America at 250

Having won their little war, the founders convened a constitutional convention in Philadelphia to take on a new challenge: turning Enlightenment principles into an enduring political structure. Using a blueprint from James Madison (pictured), they eventually settled on a republican system with three branches of government each checking and balancing the power of the others. The constitution’s framers also wrote in protections for slavery. Some northern delegates who opposed the institution on principle nonetheless yielded to their southern, slaveholding colleagues for the sake of unity. In doing so they ensured that slavery would endure for generations. An ideal that the constitution’s northern and southern framers could agree on was a national executive strong enough to be effective but not so strong that it would descend into tyranny. This was the original No Kings movement (though the French Revolution would soon go a little harder on that point).

The first ballot for president was, like modern elections, conducted via the odd institution of the electoral college, rather than by a direct popular vote. In virtually all other ways it was unrecognisable to anyone following American politics today: there was no public campaign, not even a Swift Boat advertisement painting Washington’s crossing of the Delaware in a nefarious light. There was no sweating the count on election night either. Having led the Continental Army to victory, Washington was a shoo-in for the presidency (even as he claimed not to want the job). He was selected on all 69 electoral-college ballots that were cast; John Adams, marked on 34 ballots (each elector could list two names), became vice-president. Only one presidential election has been decided unanimously since: Washington’s own re-election.

The Bill of Rights, ratified in 1791, transformed the constitution from a merely republican charter into a liberal one, enshrining freedoms of speech, religion and due process, to name but a few. The authors’ vague language ensured that Americans, among them Supreme Court justices, would still be arguing about it 250 years later. Even the use of punctuation is the subject of intense legal debate. In the 21st century the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Second Amendment, reached in part on its placement of commas, ensures that individual Americans, and not just militias, have a constitutional right to own guns. The founders could scarcely have imagined AR-15s.

By 1790 the founders were still arguing over how much power the central government should have. The Broadway musical “Hamilton” told the story through epic rap battles between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. (The actual debates were not conducted in verse.) Hamilton was a New Yorker, the first treasury secretary—and our kind of guy. He wanted a strong federal government that paid its debts (that’s also very much our thing). Jefferson was a Virginian farmer, a slaveholder and the first secretary of state. He argued for states’ rights, fearing that centralisation would bring tyranny. Hamilton won, and thankfully that was the last time there was any disagreement about federal power in American history.

An early reactionary moment in America arrived in 1798. Those excitable French were in the midst of revolution. Tensions between France and America were high. President John Adams’s Federalist Party viewed its critics at home—namely pro-French Jeffersonians—as potential traitors. With Adams’s support Congress (pictured in its natural state) passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, four laws giving the president power to deport “dangerous” foreigners and making it a crime to publish “false, scandalous and malicious writing” about the government. They were used to silence opposition journalists and pamphleteers. One tell that they were undemocratic and illiberal was that Congress set two of the laws to expire on Adams’s last day as president in March 1801. The controversy helped Jefferson win the race to succeed Adams as president, and hastened the decline of the Federalist Party.

Donald Trump could learn a thing or two from Jefferson. While today’s president muses about acquiring Greenland, Jefferson doubled the size of America in a single transaction. In 1803, after negotiations with Napoleon Bonaparte, he purchased the vast Louisiana Territory from France for $15m ($314m in today’s dollars). The tract of land stretched from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains and encompassed 828,000 square miles, or more than 20% of modern America.

The Louisiana Purchase secured land for the yeoman farmers whom Jefferson considered the backbone of the country. But he also worried that the deal might be unconstitutional. He himself had long argued that the federal government had no power not explicitly granted by the constitution, and the charter said nothing about buying half a continent. The deal was made using executive power—on Hamiltonian terms.

Talk about Trumpian. Having declared war on Britain in 1812, America invaded Canada, expecting to be greeted as liberators from British oppression. (They were not.) The war itself had been triggered by Britain’s repeated interference in American affairs: on the western front, aiding Native Americans’ resistance to US territorial expansion; on the eastern front, interdicting American ships and pressing sailors into the Royal Navy to fight in the Napoleonic wars.

Britain notoriously set fire to the White House, but America in many respects “won” the War of 1812, as the British thereafter left the North American mainland largely to American ambitions. Native Americans were doomed to military subjugation. The war also made a national hero and future presidential contender of Andrew Jackson, who won the Battle of New Orleans in 1815.

At the time of America’s founding, an estimated 500,000 of the roughly 2.5m people living in the 13 colonies were enslaved—about one in five Americans. By 1800 that number had risen to nearly 900,000. In the South, just before the civil war, enslaved people made up more than one-third of the population. Slavery, as much as freedom, would shape America’s first century.

How did the country’s founders, so enamoured of the idea of “liberty”, justify it? Often, by applying self-serving, twisted logic to liberal principles. Some invoked the idea that property rights were essential to freedom—that is, the freedom of slaveowners to keep slaves as property. Others argued that slavery was a temporary evil worth tolerating for the sake of keeping a young country together. Still others claimed that slavery was an economic engine that the country could not do without. Many simply believed all men were not created equal, despite their soaring revolutionary rhetoric to the contrary.

Jefferson’s record on slavery was particularly troubling. Though he professed opposition in principle, he fathered several children with one of his own slaves, Sally Hemings. He also favoured extending slavery into new western states, arguing—under his peculiar theory of “diffusion”—that dispersing slaves would reduce their concentration and make emancipation less frightening to slaveholders.

Jefferson summed up these anxieties in a letter to his frequent late-in-life pen pal, John Adams, asking rhetorically: “Are our slaves to be presented with freedom and a dagger?” Adams replied that slavery had been a “black cloud” hanging over the country for half a century. In 1820 the Missouri Compromise drew a line across the map, with slavery permitted below and banned above. The compromise postponed the reckoning. Slavery would endure for nearly another half-century.

Think you know your American history? Prove it in our quiz. Each month brings five new questions on the era covered in that chapter.

