Happy Birthday America!
- Tony Boccia
- Jul 4
- 8 min read
Happy Birthday America! It has been 250 years since the 13 Colonies of the United States declared independence from Great Britain.
There's a lot of great places in the world, and I've seen many of them. America is like nothing I've seen, anywehere else. It is unique, varied, and ever surprising. A special place, full of good people who care for each other and their neighbors. I'm damn proud to be an American. On this happiest of holidays, I want to highlight what I consider to be three great American ideals that inspire me. I've found these ideals in the letter and spirit of the Declaration of Independence, and I've traced them throughout our history. They are:
Defiance in the face of loss. The sinking of USS Maine, the attack on Pearl Harbor, the loss of Space Shuttle Challenger, the Oklahoma City Bombing, and the September 11th attacks are all examples of Americans wiping the dust and tears from their faces and getting back to work. We do not shy away from defeat or loss; rather, it motivates us.
Ability and responsibilty. Americans believe that if you have the ability to make a difference, you have the responsibility to make a difference. We help our neighbors when their house is on fire. The best of us share our resources to help those in need. We send our fleets to countries devastated by natural disasters. I believe that this ideal is what carries our military forward to do good things for good people, and bad things to bad people. Misguided at times it may be; but it is a great American ideal nonetheless.
Relentless optimism. Americans are optimists. A cursory look around the world shows that many countries, including my own adopted country of Japan, are not. I think of John F. Kennedy, daring his fellow Americans to go to the moon in 1961. Or Ronald Reagan, standing in front of the Berlin Wall and demanding his adversary to tear it down. Bill Clinton's visit to Derry in 1995, encouraging people to give peace, and the next generation, a chance. Only optimists do things like that.
I encourage everybody reading this to consider these great American ideals as I see them, and think on what you value as an ideal. And while we consider this together, let's take a look at Pacific History, the focus of this blog, through the lens of America's 250th. In this, we will visit some subjects that may be difficult, but should not be controversial. All of American history is important; the good and the bad.
America's leaders quickly recognized the necessity of becoming a dual-ocean country. One of the Colonies' many grievances that led to the revolution was the Royal Proclomation of 1763, which forbade settlement west of the Appalachian Mountains. Proponents of the law pointed to the fragile peace with Britain's Native American allies, as well as the importance of preventing a new continental war from breaking out. Such a war had just concluded; the Seven Years' War ('French and Indian War' in the States) had bankrupted the Britain and France. Detractors of the Proclamation noted that fertile lands on the other side of the Appalachians were necessary for the growth of the new American nation.
Following America's victory in the Revolutionary War in 1781, it did not take long for pioneers to start heading west. Thomas Jefferson, writer of the Declaration of Independence and the country's third President, purchased much of the Mississippi watershed from France in 1803 and immediately commissioned one of the most historically important events in American history, the Lewis and Clark (and Sacagawea) expedition to survey it. They arrived at the mouth of the Columbia River, now the border of Washington and Oregon, on November 21, 1805. Setting American eyes on the Pacific Ocean was a turning point in our history. It showed every all of us, from politicians to farmers, businessmen to immigrants, that the entire North American continent was up for grabs. In 1785, the Land Ordinance was enacted and a legal basis for drawing state borders in the interior of the country had been established.
The history of America in the 19th century could largely be described as a conquest of the interior. Treaties with the Spanish and Russians (1819, 1824, 1825) and Mexican Cession (1848) laid the groundwork for settlement of the Pacific Coast. Policies such as the Monroe Doctrine (1823), ideas of Manifest Destiny (1845), and the discovery of gold in California (1849) beat the flames of expansion into a raging inferno. By 1889 Washington, Oregon, and California were all in the Union; some 10 million people moved west of the Appalachian Mountains between 1781 and 1900. Caught up in this mass trans-continental migration were some 1 million native peoples.
A landmark decision in a Supreme Court case led to the Doctrine of Discovery being enacted into law in 1823. The spirit of this law was to disenfranchise native ownership of territory and land. Rooted in Papal Bulls, law opinions from the 15th century, and other largely meaningless semi-historical precedents, the U.S. seized property and relocated tribal lands based on the needs of the federal government and the newly organized states and territories. More than half of native Americans were killed or forcibly relocated in carrying out this mass re-distribution of wealth and land. The Indian Removal Act (1830) triggered the Trail of Tears (1830-1850), Long Walk (1864) and Yavapai Exodus (1875), among many other atrocities. The conquest of the Native Americans has been called, and meets nearly all descriptions of, a genocide.
