OPINION:
On the Fourth of July, the country will mark 250 years since 56 men signed their names to a single sheet of parchment and pledged their lives to an idea.
There will be fireworks over the National Mall, parades down Main Streets and speeches that reach for the language of Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. Then, on July 5, the bunting will come down.
The question worth asking now is not how loudly we will celebrate but how long we will remember.
I have spent years making the case that the Founders still matter. Lately, the argument has been answered in an unwelcome way.
The official commemorations meant to unite us are already being pulled apart. When the organizers of the anniversary concert series in Washington announced their first slate of performers, more than half of those performers withdrew within days, objecting that the celebration had become too political.
The lesson is not about any one artist or administration. It is that a 250th birthday staged as a contest over who owns patriotism will divide the very people it was meant to bring together.
There is a better way to honor the moment, and it does not depend on who occupies the White House or which party runs Congress. It begins with a fact that ought to alarm Americans of every persuasion: We are losing our common inheritance not to disagreement but to forgetting.
The numbers are stark and not partisan. In a recent survey by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation, more than 70% of Americans failed a basic quiz on civic fundamentals such as the three branches of government, the number of Supreme Court justices and the rights guaranteed by the First Amendment.
The most recent national assessment found eighth-grade civics scores slipping rather than rising. A people cannot defend — or even argue honestly about — a heritage it no longer knows.
This is where the Founders become more than statues to support or topple. They were not demigods, and they did not agree with one another. Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson could barely share a Cabinet. John Adams and Benjamin Franklin grated on each other’s nerves across an ocean.
What they built was not a finished monument but an argument, a structure designed to let free people disagree without destroying one another. To know that history is to understand that fierce political division is not a sign that the republic is failing. It is the very thing the Founders expected and engineered the Constitution to survive.
That is why permanently designating November as National American History and Founders Month is not a partisan project and should not be perceived as one. The idea has already reached across party lines.
It was first proclaimed in 2019 and embraced by Democratic and Republican governors in 22 states. November is the natural home for it. It is the month of Thanksgiving and Veterans Day, when Americans of every background already pause to give thanks and to honor sacrifice.
Skeptics on the political left sometimes worry that “Founders” means a sanitized, triumphalist story that papers over slavery and exclusion. Skeptics on the right sometimes worry that civic education has become an exercise in apology.
A national month of American history answers both, because honest history requires the full record. You cannot understand Frederick Douglass without the Declaration to which he held the country. You cannot understand Seneca Falls without the founding promise its organizers demanded be kept.
The founding is not a wall against America’s later reckonings; it is the ground those reckonings stand on.
A single anniversary, however grand, cannot carry that weight. July 4, 2026, will come and go in a day, but civic memory is not built in a day. It is built by habit, by returning to the story every year until it belongs to the next generation as surely as it belonged to the last.
The semiquincentennial gives us the occasion. A permanent month of remembrance would give us the opportunity.
Congress has the power to leave a legacy from this anniversary that outlasts the fireworks. Members of both parties have spent the past year competing to claim the mantle of America’s 250th. Here is a way to share it. Designating November as National American History and Founders Month costs nothing, excludes no one and asks only that we agree on the thing we have always had in common.
We are heirs to the same astonishing experiment, and that experiment is worth knowing well enough to remember and keep.
The Founders gave us an unfinished sentence and trusted us to keep writing it. The least we owe them, in their 250th year, is to remember how it began.
• Jennifer London is the founder and president of the National American History and Founders Month Organization and author of the forthcoming “The Movers & Shapers: Seven Founding Fathers of the United States of America.”
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