America is 250 years old, and the race to define it is still as frantic as ever. The traditional position defines our country as just that: a tradition — a centuries-old heritage of specific freedoms and rights, jealously guarded by those who understand these rights to best promote human flourishing and “the public good.” The Declaration of Independence, written 250 years ago, appeals to these rights as a tradition already old, as it charges the British monarchy with more than two dozen violations.

The Declaration of Independence then fuses this tradition with a more abstract and universal declaration of liberty, best known in its declaration of self-evident truths: “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” But the Declaration was merely a declaration, not a charter, and it took decades — even centuries — for the ideals first promulgated in the Declaration to be fully realized in the U.S.A. That doesn’t make them untrue; it just means that real life is far more complicated than an abstract argument.

There is another narrative competing to define America. The radical position interprets U.S. history through the matrix of critical theory and intersectionality, dividing us into classes of “oppressor” and “oppressed” by both immutable characteristics (race, sex, nation of origin) and mutable ones (religion, education, wealth, sexual orientation, gender identity).

This narrative, which traces its ancestry through Karl Marx to the anti-Christian French Revolution, deems America fundamentally evil. The original sin is racism, the bitter fruit is segregation, and the current proof of guilt is any existing inequality, whether related to racism or not. Because the evil institution of race-based slavery existed in America at its founding, the whole nation is judged to be unforgivably and irredeemably racist. The largely discredited 1619 Project was the mouthpiece of this narrative, but its hold on American imaginations far exceeds the scope of that ill-fated exercise.

Indeed, the racial division this project fostered still strikes at the very core of American unity. “Nobody black I know is really excited about the 4th of July,” asserted progressive media personality Joy Reid in a recent podcast. “It is the celebration of slaveholders who freed themselves from having to pay taxes to the Crown for their slave empire.” Instead, she explained, “Juneteenth to me is the real thing that the 4th of July is, because we really were not a democracy until we ended slavery.”

It’s hardly likely that most black people in America share Reid’s sour perspective on Independence Day. But her perspective wins a disproportionate hearing because it is shared by so many of the highly-educated elites who shape American public discourse.

For the past decade, that anti-American perspective on American history has been on full display at one of the most recognizable historical sites of all, Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia, specifically at the President’s House Site from which Presidents George Washington and John Adams administered the Constitution’s earliest years.

In a January essay, American Main Street Initiative president Jeffrey Anderson described the site’s bizarre presentation of American history. “Of the 30 ‘interpretive’ signs on display in the President’s House area, 25 focus on slavery or race relations,” he recorded. “One other sign is about the archaeological process. Only the four remaining signs focus more broadly on the first two presidents’ actions. Of those four, the largest, on ‘Executive Decisions,’ includes such topics as ‘Race, Ethnicity, & Country of Origin,’ ‘Closing the Doors Against “Dangerous Aliens,”’ and ‘Driving the Indian Nations Out of the Northwest Territory.’”

The signs singled out President Washington, the father of his country, the man who set a precedent for voluntarily relinquishing power not once but twice, for particular calumny. They accused him of “injustice” and “immorality,” describing his conduct as a slaveholder as hypocritical, “deplorable,” “profoundly disturbing,” and as having “mocked the nation’s pretense to be a beacon of liberty.”

One sign claimed that “[e]nslaved labor played a dominant … role in the nation’s economy,” although slavery’s presence in the south contributed to its eclipse by the industrializing [N]orth. One claimed that slaves “built … the nation” (how could it be both immigrants and slaves?). Another claimed that the President House’s “close proximity” to the Liberty Bell “reminds us that liberty was not originally intended for all.”

At times, the signs spun a narrative even beyond the facts, Anderson argued. “A plaque states that ‘[a]s Washington and Adams governed the new nation, slavery continued to grow’ — right above statistics showing that the portion of the U.S. population held in slavery dropped from 17.7% in 1790 to 16.8% in 1800, and that by far the fastest-growing segment of the population over that decade was free black Americans,” he wrote.

Anderson faulted the signage for implying “that no hope of placing slavery on the course of ultimate extinction was ever realistic,” and for making “little to no mention … of Washington’s historic actions while living there: appointing an all-star first presidential cabinet and the first six Supreme Court justices; thoughtfully navigating early controversies over how best to construe powers granted under the Constitution … charting a steady course in foreign affairs, thereby keeping America out of European wars; willingly ceding presidential power after two terms.” Nor does the signage acknowledge that Washington worked as president to sell off land he owned “with the secret intention of using the proceeds to make it more financially feasible to free his slaves,” Anderson said.

All this resulted in a situation where, “until the Trump administration took action, Washington was more heavily criticized at Independence Park than George III,” said Anderson. “The hero of the American Revolution was portrayed as the villain of Independence Park.”

As the foremost American, Washington bore an outsized share of criticism, but the signage criticizing him was part of a larger project to criticize America as a whole. The “signs’ ‘Slavery Timeline’ amazingly didn’t even mention the Civil War — but did find the space to highlight Juneteenth,” Anderson observed. “The site essentially ignored the watershed events that took place there during America’s first two presidencies, and it discussed slavery without any nuance or even-handedness.”

