250 Years Later, Why We’re Still Fighting About Our Founding

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This is the daily. 250 years ago, the founding fathers gave rise to a new nation and an enduring myth. A myth about their virtue and what that meant about our virtue as a country. Today, my colleague, Jiilin Ye, on the evolution of the founding myth.

Why we're still fighting about it.

“And why it may hold the key to America's future.”

It's Friday, July 3rd.

Jiilin, it is really lovely to have you on a show.

It's great to be here. You are massively overdue to be a guest on the show because for a very long time, you were unbookable as a guest on the daily because you were the national editor. National editors don't really come on the show. They tell us which of their reporters can come on the show.

And that was our relationship with you. Could be please book this reporter. Yes, and I've been a huge fan and it's just so lovely to find way to be here. Now that you're not the national editor, you're a reporter focused on big ideas and big debates in the United States.

And as a result, it feels very fitting that your debut appearance on the show comes on the anniversary of the United States turning 250 years old. And on that anniversary, you set out to think about what the 250th really means and you arrived.

“And what I think is a really surprising answer.”

So talk about that. You know, the 250th has been coming up for a while. And in these months leading up to it, it's honestly just struck me as kind of a weird time. Cruise dismantled plaques, telling the stories of the nine enslaved people who lived in the President's house and were owned by President George Washington.

You know, leading up to this moment, you see this effort by Trump to really sanitize parts of our history. And in this place, it might be seen as disparaging to America's past. He has had executive orders saying, you know, we can't mention slavery anymore from you know, national park historic monuments.

At the same time, we're getting a lot more that's just about Trump in his own image. Freedom, at the White House, I don't want to talk about things. And so you get examples like, you know, there's a UFC 250th match in front of the White House for his birthday. You have him unveiling a commemorative special passport now where it's a passport, but also

there's an image of him standing in front of the text of the Declaration of Independence itself with his signature at the bottom. So he's kind of inserting himself into the founding. Hello Washington and a very big hello to America. Thank you.

And this just all is fully realized in the kickoff event itself for the entire 250th. In 1776, our founding fathers met in Philadelphia and changed the world forever and ever.

Trump basically does a campaign style rally.

Just like those patriots of 1776 over the past 17 months, we have taken power back from the far off political class. And in this moment, he is just really fully claiming for himself and for the Republican party, the founding. Together we stand on the shoulders of incomparable heroes such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Abraham Lincoln.

He's saying we're the party that's going to protect the founding, all the mythology about the founders you love, about the country you love. And in doing that, it's really kind of the apex in a way of something that's been happening for decades where the GOP is just saying this is ours. And we will make America great again.

Thank you very much. Happy birthday America. Thank you.

And meanwhile, on the other side, on the left, you know, I feel like there's almost a kind of silence or awkwardness

“or just not quite knowing what to do or say in response.”

Maybe just a little bit of, okay, you can just take it. You know, this whole period, Jefferson and Washington were slaveholders. There's so much to apologize for and to feel really bad about and guilty about. There's something just wrong with this era and the more we learn, the more we feel like it's hard to feel proud of it. And so there's this kind of dynamic that I was perceiving.

Right. I identify with what you're describing. Right.

One side saying 255 is kind of ours to craft the celebration of the other side, basically saying,

good luck with that, because we don't know what to do with it. You can take it. I'm oversimplified. Of course. That was the impression I was getting.

So I wanted to explore why does one side seem obsessed with myth making stripping away mentions of slavery at national parks and the other side keeps being sort of caught up in the facts of it.

“And what is that dynamic and could we ever get out of it?”

You know, we are journalists. So we are, of course, obsessed with the knowing of facts. We are not interested in myths. We are kind of in the business of anti myths. But the more you learn about the founding and how the country is thought about its founding,

which is what I'm interested in, right? What struck me is that actually throughout our history, basically from the very beginning after the founding, there has been a really important other history where people are making myths out of the founding.

And the myths are not technically factual per se,

but they're really powerful for people.

