Happy 250th, America!

Written by Brook Schaaf

President Calvin Coolidge famously said, “After all, the chief business of the American people is business,” often paraphrased as “Business is the business of America.” Not war, not education, not dominion, not evangelism, but commerce.

Less famously, on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Coolidge gave a “final speech,” as in “If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final.”

Taken together, these observations suggest that in a peaceful society that recognizes natural rights, people naturally devote themselves to commerce: discovering, creating, and exchanging value. We marketers contribute to this surplus by aiding the process of market fit and conversion.

I reflected on the extraordinary surplus we Americans enjoy when I visited Johnson City with my family to renew my older boys’ passports. Named for a relative, Johnson City was the boyhood home of Lyndon Baines Johnson. His ranch with a little airstrip sits some miles outside of town, and there is a small museum across the street from his boyhood home, which we toured.

The home had high ceilings, typical of buildings of the age, which I had always understood to be for heat, but were also to collect soot from the kerosene lamps that burned indoors. The three girls in the family shared a room, huddling together in winter in a single bed because their wing of the house had no stove. In summer, everyone had the opposite problem because it was even hotter on the screened-in patio, so they sometimes dipped their bedsheets in water for evaporative cooling while they slept.

Experiences like these offer perspective. The conveniences we enjoy today would have seemed extraordinary to most Americans a century ago. The progress our nation has achieved is easy to overlook precisely because it has become our everyday reality. 

That is one reason I find the relative quiet surrounding America’s 250th birthday so striking. The Bicentennial in 1976 generated tremendous excitement despite a decade marked by economic hardship, political scandal, and national uncertainty. Even the Centennial celebration came only eleven years after the Civil War. By comparison, this milestone has arrived with surprisingly little fanfare. 

What to make of this? Perhaps too many of us have come to take this prosperity, this surplus, for granted. Perhaps we do not value ritual as we ought to. Perhaps too many of us heed the siren song of other political and economic structures, such as socialism, ever appealing in description, ever destructive in implementation.

Whatever the case, we should not take for granted what we have. We should have a sense of incredible gratitude for the durable, ingenious system of government left to us by the Founding Fathers. We should celebrate America and leave it better for our children and grandchildren.

As we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, may we do so with gratitude for those who came before us, confidence in what free people can accomplish together, and determination to leave an even stronger America for our children and grandchildren. 

To paraphrase JFK, seek not that your country be worthy of you but that you be worthy of your country.