“If you’re a billionaire, why are you a billionaire?”
~American singer-songwriter Billie Eilish
“This land was made for you and me.”
~American folk singer-songwriter Woody Guthrie
America’s 250-year anniversary is causing a lot of angst. Some would like to paper over everything we’ve done wrong; others are so consumed with our failures they can’t bring themselves to admit what we’ve done right. Tant pis, because there’s a lot to celebrate.
Here’s something to cheer: Since colonial America’s first days, ordinary people have refused to bow to fatcats, oligarchs, profiteers, and aristocrats.
Over and over, we’ve demanded a fair return on our labor and the chance for opportunity and dignified lives. Just as relentlessly, a smaller elite has sought to hoard the rewards for themselves. These opposing forces have churned through American history like colliding weather fronts, unleashing storms of protest and reform.
In many ways, American history is the story of that never-ending collision.
I grew up not far from the site of the Battle of Alamance, an early and dramatic clash in North Carolina between ordinary working people and colonial elites intent on fleecing them. The Regulators, as this group came to be known, were mostly small farmers and laborers in the state’s backcountry. For years, they petitioned officials, filed complaints, and sought redress for their grievances through peaceful means. There was plenty to complain about: they were unfairly taxed, swindled out of their land, and saw corrupt officials at every turn. An entire political system was rigged to benefit the well-connected at their expense. Sound familiar?
One of their leading voices was Herman Husband, a farmer and fiery pamphleteer inspired by religious zeal to give voice to the Regulators’ anger, helping turn scattered complaints into organized resistance and insisting that everyday people had both the right and the duty to challenge corrupt authority. “Now shew yourselves to be Freemen,” he charged them, “and for once assert your Liberty and maintain your rights.”
One of the Regulators’ complaints was particularly symbolic. Governor William Tryon desired a luxurious new palace in New Bern modeled after fashionable English estates, and colonial authorities were funneling tax revenue to pay for it. The Regulators didn’t object to paying taxes per se, but they mightily resented funding and furnishing a pimped-out Georgian mansion, complete with lavish ballrooms, at a time when many could barely scrape by.
Today, the powdered wigs are gone, but the feelings are not. Strapped Americans are once again seething about taxpayer dollars being used to support an extravagant building project associated with a powerful political figure — in this case, President Trump and his opulent ballroom.
At Alamance, the Regulators took up arms against their oppressors, only to be met with overwhelming force and a brutal suppression that crushed their resistance and scattered their cause in blood and defeat. But the impulse that drove their uprising didn’t die with them. A few years later, some of that ornery spirit of defiance would help fuel the American Revolution itself.
To reflect on America’s past and present, I caught up with historian William Hogeland, who argues that the nation’s early history was driven less by patriotic ideals than by open struggles over money and power. In his recent work on Alexander Hamilton, for example, he challenges the popular musical’s portrayal of Hamilton as a boot-strapper who sought to help others rise, instead emphasizing his elite-aligned policies and role in shaping a system that often favored concentrated financial power.
Hogeland is especially interested in the messy fight over the Declaration of Independence — not just against Britain, but among Americans themselves. Independence, he argues, came about through a constant clash between well-to-do leaders like John Adams, Samuel Adams, and Richard Henry Lee in the Continental Congress and ordinary people who wanted independence to mean a fairer deal for everyone. That conflict, he says, is one of the most important and overlooked parts of the Revolution.
Hogeland points to the unlikely, uneasy partnership between Thomas Paine and the far more affluent John Adams in the summer of 1776, as the Declaration was taking shape. As he puts it, these men were “hating each other on every level,” in part because Adams despised Paine’s brand of democracy as dangerously radical — “the kiss of death for America.”
When Paine’s Common Sense helped ignite the push toward independence, Adams responded with Thoughts on Government, laying out a far more restrained constitutional vision. Yet in the charged weeks around the drafting and push for the Declaration, the two briefly found themselves aligned in the broader effort to break from Britain and secure independence. For a fleeting moment, shared purpose overrode deep ideological division. Then, once independence was declared, they were back to being bitter enemies.
When I ask Hogeland what inspires him on America’s anniversary, he emphasizes the human struggle and the improvisational nature of our history.
“It’s the idea of people making something out of nothing, responding to events without really knowing what to do, yet deciding to take a stand and make a move — that’s what inspires me. I find myself drawn to tragic figures like Husband and Paine, both of whom came to unhappy ends. That’s something I’ve wrestled with. Here were people who devoted themselves to a cause and paid a heavy price for it. And then there are the lesser-known figures that most Americans have never heard of, even though they played important roles. Part of what motivates me is bringing those forgotten voices back into the story.”
He talks about people like Philadelphia apothecary Christopher Marshall, one of the Revolution’s forgotten radicals, whose extraordinary diary offers one of the most vivid firsthand accounts of the period. Then there’s James Cannon, a Philadelphia mathematician and educator who backed the Patriot cause and represented its more intellectual, reform-minded edge, pushing for greater political accountability, stronger civic institutions, and the spread of learning.
Hogeland often returns to stories of how, after independence was won, ordinary Americans revolted against systems they saw as favoring wealthy insiders. In the winter of 1787, armed farmers in western Massachusetts—many of them Revolutionary War veterans—trudged through the snow to shut down county courthouses where judges were seizing farms and jailing debtors. At the Springfield Arsenal, they faced cannon fire as they tried to resist the state militia’s crackdown. Known as Shays’ Rebellion, the uprising grew out of crushing taxes and aggressive debt collection that threatened the land and livelihoods of struggling families.
