On December 31, The Washington Post carried the headline “Washington Monument illuminated on New Year’s Eve to mark country’s 250th.” The article described an installation that projected patriotic images onto the monument and noted that the display “kicks off a year of events on the National Mall to mark the nation’s 250th.”
Such peculiarly vague locutions, an adjective without a noun, are everywhere in this year’s civic festivities. We say “America’s 250th” or “America at 250.” In 1976, people did something similar by calling that year’s celebrations simply “the bicentennial.” Some call this year “the semiquincentennial,” which is just as indeterminate as “the 250th” but harder to pronounce.
This vagueness is not a coincidence. It points to our uncertainty about how to approach what ought to be a year of patriotic celebration. When you mark a wedding anniversary, you don’t just call it “the 25th.” When you wish someone a happy 40th, they know perfectly well you mean a birthday. But as we approach this civic milestone, we are oddly at a loss for words—because we are unsure quite what kind of occasion we are marking, and therefore how we should mark it.
So let’s ask plainly: What kind of occasion is “America’s 250th”?
The natural answer is that we are celebrating a birthday. America is turning 250 years old, and that calls for a national birthday party.
This is almost instinctively how a lot of our plans are taking shape. The first image projected onto the Washington Monument on New Year’s Eve was a 250-foot birthday candle. Many of the grandest public events being planned aim to feel like a birthday party.
And it makes sense. Abraham Lincoln thought about the founding this way. In 1863, he opened the Gettysburg Address with words so familiar that we can forget what image they were meant to convey: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” What happened in 1776, Lincoln said, was that a new nation was conceived and brought forth. And he closed by urging that the Civil War might yield “a new birth of freedom,” echoing that first birth at the founding.
Advertisement
Yet the limits of the birthday metaphor are already implicit in Lincoln’s language. The new nation, he said, was not merely conceived and born; it was dedicated to a proposition. Lincoln wanted to point beyond a beginning to an achievement: a distinct commitment, an ambition meant to exert a lasting pull on the minds of later Americans.
That is not how a birthday usually works. Birthday celebrations do not really mark the meaning of the birth itself; they mark the time since that moment—the path traveled, the age achieved, the growth and development that followed birth.
To be sure, 250 years of growth is part of what we celebrate this year. The sheer age of our republic is an achievement. Ours is among the oldest regimes in today’s world, and that is nothing to sneer at. Long life is a mark of health.
Still, the birthday of an older person is rarely an occasion to look forward. And even at its most appropriate, the comparison to a birthday doesn’t capture what we celebrate on the Fourth of July. When we mark that day, we point to what was said and done in 1776, and what it made possible.
What you and I did on the day we were born was not very impressive. What happened in the founding era was. So while there is nothing wrong with a birthday party for the nation, it is not exactly the right way to express our admiration.
America’s 250th isn’t just a birthday.
