American Exceptionalism Is Alive and Well

Martin Luther King Jr. speaking on the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation
(New York State Museum)

By Ian Rowe

The following is adapted from remarks that Ian Rowe delivered at the Coolidge Foundation’s conference The Declaration: Continuity and Commerce, held at the Library of Congress on January 10, 2025. Rowe spoke on the panel “The Declaration’s Future: Restoring the Apple of Gold.”

If we want to preserve the future of the Declaration of Independence, we must ensure we teach young people how the principles embodied in the Declaration have driven many of America’s triumphs in the past and what will enable them to lead self-determined lives of meaning and purpose.

With the Declaration’s future in mind, I want to take a look back.

On September 12, 1962, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at the request of the New York Civil War Commission at the Centennial Celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation. In his remarks, King emphasized that the document that started the long process of ridding America of slavery was actually inspired by the core principle of equality embedded in the country’s founding document.

Dr. King said:

The Declaration of Independence proclaimed to a world, organized politically and spiritually around the concept of the inequality of man, that the dignity of human personality was inherent in man as a living being. The Emancipation Proclamation was the offspring of the Declaration of Independence. It was a constructive use of the force of law to uproot a social order which sought to separate liberty from a segment of humanity.

What King so eloquently revealed was that slavery, far from being a particular American atrocity, was an accepted, grotesque feature at the center of a world ordered around the normalcy of human bondage. Yet it was America’s Enlightenment principles that allowed it to, in King’s words, “uproot a social order” and liberate millions of enslaved people in recognition of their inherent and individual human dignity.

I share King’s words on the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation when we as a country will soon celebrate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. King’s remarks serve as a good example of how the teaching of American history must integrate how our founding principles drive American exceptionalism and individual moral agency.

Yet we convene at a time of some skepticism. The Atlantic recently published an essay entitled “The Death of American Exceptionalism,” which makes the case that young Americans no longer believe their country is anything special. In the early 1980s, 67 percent of high school seniors agreed that “despite its many faults, [America’s] system of doing things is still the best in the world.” According to the article, that number fell to 27 percent by 2022.

These depressing numbers suggest, if not mandate, that we have the moral imperative and responsibility to offer the optimistic view—and truth—that the American Dream is real and it persists. The history of our country is proof positive. The American story, told in its totality, is a story of inspiration and setbacks, of cruelty and kindness, of adversity and triumph over adversity.

As a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, I research the forces that drive upward mobility and how people achieve the American Dream. I study factors like family formation, adoption, and education. In addition to this research, I put my ideas in action—on the ground, operationalizing them where it really matters, in the very communities we are seeking to uplift. Since 2010, I have been CEO of public charter schools in New York City—the first ten years running a network of all-boys and all-girls elementary and middle schools in the heart of the South Bronx and Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Our faculty educated more than 2,000 students across six campuses—primarily low-income, black and Hispanic kids, with each year having an excruciatingly long wait list of nearly 5,000 families.

I have now launched Vertex Partnership Academies, an International Baccalaureate public charter high school in the Bronx, organized around the four cardinal virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom.

Our students and families know that a great education can make a huge difference. They are not doomed to relive the worst of America’s past, but are instead buoyed by what the founding principles in the Declaration make possible. Because of America’s legacy of excellence and resilience in the face of slavery and discrimination, hundreds of doors are now open. And young people of all races have the ability to open their own doors if they are prepared to capitalize on the opportunities at their fingertips.

This means teaching the rising generation a full history of this country, warts and all. It means letting them know they live in a good, if not great, country. We must celebrate how our nation’s enduring principles have provided the world an indispensable model of how formerly enslaved people came to regularly produce some of the country’s most influential leaders in virtually every facet of American life.

A hopeful and upwardly mobile future for Americans of all races must be built on a shared understanding of our past that is accurate and expansive, not falsely embellished and narrowly selective.

As Dr. King said on the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation:

If our nation had done nothing more in its whole history than to create just two documents, its contribution to civilization would be imperishable. The first of these documents is the Declaration of Independence and the other is that which we are here to honor tonight, the Emancipation Proclamation. All tyrants, past, present, and future, are powerless to bury the truths in these declarations, no matter how extensive their legions, how vast their power, and how malignant their evil.

Those who seek to teach a sanitized version of American history to achieve some false sense of patriotic education do our country and students a disservice. Ironically, so do those who cherry-pick the most egregiously cruel acts to weave together a narrative of a permanent American malignancy of racism. It is through exposing all “the truths in these declarations” that we can best teach about U.S. history, and, as a dividend, perhaps we will also inspire a reverence for liberty and the American experiment.

Let me close by quoting Alexis de Tocqueville. In Democracy in America, Tocqueville wrote, “The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.” I find this statement compelling because it suggests that our country, through its founding documents like the Declaration and the Constitution, has within itself the tools of self-renewal, the power of self-betterment, a story still to be told.

At Vertex, our students recite the Preamble to the Constitution each day to remind them that we are the people to shape the future. Our goal is to impart the idea that they also have these tools of self-betterment and self-renewal within themselves, that they live in a remarkable country that is not hostile to their dreams but in fact can help make those dreams come true if they live with virtue and character, as architects of their own lives.

Ian Rowe is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the CEO and cofounder of Vertex Partnership Academies, a network of character-based International Baccalaureate high schools inaugurated in the Bronx in 2022. This essay is adapted from his talk at the Coolidge Foundation’s conference The Declaration: Continuity and Commerce.