10-12 October 2025, Boston, Massachusetts.
‘In God We Trust’ is the official motto of the United States of America, a phrase that has twelve letters. Some say that a better and certainly a more venerable motto is ‘E pluribus unum’ which, having thirteen letters, is not only older but is symbolic of the thirteen colonies which first rebelled against British rule in the reign of King George III. The number thirteen is represented in the thirteen stripes on the US flag. It is this more ancient motto that appears on the Great Seal of the USA. ‘E pluribus unum’: out of the many, one.
This weekend, after an intensive week of establishing myself in New York and having pretty much found way round Midtown where I’m living and The Burke Library on the Upper West Side where I’m reading daily, I fled the city and travelled a few hundred miles North to Boston in Massachusetts, to be the guest of occasional SPK parishioner Sally McGinty, in her charming home in Back Bay. On Saturday, lured partly by the promise of sight of the variegated leaf colours of a New England ‘Fall’, we drove about 45 minutes to the North West of Boston to the Minute Man National Historical Park.
We are in the midst of a Government shut-down here, and so the National Historical Park is technically closed to visitors. However, this simply means that the car parking areas are chained off, and that the public loos are all closed, the Federal employees who would usually staff them having been furloughed. It is impossible to close down an area as large and as permeable as Minute Man, and resourceful visitors like us simply found space to park along the verges of the main roads that skirt the Park and walked in. So it was that with many other people we wandered along part of the route that leads from Lexington in the East to the small town of Concord, Massachusetts.
Concord may be a relatively small town, but it is a big and resonant place in the history of the United States, because it was here, from the high ground behind the old North Bridge, that on the 9th April 1775 the first musket shot of the American War of Independence was fired, a shot, as Emerson would later write, “heard ‘round the world.” Although no federal employees were to be seen, a small group of volunteers was on hand to open the car parking areas adjacent to the North Bridge area, and so we were able to walk from there down the narrow path, past the commemorative obelisk, and across the ‘new’ North Bridge (there have been six since 1775) into an idyllic landscape whose picturesque charm belies the grim bloodshed of that April day 250 years ago.
The signage and the inscriptions on the monuments are interesting. Here in Concord it is – unsurprisingly but debatably – the British who are portrayed as ‘invading forces’ and not the rebels who rose up against their (admittedly) colonial rule – but then history, Winston Churchill is supposed to have said, is written by the victors, and long before Churchill, Machiavelli noted that it is rulers who end up controlling narratives about power. There are several monuments to the British dead, respectful enough, even if one of them appropriates the poetry of Kipling: ‘They came three thousand miles and died to keep the past upon its throne / Unheard beyond the ocean’s tide, their English mother made her moan.’ But hold on, Kipling didn’t write that about America, but about the First World War. Why is it here, masquerading as an eighteenth century sentiment about another war on another shore? ‘The Dead,’ the source of the excerpt, was written by Kipling in the early autumn of 1914, before his own son was killed, but perhaps the anguish about the cost of war and ambivalence about colonialist attitudes is universal and therefore transferable.
Churchill’s comment, and this inscription – along with a comment by my host – sets me thinking about contemporaneity and commemoration – or, in less grandiose terms, who remembers what, when and how!
Sally pointed out that if the Obelisk at Concord was erected in 1837, the work of creating the old North Bridge as a focus of national attention happened well after the events. The centrepiece of this effort to refocus attention on the start of the War of Independence was the erection of Daniel Chester French’s statue of ‘The Minute Man,’ one of the farmer-militia who trained daily to be ready to take up arms ‘at a minute’s notice’ and whose patience with British colonial rule finally ran out on 9th April 1775. (We’d admired Daniel Chester French’s statuary in Boston Public Gardens the afternoon before, marvelling not least at the stolid magnificence – broken chain in hand – of abolitionist Wendell Phillips).
The instinct to mark a centenary is probably also universal, but I can’t help wondering whether this centenary was a particularly useful one to observe in American public life. This was, after all, a nation emerging from the carnage and deep division not of the War of Independence but of the American Civil War. If this ended, formally, in 1865, the bitter divisions created by it still ran deep (indeed in some states and in conversation with some Americans they clearly still do!). What wiser act in the midst of division could there be than to raise awareness of another, common enemy – albeit one from the past. Nothing brings a divided group together more quickly than the sense that they have or at one stage had a common foe. In the trade we call this the introduction of a ‘superordinate goal’ – i.e. that the primary task of the divided teams becomes a common one in which enmity can be overcome, here the task of considering superordinate identity. It is also known, more prosaically, as the ‘rally-round-the-flag’ effect!
So, in the months running up to 1875, the use of the year as a centenary was probably motivated not only by nostalgia, but by an instinct to draw a divided people together. You might even say, ‘E pluribus unum.’
Here in what currently feels like a very divided United States that work continues. Let’s see how that plays in next year’s 250th celebration.
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