Native Americans already got a raw deal from the new Americans long before Jackson became president. European settlers brought with them smallpox and measles, then war and displacement. But things got a lot worse in the 1830s. Jackson’s Indian Removal Act, which Congress narrowly passed in 1830, banished 60,000 Native Americans from their ancestral lands east of the Mississippi River. A Supreme Court ruling in 1832 should have protected tribes from being kicked off their land but Jackson ignored it, a defiant precedent that would inspire future presidents. Thousands died on the forced march west, known as the “Trail of Tears”. Native Americans were given territory where they ended up, but that would later be taken from them too, as white Americans kept moving west. The term “manifest destiny”, coined in the 1840s, gave this expansion a sense of evangelical purpose: it was not only inevitable, it was divine providence.

More than 4m people came to the United States in the 1840s and 1850s—equivalent to roughly a quarter of the population in 1840. This wave of immigrants was dominated by Irish and German Catholics, a contrast to the country’s mostly Protestant, English-speaking inhabitants. Americans reacted to the influx with their traditional calm and restraint. Populist rabble-rousers spread rumours and conspiracy theories about the new arrivals. Nativist riots broke out in northern cities. Not for the last time, Americans were forced to consider whether their national identity was civic or ethnic.

In the 1840s American women were denied more than just the right to vote. Once they were married (as was expected of them) women had no rights to money, property or much else. Their personhood simply dissolved into their husband’s, under laws of “coverture”. This began to change with a gathering at Seneca Falls, New York in 1848. Attendees signed Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s “Declaration of Sentiments”, which called for women to be given the right to vote as well as equality in other respects, declaring, “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.” (Emphasis added; we wanted to make sure you noticed.)

“What a slur it is upon this self-styled model republic for its most eminent citizens to be contending as to whether slavery shall be extended or not, when other civilised nations are abolishing it unequivocally and promptly!” We wrote those words in 1849, amid a burst of American territorial expansion. The Mexican-American War (1846–48) ended with Mexico’s defeat and the United States acquiring vast western lands. That raised the question of whether slavery would be allowed in these new territories.

The Compromise of 1850 admitted California as a free state and allowed residents of Utah and New Mexico to decide the slavery question. It also significantly toughened the Fugitive Slave Act, stripping black people of habeas corpus rights and requiring northern authorities—and citizens—to assist in the capture of (allegedly) escaped slaves. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 then allowed the newly created Kansas and Nebraska territories to decide on slavery by popular vote, ending a decades-long ban north of the 36°30′ line. Together these events transformed slavery from a regional dispute into a national crisis.

The Supreme Court may be unpopular these days. But its lowest point as an institution came in 1857 with a decision authored by Roger Taney, the chief justice, in Dred Scott v Sandford. Scott (pictured) had sued to obtain his freedom after the death of his owner. By a 7-2 vote the court ruled that black people—whether free or slave—are not and cannot be American citizens, that in fact they had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect”. That meant, Taney wrote, that Scott lacked even the standing to sue. Not content with stopping there, the court also ruled that Congress had no right to ban slavery in the territories, because slaves were property and the property rights of slaveowners could not be infringed upon.

It was and remains the worst ruling in the history of the court. Northern rage at the decision fuelled the rise of a new political party, the Republicans, and of one of its members in particular, a young Illinois lawyer named Abraham Lincoln. You may have heard of him.

Is liberty universal or conditional? Can a majority vote away a person’s freedom—or are some rights inherent? These were the questions at the heart of the seven public debates held across Illinois between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas in 1858. Lincoln, a Republican, was challenging Douglas, a powerful Democrat, for his Senate seat. The central issue was slavery, and whether it should be allowed to expand into new territories. Douglas argued for letting settlers decide. Lincoln insisted that slavery was morally wrong and incompatible with the Declaration of Independence. In the end, Douglas kept the seat, but Lincoln gained national attention. He emerged as the leading moral and intellectual opponent of slavery’s expansion—and would be elected president two years later.

After the election of Lincoln in November 1860, southern states began to secede from the union, believing that the new president-elect was determined to abolish slavery (though he had promised not to). In April 1861 soldiers of the newly formed Confederate army attacked and seized the federal stronghold of Fort Sumter in South Carolina, starting a four-year civil war.

It remains the bloodiest conflict in American history, killing up to 700,000 people, almost one-and-a-half times as many Americans as would be killed in the second world war. At the Battle of Shiloh, Ulysses Grant, a Union general and future president, remarked that you could walk in any direction to the battlefield’s edge without ever touching grass for all the bodies. The war was particularly devastating for the (white) South, where as many as one in four military-age white men died. The Confederacy lost both the war and the right to own slaves. A new, less imperfect union was born.

Early in the war, Lincoln seized on victory at Antietam to make a risky gamble. He gave the Confederacy an ultimatum: surrender by year’s end or he would abolish slavery. The South continued to fight. So on January 1st Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing all slaves within the Confederacy. Though remembered as a great moment of liberation, the declaration was more pragmatic than is sometimes remembered—slavery remained legal in the four Union states that still practised it so as not to provoke them into joining the rebels.

In November 1863 Lincoln gave what would become known as the Gettysburg address. It erased any question as to whether the war was a moral enterprise or merely an attempt to keep the states together. The 272 words Lincoln spoke that day—proclaiming that “all men are created equal” and that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth”—became enduring touchstones. The war would grind on for two more years. But after that day its purpose, “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom”, was firmly established.

John Wilkes Booth certainly had a knack for drama. A famous actor and Confederate sympathiser, he first devised a harebrained scheme to kidnap Abraham Lincoln and ransom him for Southern prisoners. When that plan collapsed, he simplified the plot: shooting the president in the back of the head during a performance at Ford’s Theatre in Washington. Afterwards Booth leapt from the presidential box onto the stage, apparently broke his leg, and escaped (briefly).

America had lost Lincoln at a crucial moment. The civil war was ending and Reconstruction was beginning. Lincoln, who possessed both moral clarity and an instinct for conciliation, looked an ideal leader for salving America’s wounds after the war. Instead that task fell to the more ornery, less capable Andrew Johnson.