By the turn of the 20th century, expansion was mostly complete, and America was firmly a two-ocean country. Borders with Canada and Mexico were defined, and port cities such as Los Angeles (1835) San Francisco (1850) and Seattle (1851) were well on their way to competing with their east coast counterparts. By 1900, all three cities had a greater population than Norfolk and Charleston; San Francisco had more people than Providence. The conclusion of the Spanish-American War in 1898 gave the United States territories in the Philippines and Guam; they annexed Hawai'i the same year (a U.S.-backed coup had overthrown the Hawaiian Monarchy in 1893). The U.S. Pacific Fleet was established at San Diego in 1907 to protect these new American interests and burgeoning trade; at the onset of a new Pacific War in 1941, it was moved to Hawai'i.
The story of America is largely the story of migration and movement under adverse circumstances. Whether it's Protestant groups fleeing persecution in England, enslaved peoples brought to the New World in chains, or people from Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia seeking a new start, the heritage of the United States has matched the people who built it, and many of those people have come from somewhere else. My own ancestry is from Italy, where violence and abject poverty following the Risorgimento pushed some 4 million people to the United States between 1880 and 1920. My great-grandparents who made the jump (some chose not to), didn't sail under the gaze of the Statue of Liberty until the first decade of the 20th century. The American experience is still quite new to my family. And we're not alone: 15% of Americans are immigrants; roughly 51 million people.
As the American experience is an immigrant one, so too is that of the Pacific Coast. The multi-national aspect of the west coast pushed up against racism, America's original sin, almost from the very beginning in California, Oregon, and Washington. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 aimed to stop all immigration from China for ten years, and restricted Chinese nationals from becoming American citizens. It was made permanent with the Geary Act in 1902. Small wins did occur; the Supreme Court ruled in 1898 that children born to Chinese immigrants in the United States had automatic U.S. citizenship under the Constitution, but for the most part these anti-Chinese (and broader anti-Asian) measures were unopposed. Although not equally enforced throughout the United States, they remained present in the public consciousness throughout the 20th century, causing violence and racist behavior to be inflicted on many Asian communities.
When the anti-Chinese acts were repealed in 1943, as a show of good will toward our then-allies, it did not change the public mood. The same kind of decision-making that had caused these anti-Chinese laws to be enacted also allowed for some 120,000 people of Japanese descent to be interned in camps throughout the Western United States from 1941-1946. I would be surprised to find out that your average American knows about Japanese internment; this matter is not widely taught in schools and is sometimes looked at as some meaningless event from a bygone era. The fact of the matter is Executive Order 9066 was quickly challenged in the courts when signed in February 1942, and the Supreme Court upheld it, in Korematsu vs. United States, in December 1944. American forces liberated concentration and prison camps in Europe while Japanese-Americans were kept in them back home. This is not ancient history; Korematsu vs. United States was only struck down in 2018, in Trump vs. Hawaii.
Despite the setbacks and mistakes, American has endured and prospered because of our ideals. Our ability to overcome loss, make a difference, and be optimistic have drawn in people from around the world, and the Pacific Coast has capitalized on the ability of these new Americans to contribute. Today, some 53 million Americans live in the five states that border the Pacific Ocean. 23 million of them live in counties that have a Pacific coastline. A further 250,000 Americans live on Guam, the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas Islands, and American Samoa. Asian-American culture and traditions have blossomed in the United States, and become a part of our shared national consciousness.
The story of how the United States became a two-ocean country is a tough read. The point of this essay is not to go over what America did wrong; what I hope to have proved here is that America can do wrong, and still do so much right. The scars of the Indian Removal Act, Chinese Exclusion Act, and Japanese Internment are visible today throughout the Pacific coast of the United States, but we have come a long way toward healing them. There is no going back to undo the damage, and we may never be forgiven; unfortunately, we have to be okay with that. We also must accept that the most important task lies ahead; with the memory of our past in tow, we must look and move forward, together. The best of us live out the ideals enshrined in the Declaration of Independence every day, without even realizing it.
The story of America isn't always pretty, but it sure is impressive. It took defiance, character, and optimism to publish the Declaration of Indepence 250 years ago. Courage was required in 1776 to know that the fight was not over, and the war could very well be lost. The men who signed the Declaration knew all too well what would happen to them if the revolution failed. Truth be told, it could still fail today. It has taken, and will continue to take, all of our strength, and more, to uphold those ideals written so eloquently in our birth certificate. I don't think we'll fail. I actually don't think Americans know how to fail. Together, we can hold up our ideals and values and help make the world, and indeed our own neighborhoods, a better place. I know it can be done.
Happy birthday, America. I believe in you.
From Tokyo,
Tony
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