To all our readers: Happy Independence Day! This week we’ve published a handful of essays about how much we love this country: Nikki Haley wrote about the speech Calvin Coolidge gave on America’s 150th; Rod Dreher explained why he’s moved back here from Europe; and Caitlin Flanagan reflected on loving her country even when it troubles her. There’s no Weekend Press today, because we want you to spend as much of today as possible celebrating the U.S. But make some time, between the grill and the Popsicles, for Larissa Phillips’s latest essay. It’s about how her patriotism was challenged in an unlikely place: her own classroom. Larissa runs a reading group for adults, and her students are immigrants—middle-aged women who crossed oceans to become U.S. citizens, but have lately come to believe their country is taking away their rights. Hearing their complaints, Larissa bristled. Then she asked: Have any of you ever read the Bill of Rights? They said no, and the rest is history. —The Editors

“We don’t have any rights!” said one woman.

“That’s true,” another woman agreed. “They’ve taken all our rights away.”

“And they’re not done,” another added. “Everything is getting worse. They’re going to bring us back to Jim Crow.”

This might sound like the rhetoric of activists, but we weren’t at a rally or on a college campus. This was an online reading group I lead, attended by usually middle-aged adults who are studying to pass the GED. The women in the class were mostly legal immigrants from African and Caribbean countries, who have become American citizens through naturalization. The majority came here in search of a better life for themselves or their children—or both. They’d grown up hearing stories from friends or relatives who’d moved to America and came back home to visit with suitcases bursting with gifts for everyone—sneakers and jeans and sweatshirts.

Now, they’re the ones expected to bring home presents. “They think you’re making so much money, but they don’t know how expensive it is to live,” one woman said wearily, during a recent discussion.

These women have been nannies or nursing home employees throughout the boroughs of New York City. They clearly believe in the necessity of hard work, and also believe in themselves enough to come to classes night after night in their quest for the thing that gets you ahead in America: education.

I’ve been working with immigrants since 2006, when I randomly fell into a job in an adult literacy center (work that eventually led me to start the Volunteer Literacy Project.) I was immediately moved by this self-selecting crowd of make-it-happen types. Their optimism, stoicism, and toughness—on the part of the women, especially—even inspired me to face some of my own demons. How could I quail at life’s challenges when surrounded by people who face them with such resolve?

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On the eve of America’s 250th birthday, we wanted to hear from someone who has spent his career thinking about what comes next. Scott Nolan helped build propulsion systems at SpaceX, became a partner at Founders Fund, and then founded General Matter, a company working to enrich uranium in America. Today, he looks forward at what the next 250 years could bring, what they will demand of us, and why getting it right matters. This piece was originally published in Packy McCormick’s Substack, Not Boring, and we are pleased to republish it today. —The Editors

To imagine what America might look like 250 years from now, a good place to start is what life was like in the colonies that would become the United States of America 250 years ago, on July 4, 1776.

In 1776, we did not have running water, light bulbs, electricity, or gas stoves in our homes. We had no insulin, no penicillin, and no X-rays. We did not have cars, and we certainly didn’t have planes. We didn’t have trains or even horse-drawn streetcars.

In 1776, there was no anesthesia. Instead, you were held down and fully conscious during surgery. Surgeons didn’t realize that they needed to wash their hands, and the average American was most likely to die from an infectious disease. We didn’t understand blood types, and blood transfusions could not be safely performed. Infant and maternal mortality were extraordinarily high.

There was no synthetic fertilizer with which to grow food—we used animal manure—and no refrigeration to store it once harvested. Food supply was limited by season and geography, stretched with salt or smoke or ice.

There was no telegraph. Paul Revere used a horse to warn that the British were coming. Storms arrived with even less warning; there was no weather forecasting. Because there was no real-time coordination across even modest distances, there were no standardized time zones. Every town kept its own time by the sun.

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In which other country in the world could Heinz Alfred Kissinger—born in Fürth, Bavaria, in 1923—possibly have become secretary of state? Such an ascent, from penniless Jewish refugee to the center of power, could have happened only in the United States.

Kissinger’s was the quintessential American success story not only because he was an immigrant—his first job was in a shaving brush factory in New York City and his path to Harvard and academic success led through the battlefields of Nazi-occupied Europe. But equally American has been the bitter controversy engendered by his eight years at the helm of U.S. foreign policy.