The civil war’s wake was a period of radical change known as Reconstruction. The states ratified three amendments to the constitution. These banned slavery and enshrined citizenship for all persons born in America, putting a torch to the Dred Scott decision. Crucially they also guaranteed equal protection under the law, which would become the foundation for some of the most important Supreme Court rulings of the 20th century. With northerners in Congress and the federal military applying pressure, there was a Renaissance in the South for black people, who registered to vote in droves and about 2,000 of whom were elected to federal, state and local office in the formerly Confederate states. The southern states also rewrote their constitutions, striking down discriminatory laws, expanding women’s rights and guaranteeing a public education for all.

Tragically, Reconstruction was short-lived. Southern whites engaged in a concerted campaign of racist terror across the South, and forged political alliances with moderate Republicans to erode the federal government’s grip on their affairs. President Grant’s support for Reconstruction grew tepid, and a divided Congress pulled back as well. In 1876 the Supreme Court ruled that the new constitutional amendments applied only to actions of governments, not private individuals. The following year Rutherford Hayes, Grant’s successor, withdrew federal troops from the South. A century of white supremacist rule across the region ensued, waning only with mid-20th century civil-rights legislation.

Think you know your American history? Prove it in our quiz. Each month brings five new questions on the era covered in that chapter.

American workers rejected the idea that free markets alone could sustain liberty. They toiled long hours for low pay in unsafe conditions. Economic shocks led to mass layoffs. With little bargaining power, workers began to organise. Railroad men led the first nationwide strike in 1877. In several states governors sent in armed militia to put it down; they killed dozens of strikers.

A turning point came in 1886. On May 1st hundreds of thousands of workers struck for an eight-hour workday. Two days later police fired on strikers outside Chicago’s McCormick works, killing several. At a protest rally in Haymarket Square the next evening, an unknown assailant threw a bomb at police, who opened fire. Seven officers and at least four civilians died. In the short term the affair set off anti-labour and anti-immigrant hysteria. Several anarchists were convicted in a controversial trial; four were executed. But eventually Haymarket became a symbol of labour’s struggle. May Day acquired global meaning, and the eight-hour movement gathered momentum.

The journalist Ida Tarbell (pictured) watched with suspicion as Rockefeller’s Standard Oil dominated the petroleum business and her father, an independent oil producer and refiner, fell into financial ruin. In 1902 she began publishing a 19-part series exposing Rockefeller’s perfidies, including a scheme that helped ruin her father: colluding with railroads, which carried Standard’s oil at big discounts and paid Rockefeller a fee for every barrel of competitors’ oil they transported. (Her findings were also compiled into a book, which in 1905 we reviewed as “worthy of perusal”.) By 1911 the Supreme Court ordered the Standard Oil trust to be broken up.

Not everyone was enamoured of this new journalism of accountability. President Theodore Roosevelt (who, as we shall see later, wanted all the credit for busting trusts) cautioned journalists against becoming “the Man with the Muck-rake”. Apparently he worried that reporters would dig dirt just to sell magazines. (Outrageous, we say!) Muckraking journalists wore the label with pride and more bombshells followed.

During the civil war Congress opened America’s doors wide to immigrants. The Homestead Act granted land on the frontier to citizens and immigrants alike, and the creatively named Act to Encourage Immigration allowed employers to recruit workers from abroad. Millions came; by 1910 nearly one in seven Americans was born abroad. Irish and Germans were joined by eastern and southern Europeans, especially Italians, Poles and Russians, as well as East Asians.

But every economic shock inspired backlashes against immigrants for taking American jobs. Nativists accused Irish and German Catholics of being culturally inferior to Anglo-Saxon Protestants, prone to criminality and unsuited to the “American way of life”. (Catholics were also accused of being more loyal to the pope than to American democracy.) In 1882 Congress closed the doors first to Chinese workers, passing the Chinese Exclusion Act (the Statue of Liberty, associated with welcoming all comers, was dedicated four years later). In 1891 the Office of the Superintendent of Immigration was formed to police migration. By 1924 Congress had virtually barred migrants from outside the Americas.

On June 7th 1892 Homer Plessy, a shoemaker from New Orleans, sat down in a train car reserved for white passengers. The conductor told him to “retire to the coloured car”; Plessy refused, and was arrested. He appealed his case all the way up to the Supreme Court, arguing that Louisiana’s law requiring separate trains for black and white passengers violated the constitution’s new Reconstruction-era amendments. Segregation, his lawyer told the court, precluded equal protection under the law.

The Supreme Court disagreed, ruling in 1896, by a 7-1 vote, that Plessy was mistaken in believing that “the enforced separation of the two races stamps the coloured race with the badge of inferiority.” This decision entrenched the “Jim Crow” regime of segregation that white Southerners had begun to impose after Reconstruction. The lone dissenter in Plessy v Ferguson, Justice John Marshall Harlan, wrote that “our constitution is colour-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among its citizens.” It would take nearly 60 years for the court to decide that Harlan was right after all.

By the 1890s America’s armies had run out of parts of the continent to conquer. Its factories were also churning out more than domestic markets could consume. The country looked abroad for an elegant—one might say British—solution.

Cuba, then ruled by Spain, provided an excuse for adventurism abroad. In the small island’s fight against its colonial master Americans saw their earlier selves (if they squinted). Lurid reports of Spanish atrocities in American newspapers helped stir interventionist spirits. An explosion—probably accidental—sank the USS Maine while it was in Havana harbour, providing a casus belli. American forces attacked in 1898, driving Spain out of Cuba and Puerto Rico within months. On the other side of the world, the American navy also destroyed the Spanish fleet in Manila, swiping the Philippines and Guam from Spain.

The Spanish-American War made heroes of the young Theodore Roosevelt and his Rough Riders—a cavalry unit made up of cattle ranchers, coppers and polo players. And it gave America staging posts from which to sell goods to South America and Asia. It also made America a colonial power with 10m subjects. Taxation without representation, anyone?

In 1901 an unemployed anarchist, Leon Czolgosz, shot President William McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo. One bullet ricocheted off a button on the president’s vest; but a second bullet pierced his abdomen. McKinley died eight days later. His murder was part of a global wave of assassinations by anarchists. In America suspicion of immigrants and radicals intensified; Czolgosz was executed. The Secret Service’s role in presidential protection expanded (they had been more focused on another scourge that we also abhor, counterfeit money). And Roosevelt, who was McKinley’s vice-president, would begin a historic presidency that would establish America’s conception of itself as a force for liberalism in the world.