And what have you come to understand about why the myth of America's founding is so powerful and important? So I can see that this feels like very fraught to even say that let's talk about myths, because if you think about myths as lies, there is a lot of lying about history, right?

And we are living in a time of just constant political lying. But that's not really what I'm talking about when I talk about a myth. And when I talk to historians, they're pointing to an idea of myth as not about lying versus having facts, but about myths that are stories.

And these are ways that a group of people can figure out what they stand for, what their identity is, who they are. And historians I spoke with, even the ones who are just deep in the muck of,

here's what went wrong, here's where we've fallen short.

Many of them argue that we can't abandon the ever-to-make myth out of the founding, that if we stop arguing about it and really having debates about it, we are essentially no longer in a way practicing the heart of democracy, which is to talk about what we're doing here, what we want the future to go, and to find those answers,

Americans have over and over again, gone to the founding. Yeah, this is a very unexpected place for us to be, kind of like today on the daily, the case for the American mythology of our founding. And I want to hear about the role of myth throughout the last 250 years, but let's just start with the foundational myth.

What exactly do we mean when we talk about the myth of America's founding? What is the myth that we're really describing?

“I think we all in a way remember some version of this.”

So it's the version where a handful of men get together, and somewhat argue they're divinely touched by God, even. And they found this country, and they write these documents, and the documents themselves are almost divine, and they sort of tell us what to do,

and these are people who are just the height of virtue. And not only is this a country that is great, but it is like, God has chosen this country to bring the kingdom. It's really, really lofty. And as that myth was emerging, what role was it serving

in the early years of our country's history? I think for this country, we have to remember at the very beginning, it's a very unusual place to be founding a country. There's a couple things that the country is missing, that usually bind together a people, right?

There is no unique language. There is no official single religion. You know, there's a bunch of different Christian groups, jostling, but there isn't one official, you know, governmentally chosen church, right?

And the literal geographic borders of the country are just constantly inflexed to put in nicely. And so you don't have the usual things

Here's our language, here's our culture.

“And so this is why the founding, I think, becomes so important”

from the beginning. What's going to keep this whole thing together? We've revolted. Now we're here. We need a story.

And during this time in the 19th century, 18th century, in the countries being founded and people are beginning to tell stories about it. Anybody can just start writing stories about the past. So history at this time is different from maybe how we imagine it

today or think about it today. It's a little bit more like literature. So it's a set of great stories that people like to tell over and over. Not just because they're great yarns. They give people a sense of meaning.

They bring people together. And that's going to be the history that sticks. And to me, the very best example of this, is a story that all of us know centuries later about George Washington.

So in 1800, right after George Washington dies, everyone's already thinking, oh my gosh, our ultimate founder is gone. It's time to show how much he was sort of the ultimate great American. And this traveling Bible salesman named Mason Lockweams,

who again is not, there's no professional training for historians. He's a guy who loves George Washington. And he writes, what he calls is a biography of Washington. And it's filled with stories like the famous story of Washington chopping down a cherry tree when he's a child.

He all know the story, right? He's a young boy, he's chopping down a cherry tree. And later he admits to his father, "Father, I could not tell a lie." And the story is utterly false.

There is no evidence that it ever happened. Right. And by the way, no kid would ever chop down a cherry tree and then confess it. But George Washington is so pure, so virtuous,

according to this myth, that he was incapable of committing the totally understandable childhood act of lying to his parents. Yes. And this whole book is purported biography.

“Turns Washington into like a model for children, right?”

It's like he's the star of these fairy tales so that you can teach children what it means to be a good person. Right? What it means to have a great character like you're great national leader George Washington.

And so that is right out of the gate at the beginning. And other stories are told about the founders, all of them making them seem like these total models of virtuous American citizenship. I'm curious, as these myths are making their way across America.

You know, in school books, at kitchen tables, how widely shared do you think that these myths are becoming? I think the mythology that America is a really special country and unlike anything anyone has ever seen before

is really taking hold across many Americans. Which is not to say that it is a perfect country because people immediately look at all men are created equal in the declaration and say, "Wait a second. We've got slavery. This is obviously not true.