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First up, Bari Weiss celebrates the impulse that built America.

Risk. Our founders took the ultimate one—that of their lives—when they defied the world they had been born into to set out to make their own. Those rebels and renegades created the cultural DNA of our country. Everything we now think of as American—the NFL and Neuralink; Starbase and Starbucks; the First Amendment and fast food—has been built by people who have taken their own great risks to build their own little Americas anew.

Staying still is for other people. America’s for the strivers.

TGIF czar Nellie Bowles picks the invention Europe won’t forgive us for: air-conditioning.

My favorite thing about America: air-conditioning. This summer, Europe decided that its people must suffer in the heat so as to feel very, very bad about the climate. The old and infirm are dying across the continent from heat. Hospitals are performing surgeries in sweltering conditions. The Europeans believe that if the climate is changing, we mustn’t change anything to survive it. If you usually wear a sweater in May, you must keep the sweater on this May, even if it’s warm, because you need to remember that the climate is changing. Only by Europe (and, they hope, America) refusing air-conditioning can the planet be saved. And no, we cannot talk about the factories in China spewing sludge into the air. That is indigenous and ancestral, and to point it out is white supremacy.

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In a desperate effort to defend a key stronghold from advancing British troops, the Continental Army dug in at Philadelphia’s Fort Mifflin in September 1777. What followed was among the most brutal sieges of the Revolutionary War. The patriots’ meager defenses couldn’t withstand the constant British barrage, and one patriot after another was “cut in two.” A survivor, Joseph Plumb Martin, later described the ordeal: “In the cold month of November,” he fought “without provisions, without clothing,” without even “a scrap of either shoes or stockings.” As the battle neared its end, Martin surveyed lines of dead comrades, observing later that “if ever destruction was complete, it was here.” He was just 16 years old.

Many defeats and relentless hardships followed over the long years of the revolution. Often, soldiers survived on whatever they could find: bark from trees, dog and horse flesh, strips of leather boiled down to bitter soup. Martin recalled regularly marching “24 or 48 hours . . . night and day without rest or sleep.” At times, he fell asleep on his feet, only to be jolted awake by the man next to him. Soldiers slept and fought without adequate clothing, blankets, or, like Martin, shoes. “You might have tracked the army . . . by the blood of their feet,” George Washington said about the long winter march to Valley Forge in Pennsylvania. Those who escaped death from starvation, exposure, or enemy fire often succumbed to disease. And for all this, the small wages the men were promised often went unpaid or arrived in currency so devalued as to be nearly worthless.

Soldiers were not alone in their sacrifice. Across the colonies, ordinary people contributed in countless ways. Women organized boycotts of British goods, joined resistance groups like the Daughters of Liberty, and tended to soldiers as nurses and cooks. Farmers left their fields to join local militias and fight alongside the Continental Army. Children kept households and managed businesses in their parents’ absence. Many, like Martin, volunteered to serve. Emily Geiger was 18 years old when she rode through enemy lines to deliver an important message to a patriot general. Richard Lord Jones was 10 when he became an army fifer; after his discharge three years later, he walked 150 miles home. And when the British caught the 21-year-old spy Nathan Hale, he met death with resolve: “I only regret that I have but one life to give for my country.”

This year marks the 250th anniversary of our nation’s independence. We are celebrating with fireworks, barbecues, and parades. But we might also pause to reflect on the courage and sacrifice of the founding generation and ask: What moved so many ordinary people to do so many extraordinary things?

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To be a speaker on the same bill with Frederick Douglass could be frustrating. His fellow abolitionists on the lecture circuit, black and white, “would sometimes get angry,” recalled the black abolitionist William Wells Brown. They “would speak first at the meetings; then they would take the last turn; but it was all the same—the fugitive’s impression was the one left upon the mind.”

Douglass, who escaped from slavery in Baltimore in 1838, was a sought-after orator in an age that prized stirring oration. In the North and in Britain, his rich voice and his direct and engaging words made him a star. Early in his speaking days, a well-meaning white abolitionist leader urged him, without success, to “have a little of the plantation” in his speaking style—or else who would credit that he had once been a slave?

