NEW YORK (AP) — The national motto E Pluribus Unum, or “out of many, one,” is being sold again as an American ideal at age 250, even as the country’s own history shows who gets folded in and who gets pushed out. The Associated Press feature says the aspiration has been “optimistic and unrealistic, successful and a failure,” and that people are still struggling to practice it. That tension sits at the center of the country’s founding language, its institutions, and its long record of deciding who counts.
Who Gets to Belong
The article says the idea of unity appears in the Declaration of Independence’s “All men are created equal,” the Constitution’s “We the people,” the Pledge of Allegiance’s “indivisible, with liberty and justice for all,” the country’s name, the UNITED States of America, and the motto written in Latin on coins and one-dollar bills. The symbols are everywhere. The reality, the piece notes, has never matched the slogan.
The founders emphasized unity from the beginning, the article says, with government based not on a king and monarchy as in Europe but on “the consent of the governed.” George Washington, stepping down after two terms as the first American president, warned that people should “cherish a cordial, habitual, and immovable attachment” to the national union and “indignantly” reject any attempt to divide it. The story also says the founders spoke of high-minded ideals while putting limits on who could take part, who had rights and freedom, and who did not.
That contradiction runs through the whole feature. The fabric of the nation, first stitched together from 13 original colonies, left the meaning of unity far from settled. The article says the United States has never been just one America, where everyone lived in the same way or had the same access to power and prosperity.
The Line Between Inside and Outside
Daniel Immerwahr, a professor of history at Northwestern University, says the United State has had a more volatile history in how it handles inclusion and exclusion, and how it “draws the line and polices the line of who’s in and who’s out.” He says every society has to answer “who’s on the inside, who’s on the outside,” and that what is striking about the United States is how changeable and nonobvious those answers are.
The article lays out the lines of division in plain terms: rural vs. urban, plains vs. mountains, heat vs. snow, wildfires vs. flooding. It also points to cultural differences, including people from different countries of origin, newcomers vs. generations deep, people speaking different languages, and people following different denominations of Christianity or other religions entirely. Rich and poor, the story says, have always lived differently.
Then comes the harder history. The article says enslaved Africans and their American-born descendants were forced to live under the lash as they worked in the fields and elsewhere for the benefit of white owners, and that even after slavery was outlawed they were subject to discrimination and worse under racism that was legalized in systemic ways into the 20th century and that echoes still. It says Indigenous tribes saw their populations decimated by death and disease as the American experiment moved westward and newly arrived settlers sought their tribal lands, and that their cultures were stripped from generations as the U.S. government tried to force “unity” through brutal efforts at assimilation.
What the Powerful Call Unity
The feature says communities of people were barred from possibility because of gender, sexual orientation or other characteristics. It also says there have been persistent efforts across eras to create a country where opportunities available to some — such as voting, economic growth, or access to education — would be made available to all, and that this came gradually through protest movements, legal action, and callbacks to the same American founding ideals and aspirations of unity and equality.
Eileen Cheng, a professor of history at Sarah Lawrence College, says those ideals gave excluded groups a language to challenge the system while claiming to be “the true Americans.” That is the recurring trick of the national script: the people shut out are told to appeal to the very founding myths used to justify the gatekeeping in the first place.
The article says the meaning of unity remains abstract. It asks whether unity means uniformity, whether people can be on “different sides that happen to be side by side,” and whether unity is even a good thing in a raucous democracy. It notes there is no single answer around the globe or in history, and that countries have different languages, religions, and naturalization rules. The United States, for generations, has never officially designated any one language.
Paul Wachtel, a psychology professor at the City College of New York, says there are always tensions between unity and separateness, and that no society is just one or the other. What matters, he says, is learning how to negotiate those tensions.
The article says the United States experienced that in its infancy, noting that the Constitution is the second attempt at a framework for government and that the first, the Articles of Confederation, kept the federal government weaker and the individual states stronger. It says it quickly became clear that having such a weak central government — less unity — was not effective for the new country, leading to the Constitution.
The feature says the United States has a decidedly mixed history in dealing with these tensions and that things have fluctuated. It cites migration, saying there have been eras when the influx of people coming to these shores was seemingly a never-ending stream and other times when much of the world was barred. It says in politics the idea that there would be different factions represented by different parties was loathed by some even as it became embedded in political culture, and that groups once looked down on are later brought into the fold, and vice versa.
Cindy Kam, professor of political science at Vanderbilt University, says political elites, social elites and cultural elites do the work of identifying what the groups are and who is part of “us” and who is part of “the other.” The article says demographic, technological, economic and other changes of the last several decades are making discussions about unity more relevant than ever, while Americans live in a country where polarization is rampant and serious, sometimes dire, questions abound over what the future holds.
Cheng says this polarization is not new, but a return to the way the country was at the beginning. She says it is not a linear development toward greater acceptance of difference, but something that goes “up and down.” The motto may promise one nation, but the article’s own history shows a country repeatedly organized by division, managed by elites, and forced to negotiate the cost of belonging from the bottom up.