“There are problems here." But I think people”

still even in that critique. They do feel like they're part of something totally unprecedented. And I think the abolition movement in particular really takes this up. Someone like Frederick Douglass, I would point to

is such a critical thinker on this.

Because somebody like Douglass, you know, he himself was born a slave. He's not confused as to how that country is falling short. And when he even runs away to freedom in the north, he still sees the problem.

He still faces incredible hostility from white Americans. He gets it. This project is really falling short of its own founding document. He looks at the myth and sees it for what it is. Yes, to some degree.

But he also believes in this other myth you could say that the country is really special and it really needs to live up to being, you know, God's kingdom on earth. If you imagine, you know, the best society you could ever imagine.

So for Douglass, this is like full democracy, full equality, all are welcome. He's dreaming of a world that isn't here yet. He's saying this is where it's going to happen. So just to give an example, Frederick Douglass has an extraordinary speech

that if you read one thing by Frederick Douglass ever, if you read one thing on July 4th, in addition to the declaration, it's a speech called What to the Slave is the Fourth of July. And it's an incredibly beautiful speech.

And in it, he basically argues in a very powerful way

that the declaration is really the whole foundation of the country. Everything in there is almost like a sacred document. And he says, it's the ring bolt, the chain of your nation's destiny. The principles contained in that instrument are saving principles, stand by those principles, be true to them on all occasions

and all places against all foes and at whatever cost.

And I think creating kind of a new meaning out of it.

He's saying, these aren't just words that these slaveholders wrote. They are telling you the road map to your destiny as a country.

“And that is quite an inspiring story to tell, I think.”

It is arguably not strictly the facts. If you went into Jefferson's brain, did he mean to say all that? But it's so powerful. Lincoln takes it up, it's behind the civil war, it's behind abolition. And so that, to me, is a very clear example of someone taking the declaration,

building a new meaning out of it and changing his country forever from doing that act. At a certain point, and you have already forecast this, the myths come under pretty formal, sustained challenge. When does that start? I think this is when history itself is changing.

So we've talked about how history used to be seen more as just kind of a literature.

Right, right, of stories.

But in the late 19th century, you start getting the American research university. You have universities that are really trying to bring kind of a scientific rigor to all avenues of human knowledge. And so this is when you get to the beginning of professional historians. And so a historian now is not just a rich guy, or a guy with a lot of time on his hands, who writes some pretty compelling stories about his country.

This is a person who is trained as a historian. There's a certain rigor around facts. There has to be evidence. And so once you start doing that, then you're really now in the business of myth busting.

“And I think it really begins with, you know, early 20th century,”

your professor named Charles Beard writes this book. And he says, "Okay, these founders, they're not just these altruistic guys who are vitally chosen, they're people of total virtue, they were actually really elite farmers, aristocrats who wanted to protect their own material interests." And so that's why they wage revolution.

Hmm. Selfless no more. Selfless no more. Completely motivated by self-interest. And so once that begins to happen, you really get kind of what feels very familiar

to us now, which is the left versus the right. Right, you've got conservatives saying, "Whoa, whoa, whoa. You can't talk like that about the founders." Right. You can't talk like that about George Washington, the guy with the cherry tree.

He's not a selfish person. He's our model of great national character. And I think the other side is myth busting.

“But they're not just saying, "Oh, my gosh, the whole project is gone.”

We now learn this about the founders, walk away from the whole thing." They are still trying to find value and meaning in these stories. And so they say, "Well, okay, they were self-interested." But that just means that this country has had a problem with elite power. And it hasn't given enough power just sort of the common person.

And so look at the founding, right? The founding shows us why our modern cause is really just. So there's still sort of telling a bigger story about the country and what they want it to be out of the founding. Hmm. To even the myth busters, hang on to some version of the myth.

Both sides still see value. Yes. And this dynamic continues for decades. It ups and flows. There are moments of more agreement.

