America at 250 doesn’t need a new story — it needs many

Ceremonies honoring next Fourth of July’s Semiquincentennial are already gearing up. Earlier this month, a traveling Stars and Stripes banner — the U.S. “Flag Sojourn 250” — was raised over Mississippi, having already covered 40,000 miles of its ongoing international tour of cemeteries, landmarks, governor’s mansions and courthouses. “For nearly 250 years,” Mississippi’s First Lady Elee Reeves announced, “the American flag has been a source of comfort in times of grief, unity in times of uncertainty, and pride during moments of great national joy.”

Wronger things have been uttered with less self-awareness. In fact, the American flag was not taken all that seriously as a national symbol until 1814. Congress didn’t even bother settling on its modern template until four years later. Until then, all kinds of designs were patched together from silk, linen, wool or “anything at hand.” During and after the Civil War, of course, the ensign was as much a symbol of tyranny to many Southerners as it was a source of unity. Sympathizers from Mississippi to Kentucky burned the flag, tore it down, ripped it and spit on it.

Conceits aren’t facts: “Heritage is not history,” to borrow the scholar David Lowenthal’s distinction, but instead “what people make of their history to make themselves feel good.” America’s national identity has always been filtered, negotiated, useful and relatively honest. What makes the upcoming pageantry and platitudes remarkable is the country’s mood. 

Republican and Democratic patriotism are worlds apart. The sense of pride that once bound the right and left is so threadbare that pundits have openly despaired of America’s “identity crisis” and called for a fresh national story to “rally people to a new trajectory.”

The pleas argue, in effect, for negotiating a new heritage. We shouldn’t.

There is no “single unifying narrative linking past and present in America” that can serve an inclusive, patriotic identity. The country’s fragile birth in 1776 was as contested as its 100th birthday. The conciliatory narrative that emerged from 1876 painted veterans, North and South, as noble, valorous brothers. The “emancipationist vision of Civil War memory” faded, as Yale University historian David Blight detailed in “Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory,” and “romance triumphed over reality.” Reconstruction ended, the Lost Cause myth thrived and Americans curbed civil rights for Black Americans, people of color, immigrants and other marginalized groups for some 90 years.

The 1976 U.S. Bicentennial, which followed “a decade of racial tensions, assassinations, scandal, rising inflation, embattled campuses and eroding public trust,” also privileged heritage over history.  Federal event planners were clueless enough to ask Native Americans to commemorate what was for many a day of mourning. “Justice, justice, justice,” a tribal chairman replied. “We’ve never had any of that justice – and now you people want us to celebrate!” America was a “beacon of liberty,” while at the same time, to “lesser” citizens, it was exactly the opposite.

The flag itself has been a symbol of starkly irreconcilable ideals. The red, white and blue banner graced courthouses where Jewish intellectuals who fled Nazism swore allegiance to the United States. In the 1930s, it was also raised by the German American Bund next to swastikas, and by the Ku Klux Klan beside Blood Drop Crosses. When Old Glory was planted on the moon in 1969, it had already draped the caskets of tens of thousands of soldiers who died in Vietnam. The flag was repressive to Chinese immigrants separated from their children on Angel Island in the 1920s, an inspiration to Cuban refugees fleeing in 1980 and a betrayal to Miami residents denied justice that year for the vile police killing of Arthur McDuffie.

Traditionally, countries founded by an ethnic majority have forged identities on ethnic, rather than civic, grounds. Despite the principled rhetoric, the American founding was in effect an achievement for white men. Many Republicans appear satisfied by that heritage; some liberals, adding apologetic footnotes to old textbooks, so to speak, have found it increasingly awkward. 

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Reaching for a new half-truth is no solution, and it doesn’t have to be. Germany is proof that countries don’t instantly dissolve when deprived of the crutch of triumphalist heritage. New Zealand is making admirable progress in emphasizing civic norms over settler-founding myths. Canada provides an instructional model for democratic multiculturalism beyond mythologized heritage. Singapore has forged ahead with a politics of “pragmatic values as national values,” norms, progress and duty. 

History, by this model, offers motley warnings, reality-checks and sober inspirations for the work ahead in place of a master narrative. Not one story, but many. There are no simple solutions, to be sure — certainly not within today’s political climate. But climates shift, and while “invented heritage” can act as a powerful anchor, it can also be a millstone, an obstacle to necessary, large-scale changes. History’s crises have often led to bright renewals.

Without question, deep structural inequalities threaten the fabric of American democracy. But at the same time, they also open the door to ambitious reforms, including overturning Citizens United, progressive wealth taxation, labor empowerment, universal social guarantees and massive public investment in job creation: a new “Economic Bill of Rights.”

The grand narrative that feels missing — of America as a “shining city on a hill,” in the words of President Ronald Reagan, who was repurposing John Winthrop — has lost its use. It’s time to take the broken participation trophy of American exceptionalism off the mantle. Unlike their elders, most millennial and Gen Z Americans reject that exceptionalism. 

There is more than enough curiosity in this country to recognize all American histories, in all their differences, and more than enough common sense to support a ruling coalition that acknowledges what the American flag has meant while fighting for what it should.