Adam Smith: Historian

This piece appeared in the Sunday Times on 21 June, 2026

In January 1975, President Gerald Ford began his annual address to Congress with a disconcertingly honest line: “The state of our Union is not good.” Traumatised by the rolling crises of Watergate and Vietnam and by the violence and soul-searching of the civil rights movement, America approached its bicentennial year plagued by self-doubt and racial tension. Pundits predicted that the celebrations would accentuate division — the preparations had been dogged by protests for years. But when July 4, 1976 arrived, the mood turned out to be overwhelmingly joyous. There was plenty of nostalgia. A steam-hauled “Freedom Train” travelled across the country carrying priceless historical documents. People painted fire hydrants with stars and stripes and pocketed specially minted bicentennial quarters.

The 62-year-old president played a carefully choreographed role. Aware that many people wanted to use the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence of 1776 — a document that included the phrase “all men are created equal” — to address ongoing inequality, his speechwriters framed the “American adventure” as a work in progress. At Independence Hall, Philadelphia, on July 4, Ford described a “union of corrected wrongs and expanded rights” in which “the struggle for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is never truly won. Each generation of Americans, indeed of all humanity, must strive to achieve these aspirations anew.”

The surge of patriotism in 1976 was an expression of relief after years of division. Perhaps it should not have been surprising: as anyone who has stood for the national anthem at a baseball game can testify, the unembarrassed patriotism of virtually every American is among their most distinctive and endearing characteristics. But does that mean in that in 2026, public pride in the founders’ promise of freedom and equality could once again lead to a temporary truce in the country’s everlasting war with itself? Don’t hold your breath.

The contrast between now and 50 years ago is striking. Few of President Trump’s predecessors would have marked such a historic anniversary — and his own 80th birthday — by organising a UFC cage fight
on the White House lawn. None would have used a speech opening the 250th celebrations, as he did last July, by saying of his opponents, to the cheers of the crowd: “I hate them. I cannot stand them, because I really believe they hate our country.”

The United States, we are always told, is a young country, yet it has the oldest national constitution (1787) anywhere in the world (depending on whether you count San Marino). The Revolutionary War that paved the way for it, from 1775 to 1783, has always provided its citizens with a common set of references. Everyone can be roused by the “patriot” leader Patrick Henry’s 1775 line, “Give me liberty or give me death.” But agreement over the foundational importance of the USA’s origin story the revolution has not stopped people arguing ceaselessly about what the revolution meant and about whether it was even over.

That argument is now in plain sight. A bipartisan “America250” commission, set up by Congress a decade ago and co-chaired by George W Bush and Barack Obama, is celebrating the anniversary by emphasising the breadth of American experiences and “the future we want to create”. Initiatives included a cross-country oral history project, a push to boost charitable giving on every July 4 and block parties around the nation.

In contrast, civil servants were told by Trump’s White House in January to rebrand America250 programming to align with a new “Freedom250” commission with a much narrower patriotic agenda: to encourage Americans to think of the revolution as a glorious, flawless and providentially inspired achievement.

Trump’s supporters would argue that he is trying to restore a love of country. And beneath the bluster, Trump’s limited view of the American Revolution is very familiar: it reflects, like so much else about him, the mainstream culture of the Cold War era, when museums and films did indeed tell a relentlessly upbeat story of American accomplishment — in vivid contrast to the plodding drudgery of communism.

The leftist radicals of the 1960s and 1970s dissented noisily from this cosy view, but the majority accepted it unquestioningly. Since then a more extreme view has taken root: those who see the revolution not as the start of an unfinished project but as a fixed source of authority, a 250-year-old set of final answers. But as the US blows out its birthday candles, does it still have the capacity it once had for political renewal, while retaining its founding principles?

It is always easier to start revolutions than to end them. This is why so many Americans have believed theirs was superior to others: it had been brought to an elegant conclusion by the constitution of 1787. Americans, it seemed, had escaped the spirals of radicalism and authoritarianism that beset France, or Latin American republics. Thus a 29-year-old Abraham Lincoln could tell an audience in Illinois in 1838 that the blessings of liberty his generation enjoyed were “a legacy bequeathed us by a once hardy, brave and patriotic but now lamented and departed race of ancestors”. His generation’s responsibility was not to innovate but to live up to their glorious inheritance.

But there have also been many who resisted the claim that the constitution was an endpoint. Some enslaved people, such as Elizabeth Freeman of Massachusetts, began to sue for freedom after the declaration’s promise of equality was included in their state constitutions. In the 19th century thousands of July 4 speeches pleaded, in the words of one orator, to “step forward and compleat [sic] the glorious work” of the revolution.