There are moments of some disagreement. But it really breaks into public view during the bicentennial in 1976. There's a birthday party. And everybody's invited like most parties. And what's interesting about the bicentennial is that you'll notice there are things that

feel very familiar. This is a time of a lot of uncertainty at this moment. Total unrest over the Vietnam War, over race. There's the Watergate scandal. Right.

This is 1976. There's a lot going on. It's a lot happening. This is not a time where people are thinking. This project is going just great.

[laughs] All of us across the nation are getting into the spirit of 76. 1976 with our own spirit. And so the middle of this the country is trying to somehow market. It's 200 years.

You got to do it. You can't avoid it here. It is 1976. Right. And even in the middle of all this backdrop of absolute domestic unrest.

People are still trying to go back to the founding to tell positive stories. Even then. The purpose of our parade is to stand down the streets and celebrate the birthday of our country as gay people.

And make people aware that gay people have always been here in the midst of people before and died for our country.

We've been here since revolution. And we will always be here. You still see the sharpest critics of the founding myth trying to claim the founding as their own. See, the Afro-American bicentennial corporation has been active in any number of substantive projects. I think that across the country we're finding out that blacks for the most part look at the bicentennial in a very different way than

They're trying to invoke it.

They're saying, OK, we are black activists, we're gay activists, and we want to claim the revolutionary spirit.

And it's because of the revolution itself that we think the country can do better. And so even as they're critiquing the country, they're weaving the founding into their argument.

“And using it to say, this is why you should listen to us.”

And we are the true inheritors of the founding. So these fierce debates are unfolding, but even you're saying the biggest critics of the myth are still invoking it and claiming that founding myth as their own. But in what now feels more like silos, which doesn't resemble the single unifying force that the mythology was supposed to be. Yes. And then in the years that followed, the silos just get more and more intense, and it gets harder and harder for everyone to feel like they're having any kind of back and forth conversation about the founding.

And it's harder to imagine the more you learn that there is even a way to get back to a single myth anymore. We'll be right back.

“I'm Dan Barry, and I'm a longtime reporter with The New York Times.”

I've been here for 30 years, and I've seen a lot of things change. I was here before there was a website, but one thing hasn't changed at all, and that's the mission of The New York Times. To follow the facts wherever they lead, and if that means publishing something a government or a leader or a celebrity doesn't want to aired, that's not our concern.

I've never been told to go against the facts to accommodate anyone, and if I had, I would have quite frankly left the building.

This is the way it was when I was covering the aftermath of 9/11, and this is the way it is now as I cover the United States of today. If you believe in the importance of fact-driven reporting, you can support it by becoming a New York Times subscriber. And if you already subscribe, this veteran reporter, thanks you. So Julian, talk us through how the silos that we clearly see by 1976 by the bicentennial bring us to the juncture we are at right now, which feels more like a full-on fracturing around the beginning of this country.

“I think through the '70s, you can still see the left and the right fighting over who gets to have the founding.”

I think when you get into the Reagan era in the 1980s, it feels like the right is really claiming the higher ground there. I think it's time we ask ourselves if we still know the freedoms that were intended for us by the founding fathers. And they're beginning to really convince more of the country that they are kind of the true inheritors of the founding.

Our nation was conceived in liberty, and we have always understood that the fate of our own freedom is tied to the fate of freedom in the world.

And so you have someone like Reagan, this is, you know, really peaked Cold War era rhetoric, saying the founding is about personal liberty, more than equality. We lose freedom here, there's no place to escape to, this is the last stand on earth. And this idea that government is beholden to the people that it has, no other source of power except the sovereign people. It's still the newest and the most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. And you get the evangelical movement, which is really on the march at this point.

This is a nation under God. They're saying, God has a call on this country. It was said by our founding fathers, each of the persons who say that mean that here is a nation built upon the Judeo-Christian ethic. And God calls us to be a moral chosen nation, and they are really fusing God in the founding and America into one big thing. That living by God's principles brings a nation to greatness.

