It’s Friday, July 3. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today we’re devoting our newsletter to America’s 250th birthday, including Caitlin Flanagan on the Pledge of Allegiance, Rod Dreher on coming home after years abroad, Nikki Haley on the life her immigrant parents built in America—and much more.
Two hundred fifty years ago, 56 men gathered in Philadelphia and signed a document that changed the world—a declaration that all men are created equal, endowed with inalienable rights, and entitled to govern themselves. Amid all the gloom and division that often dominates the headlines today, it’s worth remembering this: Our Founding Fathers would be astounded at the country this has become. They would also, we think, be proud that the foundation they built has been so enduring. That the democracy they first envisioned has been copied around the world. That America has been blessed by great statesmen and survived incompetent leaders. It has shaken off the scourge of slavery and witnessed the triumph of the civil rights movement and the defeat of the Nazis. The America they created is today a land of 342 million people bound by a set of common values and self-evident truths that the Founders first put forth in that sacred document.
We’ve run plenty about the ideas and history worth celebrating this year (more on that in a second). But as we close in on this very special Fourth of July—America’s semiquincentennial—we asked our favorite writers and columnists to describe one thing they love about America. And did they ever! Bari Weiss celebrates risk. Nellie Bowles makes the case for air-conditioning. Douglas Murray toasts our vast wilderness. Read all 11 of them here.
Caitlin Flanagan was a second grader in Berkeley, California, in 1968, a year when the country felt like it might come apart, when she learned the Pledge of Allegiance. Today, she writes about what it meant to say those words every morning, how it helped instill her deep feelings of patriotism, and why, for all her grumbling about America’s general decline, she still believes an American passport is the best thing you can have in the world. “When I see our flag flying,” she writes, “it means that America is still steady, that the world is still in its place.”
What does America look like to someone who’s just come back? After four years living in Europe, Rod Dreher returned to sticker shock at the grocery store, yes, but also magnolia trees and dive bars, and a South he’d almost forgotten how much he missed. Today, he reflects on what it’s like to see your own country with fresh eyes.
Great Americans
With America’s 250th birthday tomorrow, we are publishing the last installment of our Great Americans series: our columnist Niall Ferguson on Henry Kissinger.
In what other country could a penniless Jewish refugee become the secretary of state? Ferguson asks in his inspiring essay. He argues that Kissinger’s journey from shaving brush salesman to the center of American power captures something no other country could have produced. Only in America, he writes, could such a story have unfolded—“not only because he was an immigrant, but because his path to Harvard and academic success led through the battlefields of Nazi-occupied Europe.”
For the past month, we’ve enlisted a handful of writers to celebrate their favorite Great Americans. They’ve been a joy to read, from Colin Quinn on Martin Scorsese and Joseph Epstein on Sandy Koufax to Colleen Shogan on the heroes of Flight 93. Today, to wrap up the series, we’ve handed our readers the pen. The nominees who emerged from The Free Press Forum were David McCullough, the historian who spent his life bringing America’s story to life; Calvin Coolidge, the president who respected the limits of his office better than any before or since; and Louisa May Alcott, the woman behind one of the most beloved American novels ever written.
Nikki Haley’s mother died on the Fourth of July last year. Her father died a year earlier. Her parents immigrated from India and faced discrimination in rural South Carolina, but they built a life here anyway because they believed the promise of this country was real and worth fighting for. As America turns 250, Haley turns to the speech President Calvin Coolidge delivered outside Independence Hall in Philadelphia to mark the nation’s 150th anniversary. His words, she argues, are exactly what a fractured America needs to hear right now.
Most Americans know the Revolution as a colonial uprising. Fewer know it as a world war. On this latest episode of School of War, Aaron MacLean sits down with historian Richard Bell, who explains how George Washington’s military strategy forced Britain to fight on multiple fronts across the globe, and why France’s intervention was decisive to American victory.
EDITORS’ PICKS: The Best of America at 250
America has always been a country in motion. For a year now—across essays, interviews, and debates for America at 250—we’ve traced that motion through individual lives: from rags to riches, from fear to courage, from unfreedom to freedom. These are the journeys that stayed with us.
Last July 4, Larissa Phillips traced her own arc—from a progressive Brooklynite uneasy about her kids reciting the Pledge of Allegiance to a farmsteader flying giant Stars and Stripes over her land upstate. “Yes, America is imperfect,” she writes. “But so is everything: family and work and life. This is my country—the only one I’ve got—and I believe in it.”
At age 7, in a village in northern Iran, Masih Alinejad learned to chant “death to America.” Decades later, her reporting on the regime forced her to flee to the very country she’d been taught to hate—which then had to save her life, foiling multiple assassination attempts on American soil. It’s the story of an immigrant and the country that gave her a new life and, twice, saved it.
Some of America’s most fervent believers were born elsewhere. Last fall we ran two very different immigrant stories side by side: legendary New York restaurateur Keith McNally, and Cheikhou Niane, a Senegalese busboy at McNally’s own Balthazar. Both begin in a yellow cab; both are bound by a faith in hard work and the American dream.
A year ago, Free Press founder Bari Weiss revisited a cartoon created by Benjamin Franklin more than 250 years ago that still resonates today. It’s message: Join or die.
Finally, don’t miss these blockbuster America at 250 essays from writers who need no introduction.
It's a great country and better than most countries in the world. However, there is no need for the unprovable hyperbole in the title. There is almost nothing that can be proven to be the "greatest" in a category except, perhaps, Shakespeare among English-language writers:)
I landed in America as a 17-year-old (already in GI gear) and returned to my birth-land, Hungary, in 1977 for a two-year research stint.
There were moments of great joy in both places, but my decision to become American remained unshakeable.
This 250-year-young country is as good as any, and far-far better than most.