When the United States celebrated the nation’s centennial in 1876, the star of the show was the Declaration of Independence itself, in all its faded glory.
The document was transported from Washington to Philadelphia, where it was the celebrity centerpiece of the Centennial Exhibition, what became the first official World’s Fair in the United States. Nine million people flowed through, a remarkable figure considering that the population of the country was only about 46 million.
But for the 250th, the physical document at the center of it all is on something of a historical staycation, the always-there presence at the National Archives, encased under bulletproof glass and surrounded by inert gases.
This time it seems far less the centerpiece, in a Washington that began the current phase of celebrations with the Ultimate Fighting Championship on the White House lawn last month and plans, in August, the Freedom 250 Grand Prix, a racecourse around the National Mall, feet from the front door of the Archives.
“I think it is fair to say that the official activities haven’t put much emphasis on it,” said Colleen J. Shogan, who was the archivist of the United States until she was summarily dismissed days into the Trump administration. (The White House never gave a cause for her dismissal, but it was widely assumed to be linked to the demands the institution made that Mr. Trump return documents that he took to his Mar-a-Lago estate.)
So on Monday afternoon, exactly 250 years after Thomas Jefferson was making the final cross-outs and substitutions on the Declaration’s final text, there was no wait to get into the rotunda of the Archives to peer through the glass and try to make out the words that followed “When in the course of human events …” and identify a famous signature or two.
There was a visiting couple from Germany, a Chicagoan and his son, a few people pushing baby strollers, many saying they were escaping the heat at the Great American State Fair across the street. Critics have noted that the fair, held on the Mall, has not exactly lived up to the grand Centennial Exhibition, where Thomas Edison showed off his automatic telegraph machine and Alexander Graham Bell demonstrated his newly invented telephone.
That the Declaration has survived at all is something of a miracle, as Michael Auslin, a historian and research scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, notes in his newly published book, “National Treasure.” It traces the travails of the document, which paralleled those of the nation it created.
“It has been displayed in bright sunlight and locked in dark cabinets,” Mr. Auslin wrote, “rescued from the flames, hidden in a cellar, carried in carts, moved secretly by train, and secured by the world’s most sophisticated security systems.” He called it “a time machine, drawing visitors in a never-ending stream to gaze in wonder at the very parchment touched and signed by the larger-than-life men who founded America.”
And over two and a half centuries it has been invoked for every political purpose. When it was read in Boston in July 1776, there was cannon fire and bells ringing, and Abigail Adams noted in a famous letter “thus ends royall Authority in this State.” Lincoln echoed the Declaration in the Gettysburg Address, and Jefferson Davis used it to justify secession. At each major milestone of its signing, presidents have used the moment to frame the nation’s choices in the wording of the document.
At the 150th anniversary, Calvin Coolidge traveled to Philadelphia to deliver what may have been the most extensive presidential commentary on the meaning of the Declaration in modern times, an unusual torrent of words for a taciturn Vermonter.
Coolidge used the moment to do what presidents rarely do these days: talk about the Founders, ideals and ideas. He saw the Declaration as a constant in a nation that had changed remarkably in the 150 years since its founding.
“If all men are created equal, that is final,” he said at Independence Hall. “If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions.”
Fifty years later, and just two summers after Richard Nixon’s resignation, Gerald R. Ford returned to the same place to sound a similar theme. In Washington he called the Declaration “the fixed star of freedom” and said it was “impervious to change because it states moral truths that are eternal.”
And in Philadelphia on July 4 he asked: “Are the institutions under which we live working the way they should? Are the foundations laid in 1776 and 1789 still strong enough and sound enough to resist the tremors of our times? Are our God-given rights secure, our hard-won liberties protected?”
Reading the Coolidge and Ford speeches today comes with a bit of a shock: Neither man talks about himself, nor the accomplishments of his administration. The speeches — lengthy — are about the Founders, their ideals and how they apply to the present moment.
Now it is President Trump’s turn — and he is not going to Philadelphia. His past comments on the Declaration have been limited. He has promised a “long speech” on the Mall, just before what is planned to be a record-setting fireworks display.
He has had time to think about the Declaration. In the spring of 2025 he had the Archives install a copy on an easel in the Oval Office, and when visitors come in it is among the first things he shows them. He had the curtains covering it pulled back for reporters from The New York Times in January, ahead of an interview.
Mr. Trump’s copy is far more legible than the original, as he noted to the reporters. It is, in fact, based on the most famous reprint of the Declaration — called the Stone engraving, ordered up by John Quincy Adams when he was secretary of state. (For those who track the many iterations of the Declaration, the White House says the copy Mr. Trump keeps by his desk dates to the 1840’s and was published by Peter Force, as part of “American Archives,” his documentary history of the United States.)
But he hasn’t said much about his view of the document’s significance. “Well, it means exactly what it says, it’s a declaration,” he told ABC News in an interview last year. “A declaration of unity and love and respect, and it means a lot. And it’s something very special to our country.”
Ms. Shogan, the former archivist who now is the chief executive of “In Pursuit,” a history and civics initiative, said those comments were a bit of a surprise. “The document is about a lot of things, many ideals, but it’s not about unity,’’ she noted. “It’s about ‘dissolving the bands,’” she said, paraphrasing from the first, heavily edited line of the Declaration. “It is the most famous breakup document in world history.”
