Frances Wright’s radical Fourth of July address is the antidote to MAGA nationalism.
A friend told me he didn’t plan on celebrating the Fourth of July this year, as he barely recognizes the country he believes in. I imagine he wasn’t alone in that sentiment, given the enactment of President Trump’s disastrous budget and policy bill. Couple that with the ongoing ICE raids threatening communities—Los Angeles even canceled fireworks displays to protect its residents—and the daily threats to reproductive health and women’s rights, and it can be hard to wax enthusiastic about Independence Day.
But we can’t cede the United States or our collective notion of patriotism to President Trump and his MAGA supporters.
Almost 200 years ago, Frances Wright, an early feminist, abolitionist and utopian visionary, gave a Fourth of July address that celebrated true patriotism as the embrace of change, moving always toward the improvement of humanity.
In 1828, women didn’t speak in public—and when they did, it was only for other women. Wright was one of the first to break those barriers, giving lectures championing women’s rights, opposing slavery and championing knowledge and science over religion.
She resided for a time in New Harmony, Ind., in Robert Owen’s utopian community, an experiment in socialist communal living. Her Fourth of July speech at Harmony Hall is a classic, but little known, call to action to defend the Constitution. It offers a voice of hope worth hearing today.
Wright begins her speech by remarking on the tradition of commemorating the Fourth of July with rousing speeches about American exceptionalism. In her view, it wasn’t America’s past accomplishments that mattered nearly so much as the existence of the Constitution, reflecting the greatness of the United States in its capacity to change.
There is, in the institutions of this country, one principle, which, had they no other excellence, would secure to them the preference over those of all other countries. I mean—and some devout patriots will start—I mean the principle of change.
I have used a word to which is attached an obnoxious meaning. Speak of change, and the world is in alarm. And yet where do we not see change? What is there in the physical world but change?
Dr. Amy Slagell, senior associate dean in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Iowa State, an expert in women’s public discourse of the 19th century, describes Wright as a passionate reformer who saw hope in America’s capacity for change:
Given Frances Wright’s growing commitment to living a life devoted to political and social reform, it is not surprising that her address celebrates the idea that what is exceptional about the American system of government is its commitment to “the principle of change.”
And, reminiscent of some passages in Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, Wright animates that principle through an argument from nature: “The flower blossoms, the fruit ripens, the seed is received and germinates in the earth, and we behold the tree.”
Change is an inherent part of life, Wright asserts, and from change comes improvement. And, like Paine, Wright maintains that “the increase of happiness” is the key justification for creating governments or nations.
Wright, a Scottish immigrant to the United States, believed that the genius of the Constitution was its incorporation of change. She tells her audience that whatever missteps, as long as people learn and grow, they will eventually create a government that embraces freedom for everyone.
Out of change, therefore, springs improvement; and the people who shall have imagined a peaceable mode of changing their institutions, hold a surety for their melioration. This surety is worth all other excellences. Better were the prospects of a people under the influence of the worst government who should hold the power of changing it, that those of a people under the best who should hold no such power. Here, then is the great beauty of American government.
Slagell suggests that Wright’s optimism for America rests with her sense that the capacity to change must be the foundation for justice:
In her hands, the promise of America is not simply an idea but an action. Wright believes it isn’t the nouns associated with our political institutions that matter. America isn’t exceptional because it sits in a box labeled “democratic, rather than aristocratic” or “republican, instead of monarchical”; it is worthy of being celebrated on the Fourth of July because of its commitment to change to becoming better
Even if this commitment means that bad policies will sometimes happen, Wright was confident that a people possessing the power to make changes would find a way to amend or annul them, change direction, and return to the path of improvement. It is our actions, not our labels, that matter.
Wright acknowledges that America still has far to go, specifically condemning slavery—but she is attracted to the promise inherent in the Constitution.
The clear-sighted provision in the national constitution, as in the constitutions of the different states, by which the frame of government can be molded at will by the public voice and so made to keep pace in progress with the public mind, is the master-stroke in constitutional law. Were our institutions far less enlightened and well digested than they are—were every other regulation erroneous, every other ordinance defective—nay, even tyrannous—this single provision would counterbalance all. Let but the door be opened, and be fixed open, for improvement to hold on her unimpeded course, and vices, however flagrant are but the evils of an hour.
Decades later, with the 13th, 14th and 19th Amendments, her hopes were realized.
In her own time, however, she feared that nationalism for its own sake could delay or derail the American promise. She worried that America praised “patriots” without understanding patriotism:
What, then, is patriotism, of which we hear so much, and understand so little? If it mean only a proper attention to our own interests, and the interests of the people with whom we stand connected, and of the government instituted for our protection, it is a rational sentiment, and one appertaining to our organization. It is one, in short, with the love of self, and the principle of self-defense and self-preservation. Again; are we to understand by it an attachment to the soil we tread, because we tread it; the language we speak, because we speak it; the government that rules us, merely because it rules us? It means nothing, or it means nonsense. Again; are we to understand by patriotism a preference for the interests of our own nation under all circumstances, even to the sacrifice of those of other nations—it is a vice.
Patriotism can be a virtue, however, when it means “a lover of human liberty and human improvement, rather than a mere lover of the country in which he lives, or the tribe to which he belongs.”
She urges people to be patriots, committed to the principles of human improvement:
If such a patriotism as we have last considered should seem likely to obtain in any country, it should be certainly in this. In this, which is truly the home of all nations, and in the veins of whose citizens flows the blood of every people on the globe.
Patriotism, in the exclusive meaning, is surely not made for America. Mischievous everywhere, it were here both mischievous and absurd. The very origin of the people is opposed to it. The institutions, in their principle, militate against it. The day we are celebrating protests against it.
It is for Americans, more especially to nourish a nobler sentiment; one more consistent with their origin, and more conducive to their future improvement. It is for them more especially to know why they love their country, but because it is the palladium of human liberty—the favoured scene of human improvement.
To Wright, Fourth of July celebrations were not moments for self-congratulation or smug articulations of American greatness. Independence Day instead offered an opportunity for reflection on how far we have come and how far we still must go and gave us a chance to express gratitude for the principle of change woven into our national identity.
The Fourth may have passed, but we still need to pause and remember how far we’ve come, how very far we have to go, and that we have the tools we need to make this current detour “but the evils of an hour.”
As Slagell says, “If Frances Wright were alive today, she would have a ‘Democracy Is a Verb’ bumper sticker on her car.”
