Happy Birthday, America: The Distance Between the Promise and the Practice

It's Friday, July fourth. Happy birthday, America. Two hundred and fifty years old today. And I wanted to do something a little different for today's episode instead of covering a news story or a system or a concept. I wanted to just look at what this country actually was on the day it declared independence, because the distance between July 4, 1776 and July 4, 2026 is so vast that the two versions of America barely feel like the same place. The country that signed the Declaration of Independence had 2.5 million people, no indoor plumbing, and a president who had one tooth. The country celebrating today has 340 million people, a rover on Mars, and a time capsule buried in Philadelphia yesterday that's supposed to stay sealed until the 500th anniversary in 2276. If the people who signed that document could see what their experiment became, they wouldn't recognize any of it. The entire population of the thirteen colonies was about 2.5 million people, which is roughly the size of the San Antonio metro area today. More than 96 percent of those people lived on farms, plantations, or small rural settlements. The largest city in the country was Philadelphia, with a population of about 30,000. New York had around 25,000. For comparison, London had 740,000 at the time. There was nothing in the colonies that would qualify as a city by any modern standard.

Life expectancy was around 38 years, which sounds terrifying until you understand the context. About 43 percent of children died before the age of five, and that infant mortality dragged the average way down. If you made it to adulthood, you could reasonably expect to live into your sixties or seventies, which is actually not that far from where we are now. The founders themselves mostly lived long lives: Benjamin Franklin died at 84, John Adams at 90, Thomas Jefferson at 83. The problem wasn't that adults died young. The problem was that an enormous number of children didn't make it at all, which connects back to our birthdays episode and why the extra candle on a birthday cake in eighteenth-century Germany represented the hope that your child would survive another year.

There were only nine colleges in the entire country, and less than one percent of the population had any form of higher education. Literacy was relatively high among white men in New England, somewhere around 85 to 90 percent, but significantly lower for women and almost nonexistent for enslaved people, who were in many colonies legally prohibited from learning to read. The average home was about 360 square feet with no indoor plumbing, no running water, and a fireplace as the only source of heat. Families bathed in the same water, starting with the parents and ending with the youngest child. George Washington had one tooth left by the time he was inaugurated as president in 1789, partly because dental care consisted of having a barber pull your teeth with no pain relief.

And here's a detail that surprised me: American colonists were the tallest people in the world in 1776. The average man stood about five feet eight inches, which is only one inch shorter than the average American man today and three inches taller than the average Englishman at the time. The reason was nutrition: colonists had access to more and better food than most Europeans, because the land was abundant and the economy was strong. The country was poor by modern standards but well-fed by the standards of its era. Fifty six men signed the Declaration of Independence. The most famous sentence in the document reads: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness."

Thomas Jefferson wrote those words. He owned over 600 enslaved people over the course of his lifetime. The contradiction between the principle and the practice was obvious even at the time, and it has defined the country's relationship with its own founding document for 250 years.

Of the 2.5 million people living in the colonies on the day the Declaration was signed, roughly 450,000 to 700,000 were enslaved. About 20 percent of the population. They were not included in the promise of equality. Women, who made up half the population, could not vote and had severely limited legal rights in most colonies. Native Americans, who had lived on the continent for thousands of years before any colonist arrived, were not citizens and would not be granted citizenship for another 148 years, as we covered in our Indian Citizenship Act episode. The "all men" in "all men are created equal" meant, in practice, white men who owned property. That was the electorate. That was who the Declaration was written by and for.

A Harvard professor named Danielle Allen, one of the world's leading scholars on the Declaration, put it in terms that I think are exactly right: "We can't write it off. We shouldn't write it off. It is our inheritance." The document was aspirational, not descriptive. It described a country that didn't exist yet and, in some ways, still doesn't fully exist 250 years later. But the aspiration created a standard that every subsequent generation has used to push the country closer to the promise. If you've been listening to HigherIQ over the past few months, you've heard the story of how America has spent 250 years trying to close the gap between what the Declaration promised and what the country actually delivered.

The 13th Amendment abolished slavery in 1865, 89 years after the Declaration was signed. The 14th Amendment granted citizenship and equal protection in 1868. The 15th Amendment guaranteed the right to vote regardless of race in 1870, though poll taxes, literacy tests, and violence prevented most Black Americans from exercising that right for another century. Women didn't get the vote until 1920, 144 years after the founding. Native Americans weren't granted citizenship until 1924, 148 years in. The Civil Rights Act wasn't signed until 1964. Loving v. Virginia didn't strike down interracial marriage bans until 1967. And just this week, the Supreme Court upheld birthright citizenship against an executive order that tried to narrow it, 158 years after the 14th Amendment was ratified.

Each of those milestones was a fight. Each one required either a constitutional amendment, a Supreme Court ruling, or landmark legislation because the existing system wasn't going to expand the promise on its own. The Juneteenth episode we did a few weeks ago captured the pattern: freedom was declared in 1863 and wasn't enforced in Texas until 1865, and the enforcement came not as information but as soldiers with bayonets. The distance between a right being written down and a right being real has never been as short as it should be, and the people who needed the right the most were almost never the ones with the power to secure it.

Yesterday in Philadelphia, they buried a time capsule on Independence Mall with items from all 50 states and territories. It's supposed to stay sealed until July 4, 2276, America's 500th birthday. I keep thinking about what the people who open that capsule will think about us the way we think about the founders: flawed, contradictory, capable of writing principles they couldn't live up to, but building something that outlasted them. The 250 years between 1776 and today have been the slow, uneven, still-incomplete project of making the Declaration's promise real for everyone it originally excluded. The next 250 might finish the job, or they might add their own contradictions to the list. Either way, the document that started it all is still the standard we measure ourselves against. And the fact that we keep falling short of it and keep trying anyway might be the most American thing about us.

Happy Fourth. So if this comes up in conversation, here's how to think about it. America turned 250 today. On July 4, 1776, the country had 2.5 million people, no cities larger than 30,000, a life expectancy of 38 dragged down by 43 percent child mortality, nine colleges, and a population that was roughly 20 percent enslaved. The Declaration of Independence declared that all men are created equal and was signed by slaveholders. The 250 years since have been the project of extending that promise to everyone it originally excluded: enslaved people, women, Native Americans, immigrants, interracial couples. Each expansion required a fight, and none of them happened because the system volunteered. A time capsule was buried in Philadelphia yesterday for America's 500th birthday. The people who open it in 2276 will judge us the way we judge the founders: by the distance between what we said and what we did.

Stay informed, stay curious, and we'll see you tomorrow.