That, and the GOP taking it all in, really pushes this idea of who has the myth, who owns it, who owns the founding, pushes it into sort of a republican direction. And the decades that follow, historians are finding out more and more reasons to be skeptical of mythology about the founding. We are learning a lot more about the lives of the slaves of Jefferson and Washington. In the late '90s, we get a truly explosive book about Sally Hemings, one of Jefferson slaves, by the historian at Gordon Reed.

And then a year later, there's even DNA testing to prove that she's completely right.

That's a 200-year-old sex scandal returned to the headlines last week with news of scientific truth now that has confirmed Jefferson's sexual liaison with the woman named Sally Hemings.

“And I think the left seeing all of this really just sees more reasons for critique, more reasons for skepticism.”

How could the same man who wrote about all these great American ideals at the same time quietly, be having an affair with someone who was a child? That makes him a liar fraud and hypocrite to many people. And this new information just is really hard for people to absorb.

Jefferson is being depicted very simply as a rapist, a hypocrite, and a dirty old man.

If you've grown up thinking about Jefferson as a paragon of American ideals, this is just really tough to swallow. I would also add to this, there's so much more now about the American Indians. The founding fathers were all races that stole this land from them. And sort of what was going on for them during all of this founding and rebellion. They took our language, our culture, the overthrow of our governments and took our land.

And it's just very hard to integrate a story of absolute dispossession of land with a story of a divinely touched nation. There are exceptions to this, of course. I'd point to President Obama as someone who has spoken very eloquently about the founding while also acknowledging original sins like slavery.

“But I think for the most part, you see some elements of the left, I'd say, really having trouble imagining the founding is a place where you could possibly draw inspiration and hope.”

And so there's just a lot to process that is not merely either questioning the myths, but really exploiting them. And of course, on its face there's nothing wrong with the kind of interrogations that the American left is focused on. We are both journalists, we are both very invested in the idea of getting to the bottom of the truth and it's often very messy. So I wonder what you would say is the downside of this growing fixation on fact finding. What's the problem exactly?

I am fully in favor of the truth as a journalist, just like you Michael.

“And I, in fact, think that to really understand this country and want to fight for its future in some way, the truth is not optional, right?”

But I would also say that that is one bucket of work to be done. The fact finding rigorous history. There's an entire other area that we've seen in our history, which is not just finding the facts, but finding meaning out of the founding. These are not mutually exclusive. You can try to understand the truth of something, but the truth of something in the facts of something don't really tell you what the founding means. That's a totally separate avenue of work, you know, in a political argument. And in fact, sometimes when you get more facts, it can make it harder to do.

You're just saying, oh my gosh, when we look at the histories just one terrible thing after another, it can lead to cynicism. And there are historians who, you know, over time have been very reflective about this and said, what are we doing? We're trying to reveal facts, but that doesn't mean that we're here to just say, we know everything, we can tell you the meaning of it all. This is just one corner of understanding the American founding. And no amount of facts is going to lead you straight to that answer.

I think if I'm reading between the lines of what you're saying, it's that a successful political movement has to find a way to make meaning out of this history, it cannot just articulate flaws. And I think it makes sense to bring on stage, make America great again as a movement, which seeks to call back to the past to make America great again. And which wraps itself in expressions of patriotism and very formally rejects the liberal critique of America throughout its history. Yes, and so by now we have a situation where you really feel like, okay, Trump is out there literally hugging and kissing the flag.

And we have these 250 celebrations and you don't see kind of an organized, you know, opposition the way we did in the bicentennial from the left about who owns the history in the first place.

Well, what would it look like to find our way back to a moment when the myths that we're talking about might be more central to our identity as a whole country?

But what might a middle ground version between fact and myth that is bipartisan, what might that resemble? I think it's the place to just begin, and this is what has felt powerful to me, honestly in the last couple of months, is to return again, as I said before, to the words of Frederick Douglass. And I think if people can do that, they can sort of access a different strand of the story that I think has gone relatively quiet, which is how people understand the founding, how they make new meaning out of it, how they make their country different with the founding.