He was in peak form on the morning of July 5, 1852, in his adopted hometown of Rochester, New York. The Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society had set that date for its Independence Day celebration because the fourth that year fell on a Sunday. An audience of more than 500 crowded into the city’s Corinthian Hall and witnessed Douglass, 34, deliver what is the most famous Independence Day address in American history—and also the most misunderstood.

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As a Brit, watching the World Cup come to America has brought up some familiar feelings. The cynic in me sees various Europeans gallivanting across the United States, amazed by a Buc-ee’s with 100 gas pumps, and thinks: “Why are they so impressed?” But their wide-eyed discoveries also remind me of when I fell in love with America.

In the summer of 2014, fresh out of my second year at university in England, I applied for something called Camp America. Part cultural exchange, part babysitting, it is a program that for over 50 years has offered Brits in their 20s the chance to work at summer camps in the U.S. I found out about it because my mom worked at a camp in Poughkeepsie, New York, during the 1980s. She told me it was the best thing she had ever done. I didn’t believe her, but I thought I would give it a go anyway.

In return for a few hundred pounds, Camp America agreed to set me up with a summer camp somewhere in America, sorting out my visas and making sure that I got paid. The rest was up to me. From my university dorm in a gray English town, I chose an option that seemed as good as any other: a small, slightly scruffy Jewish camp called Berkshire Hills Eisenberg Camp, or BHEC for short. It was in Columbia County, New York, with a lake, a ropes course, and a cheerful website that looked like it was made in the 1990s. The nearest town was a one-stoplight kind of place that somehow sustained a deli, a gas station, and a diner. I remember arriving there in early June and feeling like I had stepped onto a movie set.

I had been to America before, and even lived in California for a few months, but never as an adult. Like many Europeans raised on a diet of American culture, I thought I understood the States. I knew that the people were loud and ambitious, that they didn’t care about the world beyond their borders, and that they loved guns and big sodas and baseball.

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As we celebrate America’s birthday this week, count on hearing no shortage of quotations from Massachusetts delegate John Adams, who delivered the closing argument in favor of independence at the Continental Congress 250 years ago today. Almost sure to go unquoted will be the man who delivered the closing argument for the other side. Yet there’s no better way to appreciate the enormous risks that our Founders took in declaring independence than to read the words of the motion’s most eloquent opponent: John Dickinson of Pennsylvania.

Among delegates to the Continental Congress, few could match the 43-year-old Dickinson in fame in 1776. Described as “tall but slender as a reed,” he had risen to the pinnacle of Philadelphia society as a lawyer and made a name for himself across the colonies as the author of the celebrated Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania in protest of British abuses. The arguments in these essays might have put some on the path to breaking with Britain but not the author himself. Though a staunch advocate for American liberty, Dickinson held out hope for reconciliation.

Talk of peace with Britain annoyed no one more than Adams, who chalked up the delusion to, among other things, the pacifism of Quakers (Dickinson’s wife was a member of the Society of Friends). “A certain great fortune and piddling genius whose fame has been trumpeted so loudly has given a silly cast to our whole doings,” Adams wrote in 1775 of Dickinson in a private letter that unfortunately for both men ended up in the hands of the British and then in the columns of newspapers.

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The randomized verbiage and punctuation—that drivel passing today as poetry—is fruit of the poisoned tree. The tree was Walt Whitman.

He wrote “I Hear America Singing” in self-congratulation, mistaking the ability to feel for a license to create. His writing is poetry only by courtesy—its success not aesthetic, but political; a generous offer of the democratization of aesthetics: “I feel things; perhaps you do too. If you endorse this trash, then we are one—thus you too must be something of a poet.”

Carl Sandburg, ee cummings, William Carlos Williams, Allen Ginsberg, and the Beats weren’t bad poets; they weren’t poets at all. You disagree? Quote me some. But we hear lines of Yeats or Shakespeare, the two greatest English-language poets, and we remember them. Of course we do, for their poems are songs. And songs are written for the ear—remembered as they can be sung.

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What happens when a nation founded on a shared idea stops believing in itself?