Americans didn’t mind seeing people prosper, but they harbored deep suspicion of extreme concentrations of wealth and luxury. Great fortunes, inherited privilege, and conspicuous displays of wealth put them in mind of the corrupt aristocracies of Europe they had been trying to escape or overthrow.
Thomas Jefferson warned against an “artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth,” arguing that the accumulation of inherited privilege, passed down like a private estate of power, would unravel the republican government and replace civic equality with entrenched elite rule. Obviously, these critiques sit uncomfortably beside his position as a major slaveholder, dependent on exploitation to maintain his place in the plantation economy. But Jefferson’s “all men are created equal” was more than a slogan. He championed initiatives to spread opportunity, for example, laying the intellectual groundwork for the public school systems that later emerged across the United States.
Jefferson understood that a country was coming into being in which opportunity, long reserved for the few, was being pushed toward broader claim and contestation.
George Washington built his reputation in opposition to British imperial hierarchy, and the Revolution he helped lead was, at least rhetorically, a rejection of entrenched aristocracy and inherited privilege. But he, too, was a slaveholder and deeply involved in the rather nasty business of land speculation, snapping up western acreage and thinking in terms of profit and long-term value the way modern investors think about real estate markets. To a lot of small frontier farmers in the western United States, especially in Pennsylvania, that overlap between republican ideals and elite accumulation was infuriating.
Resentment boiled over in the Whiskey Rebellion (the subject of one of Hogeland’s books) when the new federal government was already up and running under the Constitution. The conflict was about whether the new American system would actually live up to its anti-elite promises, or whether it would consolidate power in a new center while squeezing frontier livelihoods. The federal excise tax on whiskey hit especially hard in regions where farmers relied on distilling grain into something portable and profitable, and it quickly became a symbol of elite distance and federal reach. When Washington, now president of the United States, ultimately backed a show of federal force to shut the rebellion down, it brought home a hard truth for many: independence hadn’t erased elite privilege.
Lesson: the people would have to keep pushing back forcefully and without letup if they hoped to secure and preserve any real opportunity, a truth that echoes through 250 years of American struggles.
We (well, most of us) celebrate the abolitionists who fought to end slavery, the women’s suffrage movement that secured the vote after decades of exclusion, and the Civil Rights Movement that challenged segregation head-on. We take pride in the labor movement, where workers organized unions and strikes to demand safer conditions and fair pay from powerful industrial corporations.
But there are other, less celebrated moments when everyday people confronted economic and political power in disruptive, sometimes explosive ways. In 1932, during the depths of the Great Depression, the Bonus Army marched on Washington, D.C., as thousands of World War I veterans set up camp across the capital to demand early payment of promised benefits. The federal government ultimately responded with military force to clear them out, laying bare just how quickly the language of citizenship could be answered with coercion. Another often-overlooked clash between the people and entrenched power came at the Battle of Blair Mountain, when coal miners in West Virginia took up arms against mine operators and private security forces in one of the largest labor uprisings in U.S. history, turning the hills into a battlefield over wages, dignity, and control of everyday life.
The more recent Occupy Wall Street movement, which erupted across the country in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, was widely brushed off in the mainstream media, but it nonetheless dragged the word “inequality” out of the margins and back into the national conversation. A wary, skeptical gaze at business elites — the bankers, executives, and corporate decision-makers at the top of the economic ladder — has lingered ever since, first on Wall Street, and, in more recent years, on the rising power of Silicon Valley.
Today, Americans are fed up with the country’s business overlords. 80% or more agree on taxing the rich and big corporations, believe the country’s wealth gap is major problem, and feel the wealthy have too much political power. Right now, barely over a quarter of Americans think that the current U.S. economic system is getting the job done for most people.
Multiple national polls — including Gallup, Navigator Research, Ipsos, and Public Citizen summaries of campaign-finance polling - consistently find that large majorities of Americans support closing tax loopholes used by wealthy individuals and corporations, restricting “dark money” in political campaigns, limiting corporate political spending through PACs and Super PACs, and in many cases favor fundamentally reforming or overturning Citizens United to reduce the influence of big money in politics.
Surveys consistently show that Americans have had it with Big Tech CEOs and do not trust them to shape policies that affect their lives, with polls like those from the Pew Research Center repeatedly finding sharply negative favorability ratings for figures like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. Widespread public opposition to Musk’s reported trillion-dollar Tesla pay package reflected a rare cross-partisan consensus that executive compensation at that scale had become a symbol of grotesque, systemic excess — proof, in the eyes of many, that the balance between corporate reward and social responsibility is completely out of whack.
Across party lines, large majorities — including 86% of Democrats, 60% of Republicans, and 70% of Independents – have said they support taxing Big Tech to help offset the social and economic costs of the industry and to ensure Silicon Valley’s wealthiest figures pay their fair share.
Significantly, a new generation is coming of age with a more skeptical view of wealth than many of their parents, less willing to treat billionaires as folk heroes and more inclined to see extreme fortunes as evidence that something in the system is off. Polling finds that Gen Z and millennials are more likely to question whether the economic system still delivers real opportunity or simply locks advantage in at the top.
That generational shift has started to show up in raw, unscripted moments, like recent college graduations where students openly revolted against Silicon Valley’s breathless push to normalize AI — in some cases booing tech promoters right off the stage. Graduates have voiced concern about job displacement and the shrinking sense of a stable career ladder, sounding like people who know they’re walking into an economy rigged against them, one in which technological disruption may tighten those pressures even further.
Their instinct to push back is who we are. The point of remembering our past is to stay watchful — to notice where power entrenches itself, and to always fight back when it forgets who it answers to.
May the new generation carry this torch of history ahead. Happy 250th, America.
