and later abolitionists like Frederick Douglass and Salmon P. Chase came to agree. The key to overturning slavery lay in America’s founding. The ideas outlined in the founding documents weren’t just lofty words or exclusionary concepts of liberty and equality that only applied toward white men. They were principles yet to be fully achieved, that posterity would be charged with fulfilling.
This understanding led Frederick Douglass to call the constitution a “glorious liberty document” in 1852 during his “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July” speech. It led to Abraham Lincoln invoking the Declaration of Independence throughout his popular debates against Stephen Douglas, and continuing to do so throughout the Civil War.
The academic radicals on the left and the reactionaries on the right are both missing something fundamental from their approach to American history. The struggle and the darkness of some of the earliest days were indeed real — and it was because of that struggle that everyday heroes ensured that America would live up to its founding principles. It means that America was neither perfect nor irredeemable.
Correcting this narrative is of increasing urgency as we approach the 250th. A recent Gallup poll released this summer highlighted an alarming statistic. Patriotic pride among U.S. adults is at a record low, with only a little over half of the population considering themselves “extremely or very proud” to be American. This trajectory is not sustainable for long term growth and stability.
A shared heritage influences far more than most consider. The values that we hold, the regions we live in, the way we vote, and more are at least partially influenced by our understanding of this heritage. As Americans look forward to celebrating 250 years of independence, it’s critical that we get on the same page about what that heritage means.
Caleb Franz is the Program Manager at Young Voices, a scholar with the Bluegrass Institute, and the author of The Conductor: The Story of Rev. John Rankin, Abolitionism’s Essential Founding Father.