As the writer H. L. Mencken quipped, Roosevelt “didn’t believe in democracy; he believed simply in government.” An enthusiastic pugilist, he would box all comers. When he clashed with Big Business, he would bully it with regulators and antitrust law.

History will remember better how he flexed his muscles abroad. Motivated in part by a belief in the natural superiority of the Anglo-Saxon man, Roosevelt sent American troops overseas to expand America’s influence. His reasoning became known as the “Roosevelt Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine: that America may be forced, “however reluctantly” (raised eyebrow emoji), to exercise “an international police power”. He quadrupled spending on the navy, turning it into a modern force that would support an empire. He fomented a rebellion in Panama against Colombian rule to take control of the nascent canal project. These moves represented the “big stick” in Roosevelt’s famous expression, “Speak softly and carry a big stick”. His flair for diplomacy fulfilled the first part of that expression, winning him a Nobel peace prize for his role in mediating an end to the Russo-Japanese war of 1905. Rarely in all this did he bother to ask Congress for permission.

For years progressives had argued that the state—guided by science and expertise (don’t tell RFK Jr)—should be used to improve social conditions, promote equality and curb the worst excesses of the Gilded Age. In Roosevelt, they found a champion. New regulatory bodies took shape; reforms such as child-labour restrictions and workplace-safety measures gained ground. The civil service expanded and became more professional. The press called him a “trust-buster” and he proudly wore the moniker, promoting himself as a heroic smasher of corporate monopolies.

The Progressive Era had its blind spots. Many reformers were also elitists who believed in their own (genetic) superiority and moral purity, supporting literacy tests for voters, immigration restrictions and a proposed constitutional amendment banning alcohol. Segregation became more deeply entrenched, including in the civil service under one of Roosevelt’s successors, Woodrow Wilson. The state became more muscular—for better and for worse.

By the 20th century America was the world’s largest industrial economy but had an outdated financial system. Between 1836 and 1913 it had no central bank. Bankers like J.P. Morgan set interest rates. Market shocks were frequent, partly because the country lacked a formal lender of last resort when banks ran short of cash.

One crisis came in 1907, when a run on a trust company prompted a wider panic. The heroes that “came to the rescue”, wrote our correspondent, were financiers from New York City led by Morgan. He locked his peers in his library until they agreed to provide emergency liquidity. But, impressed as we were then, Americans did not need The Economist to tell them that relying on a few rich men to save a country’s financial system is foolish. The episode also dealt a blow to the populist reputation of Roosevelt. He not only fell silent about the “malefactors of great wealth” he had attacked weeks earlier; he also let Morgan’s US Steel swallow a financially distressed rival. In 1913 a congressional committee warned of the “growing concentration of money and credit in the hands of comparatively few men”. That same year Congress passed the Federal Reserve Act. A new central bank would set interest rates, sometimes lowering them and sometimes, to the great annoyance of future presidents, raising them.

Think you know your American history? Prove it in our quiz. Each month brings five new questions on the era covered in that chapter.

Wilson’s idealistic rhetoric for entering the war provoked a backlash at home from suffragettes, who argued that his commitment to democracy abroad did not extend to half the population at home. In protests outside the White House women called the president “Kaiser Wilson” and burned copies of his speeches. When the protesters were jailed, they went on hunger strike, drawing more national attention.

Wilson finally buckled when it became clear that women were powering the industrial war effort at home while men fought overseas. By 1920 enough states had ratified the 19th amendment to add it to the constitution. (Britain, we hasten to note, had moved earlier, extending the vote to millions of women in 1918.)

Hooray for Hollywood

Roaring into modernity

1920s

Nothing better captured the Roaring Twenties than the investment craze on Wall Street, which had become the epicentre of American and global prosperity. Regular punters and big firms alike borrowed ever more heavily to speculate and boost returns. But in October 1929 the market crashed, helping tip the world into the Great Depression.

America’s response made matters worse. In 1930 Congress passed the Smoot-Hawley tariff to protect manufacturers, starting a damaging trade war. The Federal Reserve, worried about inflation, tightened the money supply as debts soured, deepening the downturn (and causing deflation instead). President Herbert Hoover, meanwhile, resisted offering federal relief to the needy. The extent of the suffering soon made clear how serious these missteps were. By 1933 one in four American adults was jobless, nearly half of America’s banks had failed and GDP had shrunk by 30%.

Let’s try throwing money at the problem

1933-1935

Roosevelt left another legacy: a radical expansion of presidential power. He entrenched the idea of leading the government by force of personality. He gave his first message to Congress in person—something Woodrow Wilson had revived, but which now became standard practice. He brought his New Deal legislation to Capitol Hill, cajoling and charming members rather than leaving Congress to set the agenda. And, crucially, he sold his ideas directly to the public through his radio “fireside chats”, enlarging the presidency in the American imagination. In one such broadcast, in July 1933, he highlighted the passage of his New Deal in his first 100 days—a benchmark against which future presidents would be judged.

Inevitably, Roosevelt overreached. When the Supreme Court kept blocking New Deal policies, he threatened to expand it with six new justices. His “court-packing” scheme provoked a backlash. His decisions to run for a third and then a fourth term, breaking a longstanding two-term custom, cemented the perception of an imperial presidency. The 22nd Amendment, ratified six years after his death, limits presidents to two elected terms—or appears to, at least.

“We must be the great arsenal of democracy.” With these Wilsonian words in a fireside chat in December 1940, Roosevelt explained why Americans must do more to help the British in our gallant resistance to Nazi conquest. “We must have more ships, more guns, more planes—more of everything,” he said. Roosevelt was arguing against the isolationist mood embodied by the America First Committee, whose most famous advocate was the aviation hero Charles Lindbergh.