During the Civil War (1861-65), which saw freedom granted to four million slaves, Lincoln came to see the promise of the Declaration of Independence as distinct from the formal arrangements of the Constitution that brought about the new federal government. The revolution was, he now believed, a living project. At Gettysburg in 1863, he called for a “new birth of freedom”.

It is fashionable for historians to describe the Civil War and its aftermath as a “second founding”. It led to sweeping constitutional amendments that outlawed slavery, granted citizenship to black citizens and guaranteed federal protection of equal rights. But the dominant political note at the centennial of 1876 was not transformation but the celebration of a republic preserved. Even when everything changed, the US tendency was to emphasise that, in terms of political fundamentals, everything stayed the same.

This impulse gathered strength in the 20th century. During the post-Depression 1930s, as liberals warded off the threats from communism and fascism, the Bill of Rights of 1791 — the first ten amendments to the constitution, which limited the power of the federal government over citizens — was reimagined as a sacred “charter of liberty”.

In November 1941, days before Japan attacked Pearl Harbour, President Franklin Roosevelt proclaimed the first “Bill of Rights Day”. It reframed the first ten amendments to the Constitution, ratified in 1791  as a single, sacred text which he called  “the great American charter of personal liberty and human dignity.” In 1952 the Constitution was moved into the National Archives rotunda, sealed under armoured glass. This did not extinguish cries for radical change. Most famously, Martin Luther King, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in August 1963, told the crowd that the architects of the republic had signed a “promissory note” guaranteeing the inalienable rights of all Americans, and demanded that the promise now be fulfilled.

But King’s view of an ongoing Revolution faced an ever-mounting attempt to encase a very different interpretation, building on the “under glass” view of the Constitution, which found a permanent home in conservative political and legal thought. The Heritage Foundation, established in 1973, has a mission “to save America by reclaiming its truths and its promises and conserving its liberating principles for ourselves and our posterity”. It was also the author in 2023 of Project 2025, a nine-hundred-page blueprint that has shaped many of the policies of Trump’s second term. Meanwhile, the Federalist Society, formed in 1982, has in just four decades turned “originalism” — the doctrine that the Constitution must be read as the founders’ words were publicly understood in 1787 — from an eccentric strand of legal thought into the guiding principle of most members of the US Supreme Court.
The consequences of this have been monumental. In overturning Roe v Wade in 2022, Justice Alito argued the right to abortion is “not deeply rooted in this nation’s history and tradition”. In the same year, the court overturned a New York state gun control law on the grounds that there was no “historical analogue” to justify such an apparent abridgement of the Second Amendment “right to keep and bear arms”.

There is a further point to note: it was not, in reality, the Declaration of Independence, signed 250 years ago, that created the United States, but the five years of often brutal war that followed. Ever since, war has shaped how Americans have remembered their revolutionary origins. In the wake of strategic defeats, such as in Vietnam and now, it seems, in Iran, the country has fractured between those who find in the revolution inspiration for radical renewal and those — such as today’s administration — who want to project heroic strength at home to distract from a loss of prestige abroad.

Two hundred and fifty years after those men in silk stockings signed their era’s equivalent of Brexit, the wrangling over whether the revolution is still happening, or whether the founders completed it, has rarely mattered more. If Trump is given the money he wants by Congress, Washington, D.C. will be marked forever by his one-sided conception of the meaning of the American Revolution. The “Arc de Trump”, a classical arch festooned in gold, will sit between the Lincoln Memorial and the Arlington National Cemetery, where a Confederate memorial, taken down in 2023, will be restored. Not far away, by the Potomac River, a “Garden of Heroes” will contain 250 statues of great Americans. The choices, and the rationale behind them, have been controversial.
The White House description of Martin Luther King, for example, praises his “can-do spirit” but does not mention his crusade against racial injustice. According to the White House, the garden will
“reflect the awesome splendor of our country’s timeless exceptionalism”.
The problem, as Gerald Ford realised half a century ago, is that such a narrow, rose-tinted perspective, while inspiring to some, will exclude others and can’t serve its purported purpose of bringing the country together. Ford’s framing — an imperfect country striving to right its wrongs — allowed space for doubt and legitimate struggle. The US has been unusually successful in inspiring and sustaining popular patriotism — across generations, different immigrant groups, the poor and the rich. This is thanks to its historic ability to frame its revolution as both finished and unfinished. On current form, it seems unlikely that anyone will be able to write of this anniversary, as Ford did of 1976, that “the nation’s wounds had healed.”