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This is a very different place than it was in the time of our founders. The first federal census, in 1790, showed an average household size of 5.79 persons, the highest ever recorded in America. But early Americans needed a lot of household members because many of them were going to die young: life expectancy for a white male was about 38 years. All other demographics likely enjoyed even lower average lifespans than that, although it’s impossible to know for sure because no one thought it was all that important to measure life expectancy for anyone else. The biggest city in the country, Philadelphia, had a population of about 50,000. Of the 700,000 or so black people in America at the time, around 90 percent were slaves.
The America of the late 1700s would have been unrecognizable to modern Americans. A lot of people died turning that tiny, rural backwater into the occasionally forward-thinking world power we know and love today.
Some of the people who died in the construction of this nation were those aforementioned slaves. Others were the native peoples of America, first ravaged by European diseases, then swept away by the sword. There were, of course, many who died over the centuries fighting off would-be invaders, Confederate traitors, and looming foreign threats.
The sacrifices of these countless individuals are meaningful. No one should discount them. But what sets America apart from other nations was never that its spirit of wartime conquest was somehow bigger or better than that of dozens of previous societies. There are plenty of countries throughout history that were more warlike than the United States ever was, and almost all displayed the easy, shallow patriotism of cheering on their own viciousness. From the ancient Spartans to the Mongol invasions all the way up to the sun never setting on the British Empire, warrior societies have repeatedly conquered other peoples, only to eventually crumble into the dustbin of history. Even in more modern wars, it’s hard to say that the United States made greater sacrifices than others when considering that we lost about 418,500 of our citizens beating back the Axis powers in World War II compared to the 24 million deaths suffered by our then-ally the Soviet Union.
What makes America unique is its ideals. The concept that a person like Andrew Carnegie — an immigrant, an economic refugee — can come here with nothing, and through hard work and keen shrewdness build an industrial empire that made him the richest man in the work at the time (and eventually the world’s greatest philanthropist): that is what sets America apart. Carnegie’s success would not have been possible anywhere else in the world. That spirit of allowing anyone, from anywhere, to thrive based on talent and drive rather than status or social class is what actually makes America great, then and now.
It says in the first sentence of the Constitution that what we’re trying to do here is “to form a more perfect union,” not that we’re already there. But despite all the setbacks and the obvious unfairness still imposed on vast segments of our population because of race, national origin, and other meaningless distinctions the bigoted draw between their fellow citizens, there’s still a reason why America is where SpaceX, Amazon, Apple, and a thousand other innovative companies of the 21st century have arisen. That reason is not that we’re the best at killing people. It’s because we’re the best at giving talented, ambitious people room to explore their ideas.
As we’re seeing old monuments topple while citizens reconsider our tastes in statuary, it’s important to recognize the racist past being depicted as the reason for this aesthetic reckoning. But if you’re among those upset as some of these statues fall, take a moment to consider whether many of them should ever have been erected in the first place. The United States has had many great military victories that allowed its core ideals to survive and flourish. But it was never the great killers of our history at the center of our uniqueness as a nation. What really makes us great has always been more Richard P. Feynman than Robert E. Lee.
Jonathan Wolf is a litigation associate at a midsize, full-service Minnesota firm. He also teaches as an adjunct writing professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, has written for a wide variety of publications, and makes it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.