Roosevelt insisted that aiding Britain offered the best hope of keeping America out of the war. More plausibly, he was buying Winston Churchill time until America could join it. The two leaders laid the foundations for a new “special relationship” between the former colonies and the old mother country. After Japan attacked Pearl Harbour on December 7th 1941—a date Roosevelt said would “live in infamy”—America entered another world war in the name of democracy and liberty.

At the time of Pearl Harbour, many Americans were still mired in the Depression. War gave the country a new purpose. More than 16m Americans—roughly half of young men—served. The war touched almost every family, workplace and town. Factories and shipyards turned out tanks, planes and ships at unprecedented scale; women joined the assembly lines; unemployment vanished as federal spending surged.

On the battlefield, Americans fought across two fronts. In Europe they joined allied forces in large-scale, industrial warfare, from North Africa to Normandy and beyond. In the Pacific they faced brutal, island-by-island combat at places such as Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima. American fighting relied on overwhelming firepower, complex logistics and impressive co-ordination—hallmarks of the most advanced army the world had yet seen.

America emerged from the war a more confident nation, now the world's unquestioned superpower. Having endured scarcity, Americans met a global crisis with discipline and collective effort. Those who fought are often remembered as America’s “greatest generation”.

It is one of the ironies of the American experiment that, in wartime, presidents have repeatedly trampled on the liberties they profess to defend. During the first world war Wilson jailed anti-war activists and labour organisers. In 1919 and 1920 his attorney-general, A. Mitchell Palmer, conducted raids to round up thousands of suspected socialists in America’s first “red scare”.

During the second world war, the Roosevelt administration interned around 120,000 people of Japanese descent, two-thirds of them American citizens, on the grounds that they might otherwise engage in espionage or sabotage. Fred Korematsu, a Japanese-American, challenged his arrest for refusing to report to the camps. The Supreme Court ruled that the War Department, not judges, should decide whether “military necessity” justified denying due process. Korematsu’s conviction was overturned in 1983 after it emerged that officials had suppressed assessments that Japanese-Americans posed no threat. The government would apologise five years later.

In 1939 Roosevelt received a letter written by Leo Szilard and signed by Albert Einstein warning of the destructive potential of a bomb that harnessed the energy of a nuclear chain reaction. The physicists, who had come to America as refugees, feared that Germany might build such a weapon. Their message spurred Roosevelt to act, ultimately leading to the creation of the Manhattan Project.

From 1943 a team of American, British and émigré scientists laboured at Los Alamos, New Mexico, to develop what their leader, Robert Oppenheimer, called “the gadget”. In July 1945, two months after Germany’s surrender, they detonated the first atomic bomb in the New Mexico desert.

Horrified by the result, several scientists (including Szilard) petitioned Harry Truman, who had become president upon Roosevelt’s death, not to use the bomb. But America dropped one on Hiroshima on August 6th 1945 and another on Nagasaki three days later. The two bombs killed around 200,000 people by the end of 1945, many from burns and radiation. Japan surrendered on August 15th. We wrote at the time that it was “one more terror which it is better to have on our side, but best not to have at all”.

The 1930s had demonstrated the perils of protectionism and nationalism. What was needed, thought Roosevelt and Churchill, was a new global economic system to ensure prosperity and trade after the war. Unsurprisingly, they intended to be in charge.

In July 1944, at a hotel in Bretton Woods, a mountain village in New Hampshire, negotiators designed a system with America at the heart. Currencies were pegged to the dollar, and the dollar to gold. An International Monetary Fund and World Bank were created. America would be the unquestioned leader of this system. The sun was setting on the British empire.

The champions of multilateralism weren’t done yet. The following April delegates gathered in San Francisco to ratify a charter for the United Nations, with both America and its chief ideological adversary, the Soviet Union, agreeing to participate. A new world order was born.

Think you know your American history? Prove it in our quiz. Each month brings five new questions on the era covered in that chapter.

The revolution was televised

The first televised presidential debate pitted a youthful, smiling senator from Massachusetts against a tired-looking vice-president who melted under the hot lights. John F. Kennedy went on to win narrowly over Richard Nixon in 1960. Just 43, Kennedy was the youngest person ever elected president (and the first Catholic). Appropriate to the television age, his brief presidency was a triumph in image-making, beginning with his inaugural address. “Ask not what your country can do for you,” he told Americans. “Ask what you can do for your country.” Overseas he projected a benevolent vision of America as protector of the free world. “Ich bin ein Berliner,” he declared in West Berlin.

His years in office were shaped by America’s communist neighbour to the south, Cuba. In his first year a botched attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro, known since as the Bay of Pigs fiasco, embarrassed him. But in 1962 Kennedy managed the most serious nuclear showdown of the cold war, the Cuban missile crisis, with a cool head and deft diplomacy, averting potential catastrophe. He died by assassination, in November 1963, an almost mythical figure, with a sense of promise unfulfilled. Much like his country.

He had a dream

The assassination of Kennedy thrust Lyndon Johnson into the Oval Office. He quickly set about trying to make America not just “the rich society and the powerful society” but “the Great Society”. Some policies he nicked from Kennedy. But Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal was his greater influence. Johnson declared a “war on poverty”, providing health insurance for the old and the poor and setting up programmes to boost employment and education.

Johnson saw through the elimination of draconian immigration quotas that had been in place for decades, and cajoled Congress into passing historic civil-rights legislation that finally ended the Jim Crow era. But Johnson’s presidency, and America’s image in the world for years to come, would be defined by his greatest foreign-policy failure, or “practising ‘escalatio’ on the Vietnamese”, as Tom Lehrer, the period’s top satirist, put it.

July 20th 1969 was the apogee of the American century; the day the Eagle, Apollo 11’s lunar module, set down two astronauts in the magnificent desolation of the Sea of Tranquility. The plaque they left there said “We came in peace for all mankind", and if “in peace” was a stretch—Apollo was a creature of war, even if the war in question was a cold one—“for all mankind” had a certain truth to it. A remarkable nation was doing a remarkable thing, and the claim to be doing it for everyone was more a generosity, less an arrogation.

