When the fireworks go up over Fishers this Fourth of July, they’ll mark something bigger than a long weekend. Saturday is the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence — the semiquincentennial, if you want to impress somebody at the cookout. It’s worth pausing on what those 56 men actually did when they put their names on that parchment, because it was a good deal braver than the picnic version we usually tell.
Signing was treason. Not treason as a figure of speech — treason as a capital crime under British law. The Treason Act of 1351, still on the books in 1776, defined “levying war” against the king as high treason, and the punishment was as gruesome as English law got: a traitor could be hanged, drawn, and quartered, his property seized by the Crown, his family left with nothing. These weren’t anonymous pamphleteers. They signed their real names, in a document they knew would cross the Atlantic and land on the king’s desk.
They understood the stakes. That famous closing line — “we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor” — wasn’t flourish. It was a list of exactly what they stood to lose. Benjamin Franklin is supposed to have put it more bluntly at the signing: “We must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.” Historians can’t confirm he said it, but the sentiment was accurate enough.
And some of them did pay. Richard Stockton of New Jersey was captured by British forces, imprisoned and reportedly mistreated, his estate looted; his health broke and he died in 1781. Others saw homes burned and fortunes ruined in the fighting. It’s fair to note, as historians do, that no signer was executed for signing — the Revolution succeeded, and Britain never got to hold its trials. But that outcome was far from certain in the summer of 1776. When those men dipped their pens, they were betting their necks on a war they had not yet won.
Two and a half centuries on, the country they gambled on is still here — and still arguing with itself about what it has become. A new Associated Press-NORC poll, part of a series marking the anniversary, offers a candid snapshot of how Americans feel at 250. The picture is more conflicted than celebratory.
Start with the American Dream — the idea that hard work gets you ahead. Only about a third of Americans say it still holds true today. Half say it once held true but no longer does, and 15% say it was never true to begin with. That tracks with recent Wall Street Journal/NORC surveys, so it isn’t a blip. Belief in the Dream is far from evenly held: 57% of Republicans say it still holds, versus 24% of independents and 17% of Democrats. Older adults keep more faith than younger ones — 46% of those 60 and up still believe, compared with just 22% of adults under 30.
Pride in the country’s institutions has also cooled over the past decade. Just 28% of Americans say they have a lot of pride in how U.S. democracy works, down from 42% back in 2017. Pride in the nation’s history slipped from 58% to 44%, and pride in the armed forces fell from 78% to 59%. Americans still take the most pride in the military and in the country’s scientific and technological achievements — but the trend line, across the board, points down.
Ask what holds us together and what pulls us apart, and the answers are almost mirror images. The most common thing people name as uniting Americans is freedom or liberty. The most common thing they name as dividing us is politics — “political interests or values.” In other words, the thing the signers risked everything for is still the thing we most agree on, even as the political arguments around it grow louder.
There are gentler notes, too. Nearly half of Americans, 47%, still see the American flag as more of a unifying symbol than a divisive one, though only about one in five fly it at home regularly. And roughly four in ten say the 250th anniversary makes them feel “proud,” with about a third “excited” — even as a quarter say they feel “conflicted” and another quarter “indifferent.”
Put those two portraits side by side — the men who signed under threat of the gallows, and a country now split on whether the promise held — and you get something more useful than a greeting card. The founders didn’t hand us a finished nation. They handed us a bet, and 250 years later the wager is still open. However you’re marking the Fourth here in Fishers, that seems worth a moment’s thought.
