The week is finally here—America’s 250th anniversary. It is a time to join with family and friends, eat some burgers, watch some fireworks, and celebrate the miracle that is our country.
But it is also a time to consider a difficult but important question: What holds a country together for 250 years? It is not just laws, elections, or even a constitution, however wise.
A free people also need a shared civic inheritance: a common understanding of their nation, a shared language for discussing its ideals, and sources of truth that everyone can trust.
That is why, this week, we are thinking about George Ticknor.
Ticknor was not a politician. He was a scholar and reformer in the early 19th century, when the country was expanding westward and regional tensions were rising. Americans were also consuming sharply different versions of reality through partisan newspapers.
Ticknor saw America as a melting pot in which the various elements had not yet melted together. He believed our young country needed a common culture and a source of shared reality, and he was not going to wait for someone else to create it.
Most famously, he became the father of the public library—that common ground for free information. “In a republic,” he argued, “knowledge is not merely a privilege of the few. It is the safety of the many.”
At Harvard, he also worked to formalize American English and to pioneer the study of American literature and culture. He believed borrowing traditions from Europe was not enough. We needed an identity all our own, and an understanding of why it was special.
And isn’t that what we need to reclaim today?
We are more connected than any generation before us, yet we seem to inhabit different realities. We consume different news sources and struggle to agree on basic facts. Our kids learn starkly different versions of U.S. history depending on their school. Even our culture, from the sports we watch to the music we listen to, seems divided along political lines.
We are losing a shared understanding of our nation. The answer is not for every American to consume the same news or support the same policies. It is to build enough common ground to recognize that our destinies are tied together, that we are “E Pluribus Unum”—out of many, one.
That was Ticknor’s work, and now it is ours.
Each of us has the power to create community and bring Americans together. Chances are, many of you are doing it this weekend by gathering your neighbors and friends, not caring or asking what party they support—simply taking time to celebrate what you have in common.
That’s what this anniversary should be all about: celebrating and reflecting together on what makes our country extraordinary, because only with that shared understanding can it endure for 250 years more.
Team No Labels
