America at 250: The Unfinished Republic
“But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, windswept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity.” Ronald Reagan
My first visit to the United States was an escape from the unceasing calls of a tenderpreneur who wanted to compromise me early, a temptation that would have wrecked BudgIT in its fragile first days. I missed my first flight, routed through Doha, and with it the World Bank event that had brought me. Yet I found warmth in a Days Inn a few steps from the Van Ness station, and something in me settled. When friends prodded me in 2017 to consider moving to America, I refused. It would take my wife and a series of life’s quiet insistences before I accepted in 2018 that migration was my road too. Even today, I continue to oscillate between the United States and Nigeria, belonging fully to neither place and, perhaps, to both.
Empires have come and gone, but has any “empire” carried prosperity the way the United States has? Consider its founding: a generation of men whose average age hovered around forty-four declared independence in soaring language about liberty, fought hard to earn it, then wrote a Constitution quietly watered down with provisions protecting slavery — the very contradiction that would one day drag the nation to war. Through alliances, purchases, and conquests, America grew far beyond its original thirteen colonies. It would fight Britain once more in the War of 1812, but its gravest reckoning waited within: the war over slavery. America was imagined as a utopia of freedom yet carved out in bondage, and it kept edging around that wound until the wound demanded blood. Having received the honor of permanent residence in this country some four years ago, and having studied its history all my life, I have chronicled six things that lifted it up.
The Luck of Leadership
Think of it: early America had men in their forties writing its destiny. George Washington was leading Virginia’s colonial forces at twenty-two, and at forty-three, he took command of the Continental Army. James Madison, co-author of the Federalist Papers and the guiding hand behind the Constitution, was only twenty-five when independence was declared. These men degenerated into bitter rivalries — Adams against Jefferson, and Burr against Hamilton, which ended in a fatal duel — yet their initial clarity of purpose set the nation’s compass.
Still, one cannot help but notice that of the forty-five men who have held the presidency (Cleveland and Trump each serving twice, non-consecutively), scarcely twenty could be called truly distinguished. Look at the drift toward Lincoln — Fillmore, Pierce, Buchanan — a procession of middling presidents with hardly a legacy toward the ideals of the Union. From the assassinated to the sick, America’s Presidential history carries a list of unremarkable people.
But here is what one must credit America for: its uncanny ability to summon leadership at its most critical hours. What would America be without a Washington, a Lincoln, a Grant, a Theodore Roosevelt, an FDR, a JFK, a Lyndon Johnson, a Reagan, or even a Barack Obama — figures who defined the great cycles since its founding? Icons rose in the important moments, reminding us that a nation’s greatness is not tied to an unbroken streak of high performers, but to iconic personalities arriving precisely when history demands them.
A Federation of united States
To claim a simple account of how America resolved its federal problems would be academic dishonesty. First, there was the impossible task of holding together a house divided over slavery, with the Mason-Dixon line as its seam. I remember a recent family trip to Hershey, and on our return, the iconic signs announcing the Mason-Dixon line — that surveyors’ boundary which became the symbolic divide between North and South. Maryland has always enjoyed great PR, but it was as Southern as they come: no Boston, no New York. Where we once lived in Upper Marlboro sat land that had been a tobacco slave plantation.
America continues to dodge around these questions, mischievously wrapped in the language of “states’ rights,” when it is convenient. To this day, gun laws differ state by state, and views on abortion or gay rights map onto red states and blue. And yet — as a Nigerian who has wrestled with a warped federal structure at home — it remains a marvel to me that America arrived at a working fiscal federalism: the federal government holding most of the income taxes, the states leaning on consumption taxes, the counties on property taxes. It keeps state forces in the National Guard and permits private ownership of arms, all bound — however imperfectly — by the rule of law. However fierce its battles among its complicated, contentious states after its brutal civil war, it has largely kept the fight inside the law rather than outside it.
Ideas for Progress
America was first meant to be isolationist; then came the Monroe Doctrine, confining its ambitions to the Americas. But across its history — and especially since Vannevar Bush’s postwar blueprint and the founding of the National Academy of Sciences in 1863 — it has pulled ahead of other nations by the same lever: the elevation of intellectual capital. Think of the Second World War, when Britain, in its last imperial days, entered the Lend-Lease program with the United States, and the American war machine roared into production at stratospheric levels.
