I asked Rios whether there were certain things the commission couldn’t talk about, given the nature of its mandate. “I’m not a historian,” she said. “I love history, but for me to dictate what should or shouldn’t be part of our history was never in our purview, nor should it be, in my opinion.” It was the job of each American to make meaning about their country. “But there’s no doubt in my mind that absolutely, we are the greatest country on earth, absolutely, and I feel that every day.”
This inability to weigh in on core questions about what it means to be an American helped lead to the other notable structural decision regarding America250: responsibility for making meaning has been effectively block-granted to the states. “We made the decision to empower the states to make sure that their stories were told,” Rios explained. The commission takes credit for the organization of fifty-six state and territorial commissions, and deserves some, although states with long histories were probably going to create them anyway. The overwhelming majority of events that maintain some connection to America250 are organized by state-level or local commissions and listed on the national commission’s website in a clunky database. These include high-profile events, like the anniversary of Boston’s Evacuation Day, and trivial ones, like a regularly scheduled cooking class in El Paso celebrating Irish potato soup, Chinese dumplings, and kugel.
Leaving the thorny questions to the locals is, in one sense, a no-brainer acknowledgment that Alabama and Massachusetts have different relationships to federal authority. But it’s a little strange if you think about it. Not a single state was born on July 4, 1776. What happened that day was the creation of a federal compact. That compact maintained a patent office and sent us to the moon and did other notable things, but its real value throughout the two hundred and fifty years in which it had to be defended, reformed, and expanded—sometimes at the expense of blood and suffering—is that it could, at its best, liberate Americans from tyrannical conditions created by state governments.
To put it in a less eggheaded way: one of the Obama-era rhetorical kernels that has outlived the revelation that the arc of history is more of a squiggle was his proclamation that “we have never been a collection of red states and blue states; we are, and always will be, the United States of America.” This was a piece of puffery that happened to accord with a long-standing and actually pretty important argument about the nature of the country. On the occasion of that country’s birthday, America250’s position is that there are states, and then there is Kool & the Gang.