The space age was to deliver much more, and much of it mattered more: eyes in the sky for arms control and spying, monitoring the environment and fighting wars; satellites for telecoms, broadcasting and internet access; positioning systems that have done for “where am I?” what the watch did for “what time is it?”; pictures of the furthest reaches of heaven; echoes of the earliest moments of time. But nothing resonated like the delivering of that plaque to that dusty plain.

America came to see communist expansion as a global threat. If one country fell, others might follow. This “domino theory”—and a fear by successive presidents of appearing weak—underpinned America’s intervention in Vietnam. What began with a handful of military advisers to the non-communist government in Saigon escalated into full-scale war with Ho Chi Minh’s communists in the north. By 1969 America had deployed more than half a million troops to Vietnam and was bombing North Vietnam as well as neighbouring Laos and Cambodia. Officials cited enemy body counts and kill ratios as evidence of progress.

But America’s conventional superiority proved ill-suited to a guerrilla war rooted as much in nationalism as in ideology. Its support for an unpopular authoritarian regime further weakened its cause. A war fought to “save” Vietnam relied on tactics that devastated it, from the destruction of villages to the use of chemical defoliants such as Agent Orange. When America withdrew—having lost more than 58,000 soldiers and having contributed to the deaths of more than 1m Vietnamese—it was left questioning its power, its purpose and its liberal values.

Make love, not war

A crisis of trust

1972-74

If Brown v Board marked the beginning of a historic, progressive era for the Supreme Court, Roe v Wade was the blockbuster bookend. The 1973 ruling struck down abortion bans across the country by establishing that women had a right to autonomy over their own bodies without government intrusion, unless the government could establish a compelling public interest to the contrary. The court ruled that the government had no such interest in the first trimester of pregnancies, and that even late in pregnancies, restrictions on abortion could not take priority over the health of the mother.

The ruling was a triumph for feminist politics, entrenching (so it seemed) for women a constitutional right to privacy, which had been established by the court in 1965 to protect the use of the contraceptive pill. But Roe provoked an angry backlash, fuelling the rise of a Christian conservative movement that was determined to elect anti-abortion candidates, change the political character of the court and overturn the decision.

The abortion issue was just one catalyst for a political and cultural reaction to the emergence in the 1960s of a progressive and (some would say overly) interventionist state. Conservatives chafed at affirmative action, the women’s-rights movement and the regulatory state. Nixon’s talk of a “silent majority” struck a chord with those who felt disregarded or looked down upon by elites. The mood spread among suburban white voters. They were joined by religious conservatives mobilised by battles over federal authority—not least moves against racially segregated Christian schools, seen as intrusions into church affairs.

Evangelical leaders such as Jerry Falwell (pictured) and organisations like the Moral Majority brought new energy and structure to the movement. Phyllis Schlafly campaigned against the Equal Rights Amendment, rebranding feminism as a threat to women—who, she said, would be herded into unisex bathrooms and made eligible for the military draft. The religious right was an upstart at first, consigned to the fringes of mainstream politics. But it quickly became ascendant.

In the 1950s and 1960s a consensus formed around the Keynesian idea that governments could manage the economy by increasing government spending when private demand slacked off and increasing taxes when inflation threatened to take hold. Then came the oil shocks of the 1970s. America had become dependent on imported energy. When Egypt and Syria attacked Israel in 1973, Arab oil producers imposed an embargo on countries supporting the Jewish state, while cutting production to drive up prices. The effects rippled through America’s economy. Price controls on domestic oil and petrol worsened shortages. Queues formed at filling stations.

As energy costs surged, firms raised prices. Higher costs reduced output and dampened investment. The result was “stagflation”—simultaneous stagnation and inflation. A second shock came with the Iranian revolution in 1979, disrupting global supply. This was a crisis that politicians could not wish away with Keynesian principles, but they tried: raising taxes worsened stagnation; boosting spending worsened inflation. President Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, came to represent America’s feeling of malaise and fecklessness. A new president, a charismatic standard-bearer of the new right, was about to enter the picture, championing a different model.

Think you know your American history? Prove it in our quiz. Each month brings five new questions on the era covered in that chapter.

“Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall”

1987-89

Culture, conflict and a frightening new disease

Though it was Richard Nixon who first declared a “war on drugs”, Reagan dramatically escalated it. Violent crime had been rising for decades and by the 1980s crack cocaine had become a scourge, contributing to a pervasive sense of fear and urban decay. Reagan's administration—with bipartisan support—treated drug use as a crime rather than an addiction, expanding policing and backing legislation that imposed mandatory minimum sentences for drug offences. The first lady, Nancy Reagan, urged children to “just say no”.

Black and white Americans used drugs at broadly similar rates, but enforcement patterns differed sharply by race. Penalties for crack cocaine, which was more common in poor urban communities, were far harsher than those for powder cocaine, more associated with affluent white users. Black Americans were disproportionately arrested and incarcerated. One of the most enduring consequences of the war on drugs was a vast expansion of the prison population. By the end of the 20th century America incarcerated a larger share of its population than any other democracy, a distinction it retains today. Oh, and global cocaine consumption? That is at record highs.

When greed became good

Before Bill Clinton became the free-trade president, the moderate Democrat marketed himself as the candidate of the middle class taking on the out-of-touch country-club elites represented by Bush. He promised a middle-class tax cut and universal health care, then failed to deliver on either (until a tax cut late in his second term). Instead he balanced the budget and backed welfare restrictions, introducing fiscal discipline that had long been missing from American politics. Running for re-election in 1996 he sounded a lot like Reagan, declaring that “the era of big government is over.”

Part of the explanation for Mr Clinton’s rightward lurch lay in Newt Gingrich and the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994. Stunned by the historic electoral rebuke of his first two years in office (Republicans had not won the House since 1952), Clinton “triangulated” his politics between left and right and handily won re-election in 1996. Like Tony Blair in Britain he became an archetype of a new “third way” politician: pragmatic, centrist and adapted to the age of globalisation.

Yet Mr Gingrich attacked him relentlessly, ushering in a more polarised era of politics. He weaponised government shutdowns and mastered the outrage-driven politics of the emerging cable-news age. Mr Clinton supplied his opponents with ample ammunition. After the president lied under oath about an affair with Monica Lewinsky, a young White House intern, Republicans in Congress impeached him. Mr Clinton survived both the shutdown battles and his Senate trial. But as America entered the 21st century, its politics looked more like Mr Gingrich’s: harsher, more partisan and less willing to compromise.