According to The Honesty Project, a partnership between The Free Press and the polling firm Populace, 62 percent of Americans believe the greatest threat to the country is other Americans. Nearly four in 10 members of Generation Z believe violence may be necessary to save America. Ideas foundational to our country—that violence is bad, that disagreement is something to celebrate rather than fear—no longer enjoy broad consensus.

Major Nicholas Dockery understands the danger of this reality more than most. A retired U.S. Army officer who has been deployed multiple times to Afghanistan and earned some of the military’s highest honors, he has spent his adult life fighting to preserve the ideals that bind America together. On June 19, one day after receiving the Medal of Honor, Dockery reflected on what the U.S. looks like at its best: a nation that instinctively comes together in moments of crisis. His message is simple: We shouldn’t have to wait for disaster to remember why we love this country. We’re honored to share a version of his speech today. —The Editors.

As a young boy, I spent a large part of my time in Kansas. If anybody’s familiar with that part of the country, tornadoes are a regular part of life. When I was 16, I remember seeing the aftermath of what a tornado can cause. Specifically, in a place called Hoisington, Kansas. It was about 70 miles from where I was going to school at the time. You see what a 200-mile-an-hour wind ripping through a small rural town can do to homes: It levels them.

It’s the kind of wrath that only God, through nature, can unleash. In moments, it can undo what took man decades to build. There one minute is your home and your life; the next second, a town is gone. Along with other students from my school, I volunteered to go out there and help. When we arrived, I saw a movement of people from all over the state rushing in to help.

I saw people of all ages helping those who had lost everything—everything they had. They were picking through the rubble, trying to recover photographs or anything salvageable from a life where they had put down roots, where they had raised a family, where they had built a community.

I saw firsthand what we as one people can do for one another during a time of crisis.

How we can be there for one another.

How we can answer the call, and render aid and support and care for those who, at that time, may not be able to help themselves.

Five months later, early one morning in September, I shockingly watched—as did many of you in this room—as two commercial airliners crashed into the New York skyline. There, in my second-period math class, we all huddled around the television, confused and afraid.

We watched buildings crumble.

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Robert H. Jackson was the last justice of the Supreme Court not to have finished law school; he didn’t even earn a bachelor’s degree. It is something of a paradox that one of the great representatives of the old frontier class of jobbing lawyers was also perhaps the most urbane and morally serious jurist this country has produced.

A moderate, temperamentally conservative New Dealer who owed his public career entirely to Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jackson refused to join in the pogrom utilitarianism of Korematsu v. United States—where the Court upheld the executive order that led to the internment of around 70,000 American citizens of Japanese descent—producing one of the most bracing dissents ever sent down from the high court. He sided with the majority in Brown v. Board of Education but had serious misgivings about legislating from the bench, even in a good cause. Most significantly, at Nuremberg, where he served as the American chief of counsel, Jackson provided the philosophical basis for the International Military Tribunal, wrongly described by the late Antonin Scalia as an exercise in victor’s justice. Jackson’s verticordious arguments—beautifully phrased, necessarily grounded in an appeal to transcendental moral standards—are probably the only writings by a Supreme Court justice that would be recognizable to the great jurists of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance as the products of a unified Christian civilization. That his own faith largely consisted of a coolly vestigial Protestantism combined with what he politely called a “sort of disdain” for low-church uplift makes this achievement all the more remarkable.

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Sondheim (1930–2021) has the reputation as the most highbrow of Broadway composers. His music is psychologically subtle and astute, and notoriously challenging to perform. It’s not hard to understand why a 1994 New York magazine article had the title “Is Sondheim God?” But if we glance under the hood to see how the machinery works, what we find is comedy. And he knew it. When Sondheim was awarded the 2013 MacDowell Medal, his acceptance speech began: “I take genuine pride in being the first to represent the former runt of the arts: musical comedy. Yes, I mean musical comedy, not musical theater.”

Born to upper-middle-class New Yorkers, Sondheim was a child of divorce and found a surrogate father in a neighbor, the famed Broadway lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II. He pushed the budding young composer toward musical theater and devised a program of study that paid lifelong dividends. Sondheim wrote his first musical at 15. By his mid-20s, he was collaborating with Leonard Bernstein on West Side Story. (His story is well told in Daniel Okrent’s recent biography: Stephen Sondheim: Art Isn’t Easy.)

