My father spent his early years working multiple jobs at once. He packed fruit at the grocery store, delivered newspapers, worked on the General Motors assembly line and preached on Sunday mornings. Over time, he slowed down. On his 85th birthday, he stepped down as pastor of our church but continued his job as a greeter at Chick-fil-A. He often says that his work as a preacher and a full-time worker is more similar than people think. Both need to appear before sunrise. Both need to believe in something greater than income. Both require telling people the truth about who they are and what they can become.
It is the same with nations.
At 250 years old, the United States of America is the most ambitious product ever conceived. Like all great institutions, it lives or dies by what it preaches.
Fifteen years ago, leadership scholars Doug Ready and Emily Truelove called the spirit of animation powerful brands. “joint desire” in a Harvard Business Review article. They captured how great leaders inspire diverse people to come together for the common good with a seven-factor model that stands the test of time: purpose, vision, promise, values, goals, priorities and the day-to-day behavior of people who carry the name. What makes big companies great can make great countries great. Consistency endures. Irregularity rots.
Two hundred and fifty years ago in Philadelphia, imperfect men wrote the blueprint for a perfect Union. They made a promise: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. They appeal to the God of Nature. They are committed to principles worth dying for. They admitted that the nation was not perfect on the first day, yet they expected it to reach a perfection that they could not achieve.
Complement is a verb, not an adjective. The founders hope that we will continue to build.
We did that in equal measure, sometimes going backwards before two steps forward. In Sunday school, I learned that Job sat in ashes before he sat in the ashes. Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego entered the furnace before coming out unburnt. Esther went to the king uninvited before she saved her people. America sits in ashes, walked through fire and risked life for freedom. We are still waking up.
Like a wedding anniversary, America’s 250th is not a time to pretend we were flawless, but to celebrate our journey through trials and tribulations together, and to renew our vows to maintain perfection.
America’s history of renaissance in the world.
In 1787, the Articles of Confederation fell. Shays’ Rebellion exposed a government that could not pay its soldiers or restrain its farmers. Madison, Hamilton and Jay he wrote 85 articles under the name Publius which was published in the New York newspapers within six months. They talked to the country to have a new constitution. “We the People” was a narrative idea before it became a written reality.
In 1933, a quarter of the American population was unemployed as banks and businesses fell like dominoes. President Franklin Roosevelt moved quickly through the policy, then sat in the lobby and talked to people in their living rooms. Those are great fire talks a renewed faith that government and capitalism can be made to work for ordinary people again. Eleanor Roosevelt he traveled the country like his eyes, ears and conscience.
In the 1960s, Martin Luther King Jr. he refused to fight on the country’s reduced terms. He read America its pledge and demanded that it be honored. Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, Diane Nash and many more women set the stage he stopped. President Lyndon Johnson found the courage to sign the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, knowing it would cost his party the South a generation. Women provided the foundation, King provided the voice and Johnson provided the votes. They were all revival heroes.
History also reminds us that progress is fragile. President Abraham Lincoln’s revival in the 1860s is a story of triumph and caution. He gave the country the Gettysburg Address, the Thirteenth Amendment and unity over division. Then came the fall of Reconstruction, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and the decades of Old and New Jim Crow.
Two renovation steps forward can create a step or two back. Every new generation inherits unfinished business. Nations do not regenerate by accident. They innovate when they stick to their product promise.
The American product promise, engraved on our currency, is In Pluribus Unum. Of many, one. Every immigrant, every grandchild of slaves, every farm kid and every Pell Grant recipient like me has been told that this country is theirs. If we break that promise, we pay for it in terms of trust, productivity and that’s about it half a million dollars that laid off workers leave the American economy every year.
Which brings us back to the Ready and Truelove model of mutual desire. Our goal is union, not division. Our vision is freedom, justice and prosperity for all. Our values are honesty, hard work, kindness and service. Our goals are quality jobs, schools that teach reading and thinking, neighbors who know each other’s names and a planet where our grandchildren can breathe. Our first priority is choice. Every dollar spent, every wage earned, every child raised, every tax dollar paid, every act of kindness is a step toward a perfect Union. The last element is behavior. In a democracy, it’s all of us. There are no spectators.
The late businessman Charlie Munger he was once told a group of Stanford Law School students who will not blame or embarrass people for doing the right thing. He said: “Encourage their sense of greatness. He might have been talking about the people of the nation. Patriotism is the daily work of renewing, perfecting that greatness. It is the belief that America’s highest ideals are still worth pursuing. We can all be patriots.”
I wanted to be a doctor so I could get paid to help others. God of Nature took me to law school instead, and I eventually went to the Ford Foundation. On the way, I saw that money, directed by Adam Smith impartial observermedicine, too. Patriotic capitalism is the discipline of investing in ways that strengthen the masses of people who make capitalism possible.
I refuse to accept the proposition that America cannot renew the oaths of its founders. The God of Nature keeps writing the same future. Pain precedes prosperity. Captivity precedes freedom. The crucifixion preceded the resurrection.
Two hundred and fifty years later, the product still works. The promise still holds, too Neuroscience now proves it what the Founding Fathers knew: our brains evolve more cooperatively than competitively. Lifting each other uplifts all.
Desires combined create a product. A collective ambition will revive us. Our departure.