Innovations in the 1970s and 1980s set the stage for a boom in the internet and tech stocks in the 1990s. As pioneers such as Fairchild Semiconductor, Intel and Hewlett-Packard clustered in Silicon Valley, they were joined by computing enthusiasts. Two of these, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, built a user-friendly personal computer in a garage in Los Altos. The Apple II and then the Macintosh helped turn the machines from something only big companies and hobbyists used into everyday consumer products.

More quietly in the 1980s, the Pentagon’s network of research computers, ARPANET, had become the backbone of a global computer network, though one not yet accessible to the general public. The internet as we know it would take off in the early 1990s with the creation of the world wide web by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, a Briton (you’re welcome, American economy). Americans were first to realise the massive business potential. Jeff Bezos founded an internet bookstore from his garage in Bellevue, Washington. Two Stanford doctoral students, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, wanted to make information easier to find with their experimental search engine, Google (whose first real headquarters in Menlo Park was, naturally, a garage). In Pasadena, Greg McLemore and Eva Woodsmall started Pets.com, which would go on to become the biggest company on the planet—in another timeline where dogs and cats rule the universe.

Full of hot air

Many will remember a close presidential election 16 years later that irrevocably altered the course of history, but an even closer one in 2000 also changed the world. Mr Gore, cerebral but charisma-challenged, ran against George W. Bush, the not-so-cerebral but genial Republican governor of Texas. They fought over the centre ground, with Mr Gore offering four more years of Clintonian policies (minus the Clintonian sex scandals) and Mr Bush championing “compassionate conservatism”.

When election night ended, the race was too close to call in Florida, whose electoral votes would decide the presidency. A day later Mr Bush was declared the winner there, but a recount was required by state law. The ensuing month featured much discussion of how to count “hanging chads” and about ballots that had been laid out in a confusing “butterfly” format. At one point a group of young Republicans in suits disrupted a recount by causing such a ruckus that it would become known as the “Brooks Brothers riot”. In the end the Supreme Court decided in Bush v Gore to halt the recount, awarding the presidency to Mr Bush. The court’s vote was bitterly divided, 5-4—and fiercely partisan, critics would say, a sign that in the 21st century political polarisation would not be confined to the halls of Congress and the White House.

The day the towers fell

2001

Mr Bush entered the White House surrounded by hawkish advisers, many of whom felt it was their duty to finish the war in Iraq that his father started. In 1991 American troops (backed by a UN coalition) quickly and easily drove Saddam Hussein’s army out of Kuwait. But they left the Iraqi dictator in power. Within days of the attacks of September 11th, Vice-President Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of defence, began making the case for invading Iraq.

The dangers posed by Iraq to America were not immediately obvious to many—it had no connection to al-Qaeda. But in early 2002 Rumsfeld notoriously warned about “unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know we don't know”. Mr Bush argued that Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and posed a grave threat. The supposed graveness of the threat mattered more than the specific evidence: “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud,” Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, said in September 2002. America invaded Iraq six months later.

The Iraq war turned out to be a disaster for the region, for the world and for America. Hussein was swiftly toppled, and just six weeks after the invasion Mr Bush stood beneath a banner reading “Mission Accomplished”. But American soldiers would remain in Iraq for another eight years. Mr Bush’s hawks had not prepared for the task of installing a new Iraqi government, and struggled to do so while fighting a growing insurgency. No WMDs were ever found, eroding Americans’ already shaky trust in government (and the media). The army’s torture and degradation of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison also eroded America’s moral standing in the world. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians would die in the years of the insurgency, and a deadly new jihadist threat emerged from the chaos America had wrought in the form of the Islamic State terrorist group. At least after that America would finally be done waging costly wars in the Middle East.

Think you know your American history? Prove it in our quiz. Each month brings five new questions on the era covered in that chapter.

The meaning of Obama

2008-16

In 2012 in Newtown, Connecticut, a 20-year-old man armed with a semi-automatic rifle walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School and killed 20 children, six adults and himself. The murders of six- and seven-year-olds shocked the country. Yet, despite hopes that the massacre would lead to tougher gun laws, Congress mostly offered “thoughts and prayers”.

America’s relationship with guns has made it an outlier among rich countries. It has an estimated half-billion in circulation, the overwhelming majority acquired legally. Since Sandy Hook there have been thousands more mass shootings. Yet in much of the country gun laws have become more permissive. Gun-rights advocates argue that most restrictions violate the Second Amendment, and this century the Supreme Court has often agreed. In the view of the court’s conservative majority, at least, the founders wanted to give the right to bear arms as much protection as the right to free speech.

For most of American history intermediaries such as newspapers and broadcasters controlled the flow of information. Then came the internet. Suddenly anyone could make themselves read, heard or seen by millions. America—with its free-speech culture and dynamic economy—led this transformation for better and worse. American entrepreneurs built vast social-media companies whose algorithms and users came to shape online discourse.

Social media tilted the balance of power away from institutions and towards the public. Anyone with a phone could expose an abuse of power by posting a video online. But the platforms did not upgrade public discourse. Companies’ algorithms served ever more of whatever users craved most—conspiracy theories, rage-bait, titillation, cat videos. They gave strident voices more exposure than reasoned ones. The result was a more polarised political culture, one in which populist politicians flourished.

When Mr Trump rode down a golden escalator to announce his presidential campaign in 2015, few pundits gave him much chance of winning. Even after he won the Republican nomination, polls showed him losing to Hillary Clinton, a former First Lady and secretary of state. But Mrs Clinton represented the establishment and voters were in an anti-establishment mood. Mr Trump stoked anger at elites, whom he blamed for shipping American jobs overseas. He also stoked resentment of undocumented immigrants, promising to build a wall along the southern border and make Mexico pay for it. His isolationist, nationalist—and pugilist—politics appealed to voters who wanted to put “America first” and “make America great again”.

