An inheritance needs heirs

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NICK EICHER, HOST: Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard.

The fireworks are over, but the birthday celebration is just beginning. We’ll continue to celebrate the nation’s 250th anniversary. WORLD commentator Joe Rigney looks back a century, to the 150th, and a remarkable speech by President Calvin Coolidge that still speaks to America today.

EICHER: President Coolidge spoke on July 5th, 1926, in Philadelphia. Here’s how the Bill of Rights Institute summarizes the heart of that address.

AUDIO: If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions.

JOE RIGNEY: Those words are familiar. That all men are created equal. That our rights come from God, not government. That government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed.

We tend to think those truths are what made America exceptional.

President Coolidge believed they were only half the story.

Speaking in Philadelphia 100 years ago on July 5, 1926, Coolidge reminded Americans that these principles were not unique to the United States. Europeans had long pondered them. Colonial ministers had preached them before the Revolution.

America’s uniqueness, he said, lay elsewhere. “A people had arisen determined to make every necessary sacrifice for the support of these truths.”

Everything else in Coolidge’s address turns on that sentence.

As America lives through its 250th year, we’re asking fundamental questions about our national identity. What exactly is America?

Coolidge’s answer began not with institutions, but with the character of the people who built them. They were, he said, independent, liberty-loving, God-fearing people who knew their rights and possessed the courage to defend them.

They were accustomed to hardship, but free from depravity.

They embraced a system of checks and balances because they understood that free government must never become the unchecked rule of either a bare majority or an influential few.

They were deeply Christian people. Their intellectual life centered on the meetinghouse. They knew the Scriptures. They cared less about how much they knew or possessed than about how they ought to live.

In short, they had acquired what Coolidge called “a great moral power.”

That, he believed, was America’s true inheritance. But such an inheritance could never be taken for granted. “The real heart of the American Government,” Coolidge said, “depends upon the heart of the people.”

That conviction shaped more than his anniversary address.

Three years earlier, in his first message to Congress, Coolidge turned to immigration. His concern wasn’t chiefly economic. It wasn’t primarily about the labor force or prosperity. It was about assimilation.

American institutions, he argued, rested on citizens who had learned the habits of self-government. New arrivals should therefore be limited to America’s capacity, as he put it, “to absorb them into the ranks of good citizenship.”

“American institutions rest solely on good citizenship,” he said. “They were created by people who had a background of self-government.”

His conclusion was as concise as it was controversial:

“America must be kept American.”

Whether discussing citizenship, immigration, or national identity, Coolidge kept returning to the same conviction. That ideas matter. Constitutions matter. Free institutions ultimately depend upon the kind of people who inhabit them.

Assimilation is how a nation passes that civic inheritance from one generation—and from one newcomer to the next.

Coolidge closed his anniversary address with a warning that sounds strikingly contemporary: “We must not sink into a pagan materialism.”

Instead, he urged Americans to cultivate the same reverence for holy things, the same spiritual and moral leadership, that had animated the founding generation.

At 250, we’ve inherited an extraordinary constitutional order. The question before us is not simply whether we still affirm America’s founding principles. It is whether, in our own generation, such a people will arise again.

For WORLD, I’m Joe Rigney.

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