“And I think once you can see that, you can see that there's kind of, I would argue almost like a lost tradition of that, right?”

Like how do we get back to a place where we were talking about the founding, discussing the ideals, and not just fighting about what facts should be public or not. And I think the way to get it back is to read these documents. Let's read the Declaration, just that opening part, we don't need to get into all the ways, all the grievances of the colonists necessarily. Let's just read that opening lines, let's read the Guidesburg address, these are not long documents to read, but I think for me when I reread them, it just got my imagination going of like, oh, there's so many possibilities, there's so many ways to interpret the founding.

And that's where we need to sort of be thinking, and if we can have that conversation, you know, in a way, we'll never agree on what liberty means.

“How could you, like, that's just the biggest possible idea. It's hard to agree what equality means, but I think the country has kind of found its bearings again, when people are really engaged in debates and conversations about that.”

Well, Jalen, I wanted to finish if you'll let me by asking you a more personal question, because you are the child of immigrants. I know it's because you wrote an entire book about the history of immigration in America, and you talk about your family's experience. And I wonder what all these questions about the American founding myth meant to your family, especially your parents, as they settled into the United States. I think for my family, the element of this that's so powerful is that it feels like a country that's, for a better and for worse, is really swept up in ideals in trying to make something better.

I think about my dad who loves reading Lincoln's writing, who loves to read it, because he's reading about a person who is just, you know, in the darkest hour of our country.

When the whole thing feels like it's going to be lost, there's someone who still believes that the country can be something that has not been before, and that has never been seen before.

“And so I think if you want to join in that, that's why I think not for, I won't speak for all immigrants, I wouldn't nearly, but I think there's some immigrants who just are the deepest believers in America in its myths.”

And there are reasons to be cynical, there are reasons every day to be disillusioned, but it's also a place that's always imagining something else. Right, that's how it begins, it begins by imagining a different kind of democracy that's never been never been seen before, and it just keeps reimagining it into something. And I think that just to me like provokes dreaming and hoping, right, it's like, what could this be? Like, let's see, let's try. And I think the challenge for us is to figure out just as other people have done before what does all of it mean to us today. What are the ideals? How do we match up now? And what does that mean for what we want to do next?

We're never going to agree on all of it, but is there a way to even get anywhere closer to something like a unified conversation about it?

I have to think that the founding is still the beginning and what better place to begin to try to find some story that holds us together again. Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today.

Those attacks on Russia have caused widespread fuel shortages across the country and put enormous pressure on President Vladimir Putin who began the war with Ukraine four years ago.

Ukrainian officials said that Russia's retaliatory attacks killed at least 21 people and injured at least 85 more. And these are extremely dangerous conditions and they will affect every part of our city. Dangerous heat blanketed tens of millions of Americans on Thursday as high temperatures that began in the Midwest move to the east coast, hovering around 100 degrees from Atlanta to New York City, where Mayor Zor Mondani warned residents to avoid the outdoors.

“The single most important thing you can do in these temperatures is to stay indoors with air conditioning.”

If you can avoid going outside during the hottest hours of the day, please do so.

Forecasters blamed the high temperatures on a heat dome in which a sprawling high pressure weather system is pushing warm air toward the ground.

“Today's episode was produced by Lexi Diel, Diana Wint, where Shell Banja, Alex Stern and Jessica Chomp. It was edited by Rob Zipko with help from Michael Benoit.”

It contains music by Mary Lesano, Dan Powell, Rowini Misto and Pat McCusker. Our theme music is by Wonderley. This episode was engineered by Chris Wood.

That's it for daily. I'm Michael Babaro. See you on Sunday. This week on The Wirecutter Show, we're covering Deodorant and Andy Persprint with expert writer Abbie Kisolchik who tested dozens of these products in a polyester suit. And I stayed eerily fragrance-free. Let's say I just couldn't believe it, and it became almost a sport.

“Like what more can I do to test this poor Deodorant?”

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