The study of the American Revolution probably loses something because we know how it came out, which may lead to creating interpretations unknown to the revolutionaries. Nevertheless, if we keep in mind the danger of finding omens to fit our prejudices, we may profit from a reappraisal aimed at better understanding.

Every age seems to have some dominating central idea, and every particular political system surely has some dominating central idea from which radiate all the institutions, processes, and the texture of life in that country. As Tocqueville long ago said, the dominating idea of our age, and of our political order in particular, is the idea of equality. Equality is therefore at once for us the source of our political benefits and also the source of our defects and dangers. That is to say, every dominating idea is the one that determines for the society its likeliest and greatest benefits and dangers, because the central idea is the one that can do the greatest and most pervasive good and by the same token also the greatest harm. Equality is for us that central principle, the one we have to grapple with and wrest good from, and likewise the principle from which come our greatest dangers. Equality is the political problem for mankind in the present age.

A topic like moral aspiration raises questions that no historian can long neglect if he deals with sovereign national entities such as the United States. One of the most challenging questions to be faced has to do with those mysterious bonds of affection and loyalty that provide whatever degree of psychic unity and collective aspirations a country may possess. In responding to a question about the religious dimension of national aspirations, however, I am tempted by the promise of a shortcut modeled on an argument that gained prominence among nineteenth-century Baptists belonging to the Landmark movement who, despite the absence of clear historical evidence, wished to establish the unbroken continuity of the Baptist succession from apostolic times to the present day.

God created Americans much like other people. But in the beginning all was good. America, being entirely new (at least to the white race), was especially good. Somehow Americans, simply because they were here and no longer there, considered themselves good people. They regarded themselves as being virtuous in the group because it, if not everyone in it, represented a new start for the weary sin-laden human race. The first moral aspiration of the Puritans was to be Israel reconstituted, a kingdom that rested on a covenant with God, its capital the holy city on the hill.

Just a few years ago, it was estimated that 90 percent of all the scientists and engineers who had ever lived were still alive; and that more than half of them were resident in the United States. These numbers show the status of America as a major scientific nation, and the reason why this is a fact of critical importance for the historical analyst in 1976 is that only 40 years ago America could probably still be classed as an “undeveloped” (or “developing”) country on the highest scale of the international scientific community. Before addressing myself to the causes of this change and its consequences for American political and social thought and action, for the American conscience and for America's public image and self-image, let me indicate the kind of evidence that supports my assertion that America might be considered “underdeveloped” with respect to the sciences, prior to 1935. First of all, there was an almost wholly one-way direction of movement of graduate and postdoctoral students: eastward over the Atlantic to the great European centers of scientific teaching and research. Although there were some fields in which Americans had been making outstanding contributions, such as experimental and theoretical genetics, by and large the great overarching theories that either introduced order into one of the sciences, or brought diverse branches of science into an unexpected relationship, or revolutionized much of science, were produced by Europeans: Rutherford, the Curies, Einstein, Bohr, Pauli, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Dirac. In 1963, in an address on the occasion of the centenary celebrations of our National Academy of Sciences, John F. Kennedy observed that of the 670 members of the Academy, 163 (or one out of every four) had been born in foreign lands—a figure that differed in order of magnitude from the condition in any other country, and that showed the degree to which the high estate that American science had gained was owing to the infusion of scientists from abroad.

From the beginning the American republic conceived of itself as a great experiment in the realization of liberty. This experiment has come to be conjoined, serendipitously, with another fact about America—its peculiar relationship to the process of modernization. Talcott Parsons has called America“the lead society.” This is not an expression of nationalist megalomania, but rather a descriptive (if you will, a “value-free”) statement to the effect that a number of modernizing forces have gone further in this country than anywhere else. It is in this double sense that I am prepared to use the term chosen for America. For better or for worse, we are the most modernized society in the contemporary world. And, audaciously, we continue to carry on the experiment of free institutions in this not necessarily enviable condition. Liberty is on the retreat today all over the world. I cannot pursue here the far-reaching, and sinister, implications of this for America's role on the international scene. But the institutions that embody liberty are also under great pressure domestically. My observations in what follows pertain to this domestic crisis. They are animated by the hope that, if we can resolve this crisis without abandoning the experiment, we may still serve as a lesson for the human race. Perhaps we are “chosen”to do this.

Let me begin with a statement of my own ambivalence in this setting—and of my struggle to overcome it. As many of you must surely know, there are large numbers of blacks and other nonwhites who continue to have profound misgivings about any level of participation in the current American parade of bicentennial events. And I share many of the feelings of that group. We do not celebrate, cannot celebrate, what most of white America celebrates.

American aspiration, like love, is a many-splendored thing. Its roots are deep in the history of this country. In great part, it is the sum of the aspirations of every single American who came to these shores, if they came freely as most did, seeking something splendid, something impossible for them in the land they left. In great part also, the aspirations of Americans are what can be derived from the thoughts, often conflicting, of our Founding Fathers and how these thoughts found expression in our basic documents, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. To these two considerations one mustadd immediately the fact that aspirations, like everything human, tend to evolve, develop and even change over time. History is a safe departure point, but the farther we progress from that primordial starting point, the greater the danger of history being rewritten to fit some modern persuasion or concern or even hope. Revisionism is a favorite indoor sport in these bicentennial days.