John Waterman is an associate teaching professor of philosophy at the University of New England.

America is first and foremost an idea, perhaps even an ideal.

Other nations emerged from the accidents of history and conquest sharing a land or a language. Not so the United States. It began with a declaration of moral purpose. The documents of its convocation, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, set out this ethical project for the world to see. Other nations have a history. We are a moral philosophy.

And it is perhaps because of this that the United States has inspired so many wonderful quips and quotes, all in an attempt to define it and the American character. 

And what better time to reflect on the American experiment than the occasion of its 250th birthday.

America has always been a land of promise. Thomas Jefferson called America an “Empire of Liberty,” envisioning an expansive future. For Francis Scott Key, witness to the nation’s early struggles, America was “The land of the free and the home of the brave.” Woodrow Wilson wrote “America lives in the heart of every man everywhere who wishes to find a region where he will be free.” John Adams considered it a fact that “The Foundation of every government is some principle or passion in the minds of the people.” Madeleine Albright put it simply, calling America “the indispensable nation.” 

Two oft-quoted assessments of the American character are probably apocryphal, but also too good to forget.

The idea that “America is great because America is good” is often attributed to Alexis Du Tocqueville, biographer of our nation’s early years, though no text supports it.

Likewise, Winston Churchill may never have quipped, as is so often claimed, that “America can always be counted upon to do what’s right — after it’s exhausted every other alternative.” But, it would not have been out of character of a man who did in fact say of America that the “Toilet paper [is] too thin, and the newspapers too fat.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson pronounced “America is another name for opportunity.” Ever since the challenge has been to share it. For Calvin Coolidge, the obvious path to do so was through industry, so it is no wonder he proclaimed “The chief business of the American people is business.”  Of course, his speech of 1925 did not and could not anticipate the Great Depression that would soon follow.

That calamity inspired Woody Guthrie to envision a different kind of American economy, encapsulated in his sincere, yearning lyric, “This land is your land, this land is my land, this land was made for you and me.” But America is never simple. And even Guthrie, earnest to the core, took much for granted, as we are reminded by Chief Seattle, to whom tradition attributes the idea that “The land does not belong to us, we belong to the land.”

Indeed the American landscape has been celebrated and contested throughout our long history. Katharine Lee Bates, inspired by the view from the summit of Pike’s Peak, composed “America the Beautiful “on the spot, rhapsodizing about a land of “spacious skies,” “amber waves of grain” and “purple mountain majesties.” 

Editor John L. O’Sullivan declared it was America’s “Manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and self-government.” A process that would prompt the Hunkpapa Lakota Chief Sitting Bull to liken America to “a spring freshet, [that] overruns its banks and destroys all who are in its path.” Wallace Stegner, recognizing the need to preserve some part of it, proclaimed, “National parks are the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst.”

Who is American has been a deeply contested question. Emma Lazarus articulated a generous vision of America in her poem “The New Colossus,” as a nation welcoming the “tired, [the] poor, [the] huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” A century later, John F. Kennedy would affirm that vision in his book “A Nation of Immigrants.”  And despite this, Stephen Miller did not speak only for himself when he said in 2024 that “America is for Americans and Americans only.”

Who can share in the American ideal is perhaps our nation’s most complicated inheritance. The eminently quotable Abraham Lincoln memorably defined the American project as government “of the people, by the people, and for the people.”

But which people?

Alice Paul observed early in the 20th century that “America is not a democracy. Twenty million American women are denied the right to vote.” A condition that would prompt Susan B. Anthony to wonder “Is it a crime for a citizen of the United States to vote?”

And, of course, Lincoln’s most famous invocation was made at the site of a battle over the freedom of millions of Black Americans. As Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote recently, “Our founding ideals of liberty and equality were false when they were written. Black Americans fought to make them true. Without this struggle, America would have no democracy at all.” Langston Hughes expressed the idea with heartrending economy when he wrote “America never was America to me.” Our reckoning with this history is still incomplete, still unfulfilled.

What, then, should we make of our nation’s contested and complicated history as we celebrate its 250th birthday?

In the end, Walt Whitman best captures America’s quarrels and complex promise in “”Song of Myself,” where he wrote to Americans, personifying America: “Do I contradict myself, very well I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.”

Whitman dedicated “Leaves of Grass” to the nation of his birth, declaring “The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.” Whitman wrote not to any one class or race, not to one region or party, not only to men or only to women, to no specific creed, and to no particular group. Instead he wrote to a multitude, the American people, in all their differences. Anything as large, as free and as energetic as the United States cannot escape division. Division is part of the whole.

Is it any wonder that the political rancor of recent years has felt so bitter? Work now rarely becomes a career. Mobility now thins the fabric of community. Fewer generations are now raised in faith. America has been left alone as an ideal in which to invest our belief. It means so much because it is an expression of our moral identity. Much has been made of identity politics of late. Being American is an identity, too. Of course it hurts when someone contests our idea of America. 

But that is why Whitman’s expression of that ideal is so vital: America is an idea and America is a multitude.

The project of forming a more perfect union will involve contradictions. America’s deepest political divides are a consequence of its highest ideal: to bring together a multitude in the singular project of self-government. Only by inspiring so many to give voice to their own ideals has America ever abided. Only by continuing to do so will it abide still.