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Ten years later, on October 30, 1974, came the most celebrated bout of the modern era: “The Rumble in the Jungle.” More than 600 accredited journalists—including Norman Mailer, George Plimpton, and Hunter S. Thompson—traveled to Kinshasa, Zaire, to see Ali fight another world champion: George Foreman. Just 25, the Bunyanesque Foreman had already fought and won 40 professional fights, including one where his uppercut had lifted the reigning heavyweight champion, Joe Frazier, completely off the canvas. He knocked Frazier down an unheard-of six times in just two rounds and claimed the heavyweight title.

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Eliza Lucas Pinckney (1722–1793) is an ideal figure to help us think through the meanings of independence. She forged a far more independent life than what we might imagine was possible for an 18th-century woman. Yet her life also reveals that no one, at any time, lives a truly independent life, whether a founding father or a 21st-century American.

Pinckney’s father did not intend to leave her in charge of the family’s South Carolina plantations, and a household that included an ailing mother and a 5-year-old sister. But after moving the family to South Carolina from Antigua in 1739, he was recalled into service in the British navy to fight the War of Jenkins’s Ear against Spain. As her correspondence shows, Pinckney at first depended on instructions from her father and advice from male neighbors. (Her letters are readily available in collections online and in print, and her words are beautifully deployed by her best modern biographer, Lorri Glover.) But before long, she developed her own expertise and confidence. Instructions from her father could be delayed for months, and she had to make decisions quickly. She came to understand the complexities of managing overseers and hundreds of enslaved laborers, of anticipating productivity and markets, and of negotiating with British merchants and creditors. She also came to realize that her father had run the family’s Antigua plantations into debt and that she was the better manager.

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Now, that’s all splendidly true. But what’s also true, what we don’t put on the brochure, is that America will probably try to kill you first. To become the greatest at anything in this country often entails horrific struggle. The sun burns only brighter the higher you get. The price of greatness can be a sort of insanity: an all-consuming passion, a dedication to success that is borderline pathological. With the desire to be loved, admired, revered, comes the willingness to be hated.

Few have known this so richly as Ty Cobb (1886–1961). A true-blue American nutcase, he was the best baseball player who ever lived and the first true antihero in sports. Through his greatness, he achieved immortality—the final reward of lasting fame. But the media warped him into a caricature: a bigot of supernatural proportions, a purely evil man. Today a cottage industry of Cobb defenders, misguided in its own way, looks to absolve him of everything he did.

How do we reckon with Cobb? In the many descriptions recorded over the years, you notice the word “greatest” is commonplace. Grantland Rice called him “the greatest competitor I’ve ever known.” Ernest Hemingway called him “the greatest of all ballplayers, and an absolute shit.” Jimmy Cannon was right when he said Cobb was “the strangest of all our national sports idols.” And equally right when he added, “But not even his disagreeable character could destroy the image of his greatness as a player. Ty Cobb was the best. That seemed to be all he wanted.”

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On April 6, 1909, Robert Peary and Matthew Henson planted an American flag at the North Pole alongside four Inuit men. But who reached the site first? Peary, a white naval officer and the expedition’s leader, claimed victory for himself, writing in his journal, “The pole at last! The prize of three centuries, my dream and goal for twenty years, mine at last!” But Henson, Peary’s African American assistant and partner, later disclosed that he had driven the lead sledge, breaking the trail and arriving before Peary.

Peary got the glory and in 1920 was buried in Arlington with full military honors. Two years later, the National Geographic Society erected a white granite gravesite monument in the shape of a globe. An inscription at its base reads “Discoverer of North Pole.” Henson lived another 35 years and was buried in New York’s Woodlawn Cemetery.

Born in rural Maryland in 1866, Henson grew up on the site of a former slave market. His parents were sharecroppers and died when he was young. Around age 12, Henson headed to Baltimore, where he got work as a cabin boy and traveled the world. In 1888, while ashore and working in a Washington, D.C., hat shop, he met Robert Peary. A civil engineer for the U.S. Navy, Peary was heading on a privately funded survey trip to Nicaragua and searching for a valet. Henson agreed to come. The trip was such a success that they began plotting a joint excursion to the frozen north.

