America at 250, and the Fourth of July presidents

Breslin is the Joseph C. Palamountain Jr. Chair of Political Science at Skidmore College and author of “ A Constitution for the Living: Imagining How Five Generations of Americans Would Rewrite the Nation’s Fundamental Law.”

This is the latest in “ A Republic, if we can keep it,” a series to assist American citizens on the bumpy road ahead this election year. By highlighting components, principles and stories of the Constitution, Breslin hopes to remind us that the American political experiment remains, in the words of Alexander Hamilton, the “most interesting in the world.”

An odd pattern has emerged in the history of presidential politics. Every time the United States celebrates a major birthday milestone, a Republican sits in the White House.

When America celebrated its golden jubilee in 1826, Democratic-Republican John Quincy Adams was enjoying his second year as the country’s chief executive. When the nation rejoiced that it had reached its centennial 100 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Ulysses S. Grant was our president. At America’s sesquicentennial in 1926, Calvin Coolidge occupied the White House. And during the bicentennial almost 50 years ago, Gerald Ford was completing his one and only term at the helm.

All Republicans. A bit surprising given the rough parity of Republican and Democratic presidents over the years.

What is less surprising is the particular vision of America they celebrated on those significant anniversaries. It was an America dominated by a belief in Divine Providence, a conviction that the “Almighty God” has sanctified this exceptional nation and that the blessings endowed by the Creator — the blessings of liberty, of equality, of justice, of limited government and of a moral theology based on Christianity — will always resound. America’s “high adventure,” they said, is part holy ordination, part Exodus story.

The words of their July Fourth celebrations tell the story.

Adams experienced the quintessential bittersweet day on July 4, 1826. He rang in the 23rd birthday of his second son, John Adams II, on the very same day he mourned the death of his famous father. I think we can forgive J.Q. Adams for not delivering a July Fourth address that year.

Still, five years earlier, he trumpeted America’s birthday with a most memorable speech. His words presage a common theme among all Fourth of July presidents: “Five and forty years have passed away since this Declaration was issued by our fathers;” he remarked, “and here are we, fellow-citizens, assembled in the full enjoyment of its fruits, to bless the author of our being for the bounties of his providence, in casting our lot in this favored land; and, by the communion of soul in the reperusal and hearing of [the Declaration], to renew the genuine Holy Alliance of its principles, to recognise them as eternal truths, and to pledge ourselves, and bind our posterity, to a faithful and undeviating adherence to them.”

Half a century later, Grant spoke more to the point, even if less eloquently: “It seems fitting,” he proclaimed, “that on the occurrence of the hundredth anniversary of our existence as a nation a grateful acknowledgement should be made to Almighty God for the protection and the bounties which He has vouchsafed to our beloved country.”

Coolidge was over the top in his belief in Divine Providence. America’s prosperity, he insisted, owed its source to a wink from a Christian God. Consider just a sample of his sesquicentennial address at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall.

“[The Declaration of Independence] is the product of the spiritual insight of the people,” he announced. “Unless we cling to that, all our material prosperity … will turn to a barren scepter in our grasp. If we are to maintain the great heritage which has been bequeathed to us, we must be like-minded as the father who created [the Declaration]. We must not sink into pagan materialism. We must cultivate the reverence which they had for the things that are holy. We must follow the spiritual and moral leadership which they showed. We must keep replenished, that they may glow with a more compelling flame, that alter fires before which they worshipped.”

Ford was a bit more subtle. His Fourth of July address happened in the shadow of the National Archives. “In our Archives and Libraries,” he began, “we find documents to transport us across centuries in time — back to Mount Sinai and the Sea of Galilee, to Runnymede, to the pitching cabin of the Mayflower, and to sweltering Philadelphia in [the] midsummer of 1776.”

Echoing the words of Jefferson, Ford continued: “All human beings have certain rights” and those rights “are a gift from God. … Let each of us, in this year of our bicentennial, join with those brave and far-sighted Americans of 1776. Let us do as they did, with firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, that the future of this land we love may be ever brighter for our children and for generations of Americans yet to be born.”

All four Republican presidents described an America born from a sacred charter and forged by a God-fearing people. Their descriptions reflected the hegemony of a Christian nationalist birth story, one that was no doubt accurate throughout most of American history.

But America has changed. It has changed a lot. That same birth story has become less compelling, less uniting, less resonant. It does not speak to the majority of Americans anymore. First off, the country has seen a steady decline in religious affiliation over the past 50 years. The secularization of America has come mainly from a dip in Christian followers. In fact, this country is less Christian today than at any time in its history. And that has repercussions for the upcoming election and for America’s 250 birthday. Sending the message that all citizens of this extraordinarily pluralist nation should assimilate to a particularized and holy narrative of Christian orthodoxy might have triumphed in the past. It seems sadly anachronistic today.

With hindsight, the America described by the Fourth of July presidents was always incomplete. The U.S. president who celebrates America’s upcoming milestone birthday — the semiquincentennial — must remember that. We should too. As we gear up to vote in a few weeks, and as we consider which candidate might best capture America’s new heterogeneity on July 4, 2026, let us recall the words of America’s greatest political poet, Thomas Jefferson, who said, “Perhaps the single thing which may be required to others before toleration to them would be an oath that they would allow toleration to others.”