The Industrial Revolution, wartime manufacturing during the Second World War, the Manhattan Project, the space race, Silicon Valley, biotechnology, artificial intelligence — the pattern is unmistakable. Institutions such as the National Science Foundation, together with world-class universities and private industry, embedded scientific advancement into the national project. American capitalism also produced extraordinary entrepreneurs — Carnegie, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Morgan, Gates, Buffett, Jobs, Bezos, Musk — whose influence extended beyond commerce. Think, too, of how American entrepreneurs carried a civic backbone, holding wealth not for nothing but mostly for a purpose. Is it not a wonder that American private philanthropy, quite apart from its aid agencies, has powered ideas across the world, sown freedoms, and backed the most embattled leaders on the globe? I mean, Ford Foundation has been in Nigeria since 1958!
This is a nation forever wrestling with the audacity of the entrepreneur — from the railroads to the conquest of polio, from nuclear physics to artificial intelligence. It recognized that its edge lay in advancing ideas, and it protected that edge fiercely. As a Nigerian, I shuddered at how Elon Musk had his public crash-out with President Trump and could still, presumably, sleep with both eyes closed. Who would have thought that the protection of private property and the rule of law is what keeps this country going? Yes, its expansionism brought tears — Panama, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Iraq, Afghanistan — all occasioned by the exuberance of its assumed role as leader of the free world. Its global posture remains in flux, but at home it has stuck stubbornly to free enterprise. Its flexibility — from having no central bank to building one, from embracing Keynes in its lowest moments to accepting Friedman when it entered stagnation — is a testament to its star power.
Words and Stories
I am marveled by words, well-written and graciously delivered. I remembered watching James Garfield's speech on Netflix; it sent shivers. From Lincoln at Gettysburg to Obama at the 2004 Democratic National Convention; from James Garfield electrifying the 1880 Republican convention to Friedrick Douglas’ What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July? to Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream”; from Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” to Mario Cuomo’s “Tale of Two Cities” answering Reagan’s “shining city on a hill”; from FDR’s fireside chats to his Four Freedoms, I am forever marveled that this is a country of great memory, one that strove to press its words into meaning.
Such stories tell of its founding, its brutal wars, its near losses, and its exceptionalism, carried outward through Hollywood — partly true, partly fictional, wholly persuasive. America has landmarks in abundance and has done greatly to preserve them. So it was no wonder that, on a recently planned trip to Lagos, my daughter announced, “I want to see landmarks.” And there I stood, scratching my head. I am sure she’s bored with the Nike Art Gallery.
Faith in Institutions
America has endured enormous contestation — Brown v. Board of Education, Plessy v. Ferguson — and the Fourteenth Amendment’s promise that children born on American soil are citizens remains an unspoken symbol of its constitutional power, even as it faces fresh challenge. While executive power has grown largely unrestrained globally, domestic disputes are still settled through judicial means. Think of how the dollar has remained the world’s reserve currency even after Nixon severed it from gold in 1971 — how every attempt to diversify away from it has faltered on the world’s stubborn faith in American institutions, a faith tested recently by the open hassles with the Fed Chair.
America is seen not just as the champion of innovation but as the builder of grounded institutions that came to be respected. It does not immediately resolve its moral complexities. The Emancipation Proclamation did not end racism. The Civil War did not produce equality. The Civil Rights Movement did not eliminate discrimination. Yet each generation has pushed the constitutional promise closer to its intended meaning. For now, the world might still sneer at how it throws itself around as every hegemony does from Napoleon to Britain, but in its values, we have found more safety, values grounded in institutions.
A co-habitation of best minds
In the end, with war in Europe and the flight of the continent’s intellectual capital, America became the haven of the smartest — the best minds cohabiting — and such has been its story ever since. The story of America is a story of migration: lost souls seeking a place that would accept their idiosyncrasies. One must also think of the Trail of Tears, the vast displacement of Native peoples, and the generations for whom this land was an encampment of slavery. But think, too, of the reinvention that came with amassing the best minds — through its diversity visa lottery, through its high-skilled visas. America has hacked a pattern: proffer fortune to the brave, and let them find their space in its very last frontier, from the days of the California Gold Rush to now.
In its 250 years, no one can deny America its moral complexities — how it has failed, time and time again, and risen again. It is accepted that it has done greatly and largely been a force for good, so it should take pride. This is not without its failure despite its endearing promise that "all men are created equal", a promise it reaches to keep.
Its founding fathers would be proud of what they created, and of how it continues to serve. But America must also recognize that its work remains unfinished. It will require leadership that looks beyond the next election and towards the next generation; leadership that embraces a globalized world while resisting the temptations of hyper-presidentialism that weakens the very institutions on which the republic depends. It must continue to attract the world’s brightest minds to power its next era of growth — even as competitors such as China increasingly vie for that same talent. It must summon the courage to embrace common-sense reforms, including on issues such as gun violence, despite the inertia of its political system. Above all, it must remain steadfast in the ideals that have defined its highest aspirations — life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — and continue to wield the power of words and stories to inspire not only its own people but the wider world.
God bless America.
