This July, the United States turns 250 years old. Anniversaries like this one are supposed to be moments of pride – parades, fireworks, the familiar comfort of a story we already know how it ends. But this anniversary arrives at a more uneasy moment than most. The country is as polarized as it has been in generations. Trust in our institutions is eroding. For the first time in a long time, a meaningful number of Americans are asking, seriously, whether the republic our founders built is durable enough to survive us.
I don’t think that question is answered by looking at the current occupant of the White House. His malignant presidency is a symptom, not a cause of our broken system of government – the product of decades of extreme partisanship that taught two political tribes to see each other not as fellow citizens with different views, but as enemies to be defeated by any means necessary.
A political culture that rewards contempt over compromise, clannishness over the common good, and scoring partisan points over problem-solving will eventually produce leaders who exploit such cynicism for their own ends. That is where we are. But the more useful place to look as we question the durability of our democracy isn’t at the people in Washington today. It’s at two Americans who were actually there at the beginning – George Washington and Dr. Joseph Warren – because what they teach us has less to do with any single leader than with what kind of citizens the rest of us choose to be.
George Washington had more opportunities than any American who has ever lived to make himself king in fact if not in name, and he never so much as considered it. In May 1782, seven months after the British surrender at Yorktown effectively ended the Revolutionary War, a Continental Army colonel named Lewis Nicola wrote to Washington with a startling proposal: that the fragile new nation adopt a monarchy, with Washington as its king. Washington’s reply was immediate and unambiguous. He told Nicola he viewed the idea “with abhorrence,” and warned him never to raise it again.
The question of a permanent head of state didn’t die there. Five years later, at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Alexander Hamilton delivered a six-hour speech floating the idea of a president who would serve for life. Washington, elected to preside over the convention on its very first day, said nothing. Silence was his custom throughout the proceedings, a discipline that, more than any speech he could have given, demonstrated his belief that power should be restrained, not personified. The delegates ultimately rejected Hamilton’s proposal in favor of four-year terms.
Then Washington did something even more remarkable than staying silent: having been unanimously elected president by the Electoral College in both 1789 and 1792, he simply could have kept running. No one in the country would have denied him a third term, or a fourth, or a lifetime in office. Instead, he stepped down – and in doing so, set a precedent of voluntary transfer of power that American presidents honored for close to a century and a half, until Franklin Roosevelt broke it in 1940. Washington understood, with unusual clarity for a man at the height of his own popularity, that the actions of the first president would become the norms every future president was measured against. Power, he believed, had to be transitioned, not hoarded, if the young republic was going to live up to its own founding promises.
He said as much explicitly, and presciently, in his farewell address. Washington warned that political parties were “likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”
He worried, too, that this kind of partisanship would “open the door to foreign influence and corruption,” as rival factions became willing to seek outside help to defeat their domestic enemies rather than lose to them fairly. Read those words today, and it is hard not to feel that President Washington wasn’t merely describing his own era. He was describing ours.
George Washington and the other founders were not saints, and it does no one any favors to pretend otherwise. Many of them, Washington included, owned slaves. Their vision of all human beings “are created equal” excluded most of the people actually living in the country they built. And the compromises they made to hold the union together left wounds that still have not healed. Whatever reverence we owe the founding generation has to sit alongside a clear-eyed reckoning with what it got wrong.
But alongside that reckoning is another truth: These early Americans were also people willing to risk everything – their fortunes, their families, their lives – for a country that did not yet exist and might never have survived its own birth. Nowhere is that sacrifice more vivid than in the life of Dr. Joseph Warren, a man far less remembered today than Washington but every bit as central to the revolutionary generation’s understanding of what citizenship demanded.
Warren was a Boston physician, the president of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, and the man who ran the patriots’ network of spies and intelligence in occupied Boston. It was Warren who, on the night of April 18, 1775, dispatched Paul Revere and William Dawes on the rides that would warn Lexington and Concord that British regulars were on the march.
A month earlier, on March 6, 1775, Warren had delivered the annual oration commemorating the Boston Massacre – knowing that dozens of armed British soldiers, some openly hostile, would be in the crowd. He climbed through a window to reach the pulpit because the room was too packed to enter any other way. And he closed his address with a charge to his fellow citizens that still carries weight two hundred and fifty years later:
“On you depend the fortunes of America. You are to decide the important question, on which rest the happiness and liberty of millions yet unborn. Act worthy of yourselves.”
Three months after that, at the Battle of Bunker Hill, Warren had the chance to prove he meant it. He had just been commissioned a major general in the Massachusetts militia – a senior command, and one that would have kept him safely behind the lines. He refused the honor and asked instead to fight as a volunteer private, shoulder to shoulder with the ordinary farmers and tradesmen defending the hill. When the British finally breached the American lines, Warren stayed behind to cover his men’s retreat. A British officer recognized him and shot him through the head, killing him instantly. He was 34 years old.
Washington and Warren represent two different, complementary forms of the same civic virtue. Washington shows us what it looks like to hold enormous power and choose, deliberately and repeatedly, to give it up. Warren shows us what it looks like to hold real status and privilege and choose, without hesitation, to give it up too – not for advancement, but for the plain duty of standing where the danger was greatest. Neither man asked what the country could do for him. It is difficult to imagine very many people in power in Washington, D.C. today – in either party – following either example. It is harder still to imagine a Lewis Nicola figure showing up in the modern White House and being turned away with anything resembling Washington’s fury at the very suggestion of unaccountable power.
That is the real warning our first president left us, and it goes far beyond anyone occupying the Oval Office in the 21st century. It is a warning about what happens to a self-governing people when they stop expecting sacrifice and humility from their leaders and start rewarding those in it for themselves and who simply refuse to let go.
Two hundred fifty years is a long time for a democratic republic to survive, and it did not survive by accident. It survived because, generation after generation, enough citizens – not just presidents and generals, but ordinary people who owed the country nothing more than good faith – chose the harder, less tribal path when it mattered. That is the choice in front of a growing number of Americans right now: the tens of millions of us who no longer feel at home in either major political party, who are exhausted by a politics built on contempt, and who suspect, correctly, that the loudest voices on both sides do not speak for us.
Independents are often dismissed as disengaged, or indecisive, or simply absent from the fight. I’d argue the opposite is true, and that this is our moment. We are the ones with no tribal stake in defending the indefensible from either side. We are the ones free to judge leaders – and parties – by whether they resemble George Washington’s restraint or Joseph Warren’s sacrifice, rather than by which jersey they wear. We are the true heirs of the man who penned the first presidential farewell address.
If the country’s founding generation could put aside its very real differences long enough to win a war against the most powerful empire on earth and then, harder still, walk away from the power that victory handed them, then surely we can put aside our differences long enough to defend the republic they built.
Two hundred fifty years ago, Joseph Warren stood in a besieged meetinghouse and told his fellow citizens that the fortunes of America depended on them. He was right then, and in a democracy, that sentence never stops being true of whoever is listening to it. It is true of us, now, at 250.
Act worthy of yourselves.
Greg Orman is a Kansas entrepreneur, author of “A Declaration of Independents,” and a former independent candidate for governor and senator of his state. His website is www.greg-orman.com.