Mr Trump won the presidency and, over the course of his first term, took control of the Republican Party. He passed large tax cuts and appointed three justices to the Supreme Court, creating a 6-3 conservative majority. He also discarded or undermined establishment Republican support for free trade and alliances such as NATO. Many Americans recoiled from his inflammatory rhetoric, frequent lies and divisive policies. Business leaders, though, liked his tax cuts and hands-off approach to regulation. The stock market boomed.

The Trump presidency widened America’s divisions. Loving or hating him became core to people’s identity. The red MAGA hat became a totem, worn proudly by some and loathed by others.

During Mr Trump's first term debates about sex, race and power intensified. In 2017 investigative journalists reported that Harvey Weinstein, a prominent film producer, was alleged to have harassed, assaulted and raped women in Hollywood. The revelations emboldened other women to speak out about similar experiences. Using the hashtag #MeToo, they exposed the pervasive problem of sexual harassment in America and around the world. Powerful men lost their jobs or status, as behaviour that had long been tolerated was now condemned.

In 2020 George Floyd, a black man suspected of using a counterfeit $20 bill, was killed by a white police officer, Derek Chauvin, in Minneapolis. Video of Mr Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes went viral, galvanising a sense in society that racism and police brutality had been tolerated for too long. Millions took to the streets, protesting under the banner of “Black Lives Matter”. Like #MeToo, the movement prompted a reckoning in American life and politics that many thought was overdue. But these and allied movements, critics said, encouraged excesses, such as ideological conformity, censorship and, in hiring and education, an emphasis on identity at the expense of merit.

The year the world stayed home

2020

Mr Trump's handling of covid did not inspire confidence, and the recession triggered by the pandemic left voters in a sour mood ahead of the presidential election in 2020. The virus led to changes in voting procedures; more states accepted mail-in ballots. In the end Joe Biden, a moderate Democrat well past retirement age, triumphed.

But Mr Trump refused to concede, claiming the election had been rigged. He made up stories about vote-counting shenanigans in Democratic strongholds. He blamed mail-in ballots, election workers and voting machines. The courts, including judges he had appointed, roundly rejected these claims. Still, he persisted in the lie, culminating in a rally on January 6th 2021, after which his supporters stormed the Capitol. The attack shocked the country. More than 140 police officers were assaulted. Members of Congress, in fear for their lives, were ushered into hiding. It was the most serious challenge to the peaceful transfer of power in modern American history.

Most Republicans soon got over their shock. The Democrat-controlled House impeached Mr Trump (for a second time). But the Senate acquitted him. He remained free to run again.

As America wrestled with challenges to its liberal principles at home, a new, illiberal power was rising in the east. For decades politicians had argued that as China became more integrated into global markets and international institutions, it would become more invested in the American-led world order—and, ultimately, more open and free. China did become the world’s factory and second-biggest economy. But rather than liberalise, it tried to bend the world order more to its liking. In America, concerns mounted over its growing geopolitical, economic and military power. The first Trump administration made competition with China a central theme of its foreign policy, imposing stiff tariffs on Chinese goods. Mr Biden’s presidency solidified the government’s hawkish turn. America's unipolar moment was over. A bipolar or even multipolar world was emerging.

When OpenAI introduced ChatGPT in 2022 artificial intelligence entered the mainstream. Suddenly, the idea that computers could display something approaching human intelligence no longer seemed like science fiction. As with other recent technological revolutions, America led the way. No other country on Earth has the genius, capital and infrastructure necessary to dominate the field—well, except perhaps America’s rival, China.

The surge in investment has boosted the American economy. But AI has also stirred anxieties: workers worry about their jobs, national-security officials are concerned about cyber-attacks and disinformation, and environmentalists are alarmed by the enormous energy demands of data centres. AI has raised an old question: who should control a transformative technology—the state or a handful of rich entrepreneurs such as Sam Altman, Dario Amodei and Elon Musk (pictured)? The concentration of such power in so few private hands poses a profound challenge to America’s liberal principles.

In 2022, nearly five decades after the Supreme Court found a constitutional right to abortion, it reversed itself, returning the issue to the states (many of which have since banned or sharply restricted the procedure). Under Chief Justice John Roberts a conservative supermajority has reshaped constitutional law more thoroughly than any court since the civil-rights era. It has expanded gun rights, redrawn the lines between church and state, in effect ended affirmative action in university admissions and curbed the power of federal agencies—all while expanding executive power and granting broad legal immunity to presidents. But it sometimes slapped Mr Trump down, for example when he claimed the power to impose tariffs at will or abolish birthright citizenship.

Supporters argue that these decisions uphold the constitution as written. Critics see unelected judges making policy from the bench. The argument over the judiciary’s role is almost as old as the republic itself.

We polled Americans on their country’s biggest mistakes, its greatest achievements and what the future holds. As the republic turns 250, we found a nation that is anxious and deeply divided.

Trump unbound

2024-present

In the year this timeline begins, not long after America declared its independence, the future of the young country was in doubt. George Washington’s troops were retreating, his army close to collapse. “These are the times that try men’s souls,” wrote Thomas Paine. Yet Paine was not one for despair. “What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly.” He believed deeply in the Enlightenment ideals on which the new republic rested, and wrote to stiffen America’s resolve at a moment of genuine peril. Washington is thought to have read the words aloud to his troops.

Two hundred and fifty years later, America is in need of another dose of Paine’s resolve. The country’s great liberal experiment is under strain. Politicians show little regard for many of the Enlightenment ideals the founders held dear. Americans themselves are bitterly divided, rarely agreeing on what ails the country, let alone the cures. History offers some consolation. The American experiment has faltered before—and recovered. Its story has been one of setbacks as well as renewal.

From the moment the framers set out, in the constitution’s opening sentence, “to form a more perfect Union”, the country has wrestled with its imperfections. In Philadelphia in 1787, just after the constitutional convention adjourned, an ageing Benjamin Franklin was asked, “What have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” His reply: “A republic, if you can keep it.” America’s liberal experiment remains incomplete and contested. Two and a half centuries on, Franklin’s challenge endures.

Think you know your American history? Prove it in our quiz. Each month brings five new questions on the era covered in that chapter.