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He was Gen Z’s own Kurt Cobain: gleefully mischievous and deeply, obviously, troubled, sporting red nail polish and pink hair. Peep—it was a childhood nickname, and a cute rejoinder to the harder rap honorific “Lil”—didn’t reflect the landscape he came from, which included the internet and the suburban mall as much as it did Long Beach, so much as he transformed himself into it. He had a Lisa Simpson tattoo on his neck and another that said CryBaby in big curved letters above his eye. He was always a little bit making fun of the underground rap world that he rocketed to the top of in the late 2010s and was meant to swagger through. His crew was called GothBoiClique, and they rapped about their own anxieties and awkwardness alongside the typical bars about drugs and women. “Never in the streets ’cause I never leave my home,” Peep sang on “Gym Class,” a song he put out on SoundCloud in 2016.

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It looks like an alien creation, like something extraterrestrials would make after graduating from crop circles.

In a forest near Woodstock, New York, circular platforms wrought from bluestone wind into curving edifices, wrapping around stone staircases, crevasses, and some scant foliage across nearly seven acres that are altogether a work of art. Two pools of natural freshwater sit at the sculpture’s base, enveloped by winding walls of stone. At the center of it all, a nine-ton monolith juts into the sky.

America has its own Stonehenge, and one man built it—all alone.

It’s called Opus 40.

The experience of seeing Opus 40 is hard to describe, and no photograph can do it justice. You can be in it, on top of it, and around it. You can walk through its narrow passageways, where cool air flows through, up steps and down inclines. Like Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty or the huge, contoured steel sculptures of Richard Serra, the artwork’s beauty lies in its simplicity, size, and harmony with the environment around it.

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Welcome back to Great Americans, a countdown to our country’s 250th birthday. We’re bringing you a writer we love on an American they love, every weekday between now and July 4. Previously, Christopher Cox honored Alice Paul, the suffragist who picketed the White House without saying a word, was force-fed in prison at 60 pounds, and still rewrote the Constitution. Today Philip K. Howard pays tribute to Mary Parker Follett, the social thinker who understood the secret of group behavior—and why American democracy keeps getting it wrong. —The Editors

Mary Parker Follett was a seminal thinker in management theory. In the early days of large industrial organization, when Frederick Winslow Taylor was preaching the gospel of “scientific management,” Follett emphasized the social aspects of any group enterprise. Taylor was not wrong—improving efficiency remains an ongoing goal of successful manufacturers. But his efficient workplace could result in mind-numbing repetition. Follett understood that workers had human needs—for variety, for agency, for mutual understanding.

Follett originated the idea that, in the words of former Harvard Business School Dean Nitin Nohria, “organizations perform best when they operate on the basis of shared responsibility and not . . . command and obedience.” Rigid organizational hierarchies, Follett argued, were counterproductive; the people on the spot should have the authority to adapt to “the law of the situation.” This, she saw, requires a system of “management with authority all down the line.” Follett understood that a “final authority” is always needed, but explained how better choices and better understanding resulted when “decisions are usually reached through a process” of interaction. The practice of exploring solutions and reconciling differences melds people into a common unit: “The strength of the group,” she wrote, “does not depend on the greatest number of strong men, but on the strength of the bond between them.” Healthy organizations have an “invisible leader—the common purpose.” (Unless otherwise noted, the quotes by and about Follett are from the 1995 book Mary Parker Follett: Prophet of Management.)

Follett (1868–1933) came to her understandings not through study but through life. Her father, a shoe-factory machinist in Quincy, Massachusetts, died when she was a teenager. With an ailing mother and a young brother, Follett was thrust into the role of head of the household. She taught school in Boston and could pursue her studies only intermittently, eventually graduating summa cum laude at age 30 from the Society for the Collegiate Instruction of Women—what we now call Radcliffe College. While teaching and studying she published her first book, The Speaker of the House of Representatives (1896), which described how the speaker consolidates and wields power. In a laudatory review, Theodore Roosevelt called it a “really notable contribution to the study of the growth of American governmental institutions” and praised Follett for presenting “facts as they are.”

After graduation, Follett became a social worker, creating a network of community centers for vocational training in Boston. These hubs for self-improvement succeeded, Follett realized, when people felt a sense of ownership and a part of how the centers worked. Their success would inspire hundreds of other American cities to build similar programs.

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