Incredibly, these signs were installed before the exhibit opened in 2010, during the Obama administration, and nearly a decade before the 1619 Project. However, Anderson noted, the National Park Service (NPS) “Long-Range Interpretive Plan” was finalized in 2007 under President Bush. Wokeness was already creeping through the government.

Anderson was not the first to notice the slanted signage at the Philadelphia President’s House. Soon after its installation, New York Times critic Edward Rothstein described the result: “an important desire to reveal what was once hidden ends up pulling down nearly everything else, leaving a landscape as starkly unreal as the one in which Washington could never tell a lie. It is not really a reinterpretation of history; it overturns the idea of history, making it subservient to the claims of contemporary identity politics,” he wrote. “It would allow no differentiation and qualification, treating the site almost as if it were the Slave Market of Charleston.”

However, Anderson did raise the problems with the signs back to the attention of public debate. With its characteristic dispatch, the Trump administration’s NPS took down the woke signs shortly after Anderson’s essay was published. And the NPS began a process of drafting and installing more proportional (and therefore accurate) signage. Unfortunately, nearly every action taken by the Trump administration — no matter how well grounded in law — is followed immediately by a left-wing lawsuit, and the removal of these signs was no exception.

“Philadelphia sued in federal court and won at the district court level,” Anderson summarized. “The NPS put some of the signs back up before the Third Circuit Court issued a stay in response to the Trump administration’s appeal, ordering that no further signs be hung until that court hears oral arguments on June 2.”

Of all the things on which the City of Philadelphia could focus its time and attention, it has chosen to quibble with the NPS over signage at an NPS site.

The City of Philadelphia’s lawsuit was supported by amicus briefs from Pennsylvania’s Democratic Senate Caucus and the Avenging the Ancestors Coalition (ATAC, pronounced “attack”), a left-wing group that sponsors “Anti-July Fourth Day” events. ATAC founder Michael Coard declared that “July Fourth is a celebration of … rapes, castrations, lynchings, and enslavement,” and people who celebrate it are “traitors” who “embrace whiteness” and “the 1776 birth of the racist American nation.”

ATAC boasts that it “embedded” itself in the pre-2010 “development” of the President’s House site. And now the radical signage makes a bit more sense.

Anderson spares more attention for the Pennsylvania Senate Democrats, whom he contends are simply wrong on the history. They argued that “the 1787 U.S. Constitution denied the rights and humanity of enslaved people” by “failing to end the institution of slavery,” and that the Constitutional Convention “denied the slaves’ ‘humanity’ by ‘adopting the Three-Fifths Compromise,’” as Anderson summarized.

“But eliminating slavery wasn’t as simple as waving a wand, as the NPS’s replacement signs make clear. Those signs note that it ‘took Lincoln and a bloody Civil War to finish the work that the Founders had begun and end slavery in the United States once and for all,’” Anderson responded.

As for the Three-Fifths Compromise, “The Pennsylvania Democrats could profit from reading the new NPS signs, which explain that ‘slave-holding delegates wanted enslaved people counted as whole persons to increase their political power,’” he continued, citing James Madison’s notes from the convention. “In short, the injustice of the three-fifths clause was not that enslaved people weren’t counted fully, but rather that they were counted at all — thereby padding Southern representation in the House.”

The amicus brief charged the Trump NPS with obscuring “historical truths” by replacing the signs, but those signs often added information inconvenient to the simplistic, Marxist narrative that viewed America as fundamentally evil for the original sin of racial slavery.

Instead, Anderson notes one of the new NPS signs added a little-known piece of color about the lives of the slaves living there during Washington’s presidency. “Slaves living in the President’s House” were at times “able to explore the city and sometimes even attend the theater, with Washington buying the tickets.” The fascinating fact is hard to fit with any narrative; real life is far more complex because people are complicated.

More generally, Anderson writes, “Echoing Lincoln’s observations in his 1860 Cooper Union address, the new NPS signs note, ‘The words “slave” and “slavery” are not in the U.S. Constitution as ratified, nor the word “property” in connection with language alluding to slavery.’ These signs add, ‘At the Constitutional Convention, James Madison, a Virginian, said it would be “wrong to admit in the Constitution the idea that there could be property in man.”’”

In other words, many of the Founders, even Founders who owned slaves, recognized slavery as a moral wrong inconsistent with the principles they were trying to form in the new American government. They therefore took actions to inhibit and restrict slavery, even though they failed to abolish it outright, or bear the personal cost of doing right by their slaves. But an honest retelling of history must present the full picture, showing them as neither angels nor villains.

The Founders were men. They faced problems and conundrums and made compromises, including moral ones. Are politicians any better today? The Founders also made many outstanding decisions that have withstood the test of time. It is for these that they deserve to be remembered, not for their failures. Their failures humanize them. Their successes provide models from which government officials today (not to mention private citizens) can benefit.

The fate of the signage in Independence Park still rests in the hands of the courts. Indeed, the content of signage at NPS locations across the nation is currently under judicial review, as the Trump administration seeks to correct decades of leftward drift in the federal bureaucracy.

Of course, the battle to define America’s identity stretches beyond the court system. The contest between the traditional position and the radical position remains hotly contested, and every American stands on the front lines. So, when you gather with family and friends at a backyard cookout, what stories do you tell? What does America stand for?