It’s been a quiet July 4 for me. Our nephews splashed around in the pool with friends until a summer thunderstorm chased them out. Inside, we watched France and Paraguay duel their way through this evening’s World Cup game: one team wearing white and red stripes, the other sporting deep blue.
I noticed Fox Sports commentators treating France as the United States’ proxy in tonight’s contest. I’d have bet they’d root for the New World team today of all days, but the USA and France have some shared symbolic and political history, and sports is nothing if not political.
The US declared independence from the UK a decade before the French Revolution, but French political theorists like Montesquieu and de Tocqueville inspired American leaders’ early ideas about how to build a country; how to self-govern; how to balance the powers to write laws, enforce them, and change them; and how to secure the rights of citizens, property owners, and enslavers, all too often the same people.
Shortly after the USA’s first centennial (1876), France also gifted its friends across the seas a monument to liberal democracy and the abolition of slavery. The Statue of Liberty in New York is a towering idealistic appeal. It’s covered in a blue-green patina today because the air and water of the bay have reacted with the copper it’s sculpted from. Every ideal is necessarily impacted by the ecology people express it in, and not even a gift of art from a friendly country is immune to the local environment.
Through poetry, symbolism, and her sheer size, America’s Lady Liberty reminds us of the liberté, égalité, and fraternité that the US has claimed for itself, promoted around the world, and betrayed abroad and at home over 250 years.
Our contradictions aren’t unique. I’m not sure there’s a nation-state anywhere on Earth that has finished its project of becoming, and I don’t even think our becoming is a project with an end.
So the United States, like its old friend France, is incomplete.
France began proclaiming universal human and civic rights in 1789, but it didn’t immediately align with its own vision. It had been colonizing Saint-Domingue for nearly 100 years before the colony became the first in the western hemisphere to divest from chattel slavery as well as from European colonialism. And the United States may have separated from England before Haiti separated from France, but the US refused to give up genocide, human trafficking, or torture, and created new legal structures to continue them. Slavery persists here in new forms as I write.
But at the end of the 18th Century and the start of the 19th, free and enslaved Africans in Haiti insisted on their right to rule themselves rather than be subject to Paris or to leaders France had approved for them. They traded strategies with enslaved Africans in other parts of the Americas, and as their story spread across the region as fast as the revolutionary fires they set, they inspired similar movements across the British Caribbean and the US including in Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia and the Sea Islands, and New York.
As much as enslavers viciously repressed rebellions whenever they arose, they did so in terror because they rightly judged that revolts in any one area would only engender more. The slavocracy imagined itself strong, buttressed by the dollar, the whip, the scriptures, and the law, but it never extinguished enslaved people’s will to live freely and decide their future for themselves.
There’s something meaningful in the declaration that all men are created equal and a just government rests on the consent of the governed. There’s also meaning in the witness of those who breathed the same sour air as colonial British-Americans: Indigenous people with whom the United States would repeatedly breach treaties, and enslaved and free Black people in every generation who’ve questioned the limits of our country’s idealism and the depravity of its behavior.
Take Rev. Lemuel Haynes, who read the Declaration of Independence fresh off the presses in 1776, and replied with an essay titled “Liberty Further Extended.” “Even an African,” he wrote, “has equally as good a right to his Liberty in common with Englishmen” and, as such, “the practice of Slave-keeping, which so much abounds in this land is illicit.” This essay wasn’t published or recovered from an Ivy League archive until the 1980s!
Perhaps you’ve also read the Frederick Douglass classic, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” (1852). At some point this weekend, read it again or listen to James Earl Jones recite it. “It’s hard,” reporter Jacob Soboroff said today, “to sing happy birthday to a country that keeps asking you to prove your belonging.”
We didn’t get to see the very end of the Paraguay-France game because the power went out with three minutes to go. The electrical grid in my state is under siege; extreme heat plus deferred maintenance plus higher demand including new data centers are all dragging on the common pot. So by the time the power came back, the game was over. DC officials also canceled this morning’s parade and delayed start time for other events downtown to protect attendees from a heatwave, and hundreds of thousands of people across the northeastern and Great Lakes region had no power at all.
I know France won their game on July 4. I don’t know for sure how the United States’ next national chapter will read. But I do know that even if our becoming is incomplete, it’s important that we tell more complete stories about where we’ve come from, who we are, what we have to revise, and what’s still possible.
I’ll close this entry by sharing a few books that I pulled off my shelves this morning. Every one of them widens and sharpens the picture of the US that we can view through the mainstream’s lenses. With more in view, and taking more into account, we can better discern our role in the collective story.
A 250-year-old nation-state isn’t inevitable like rising sun or falling rain. It’s neither ancient reality nor entirely new, and no natural law demands it survive. Whether it continues and how it changes is a multigenerational group project, and, year on year, the stakes only grow.
How, then, shall we live?
A few things to read
The links below are all Bookshop.org affiliate links. Please ask for these books at your public library.
On the Beginning
- Michael J. Klarman, The Framers’ Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution (Oxford UP, 2016)
- Carrie Gibson, El Norte: The Epic and Forgotten Story of Hispanic North America (Grove Press, 2019)
- Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2019)
- Sarah Augustine, The Land is Not Empty: Following Jesus in Dismantling the Doctrine of Discovery (Herald Press, 2021)
On the Middle of Things
- Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (1492-2001) (Harper, 1980/2003)
- Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom (History Book Club, 1975/2005)
- Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (Anchor Books, 2008)
- David Montero, The Stolen Wealth of Slavery: A Case for Reparations (Legacy Lit, 2024)
And Now
- Grace Lee Boggs (with Scott Kurashige), The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-first Century (U of California Press, 2012)
- Danielle Allen, Justice by Means of Democracy (U of Chicago Press, 2023)
- Osita Nwanevu, The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding (Random House, 2024)