Welcome to FP Free Week. To celebrate America’s 250th birthday, our entire site is completely unlocked this week only. Enjoy the article.
“Shine, Perishing Republic,” wrote the poet Robinson Jeffers in 1925 about a corrupt Roaring Twenties America that he feared was “heavily thickening to empire.” We survived that degradation, just as we will the present. But Jeffers’s twin sentiments should guide us as we celebrate our 250th birthday: We glow as a nation. But we decay.
If we’re honest on this July Fourth, we must admit that the sturdy American men and women who made the revolution are a distant historical memory. Today, we resemble the imperial Britain of 1776 more than the scruffy patriots who rebelled against it. We’re a nation with an appalling gap between rich and poor, rather than the republic of farmers and merchants that our Founders envisioned.
“Shine, Perishing Republic,” wrote the poet Robinson Jeffers in 1925 about a corrupt Roaring Twenties America that he feared was “heavily thickening to empire.” We survived that degradation, just as we will the present. But Jeffers’s twin sentiments should guide us as we celebrate our 250th birthday: We glow as a nation. But we decay.
If we’re honest on this July Fourth, we must admit that the sturdy American men and women who made the revolution are a distant historical memory. Today, we resemble the imperial Britain of 1776 more than the scruffy patriots who rebelled against it. We’re a nation with an appalling gap between rich and poor, rather than the republic of farmers and merchants that our Founders envisioned.
