By Theresa Rézeau

When was America great?

Was it when the nation expanded westward, when railways crossed vast territories and cities rose where forests and open plains had stood? Was it when presidents spoke of duty and sacrifice, when children were encouraged to admire those who served their country? Was it when America became a symbol of freedom and opportunity to millions who had never set foot on its soil?

But how should we remember an America in which enslaved people cultivated the land without owning their freedom, Black Americans were denied the rights promised by the Constitution, and Indigenous peoples were driven from territories they had inhabited for generations?

America’s contributions to science, medicine, technology, literature, art and human rights are undeniable. Its capacity for invention and ambition has changed the world.

The difficulty lies in the word again.

On 3 November 2026, Americans returned to the ballot box for their midterm elections. The contests concerned who would exercise political authority, but they also brought into focus a question that elections alone cannot settle: what kind of country should America seek to become?

A nation may change its representatives without resolving the questions that have followed it for generations. What does prosperity mean if it is not widely shared? What is national strength without public responsibility? And how should a country measure progress when its citizens remember the past so differently?

The word again assumes that greatness once existed in a form worthy of restoration. Yet history rarely offers us a golden age without shadows. What one generation remembers as prosperity, another remembers as dispossession. What one family celebrates as opportunity, another remembers as exclusion.

Before we speak of restoring greatness, we must examine what made it great in the first place.

In 1872, the American painter John Gast (1842–1896) created an image that captures this contradiction.

He called it American Progress.

At first glance, the painting appears to celebrate everything a rising nation might wish to become.

A beautiful woman, dressed in flowing white fabric, moves across the American landscape. A golden star rests upon her forehead. In one hand, she carries a book, the symbol of education and enlightenment. With the other, she stretches telegraph wires across the land, bringing communication and modern technology to the expanding frontier.

Behind her come railways, farmers, settlers and covered wagons. The eastern landscape shines with light. Ahead, the western territory remains dark.

She appears almost divine, a messenger descending upon the continent with the promise of civilisation.

But look again.

On the darker side of the painting, Indigenous peoples retreat. Buffalo flee. Their movement is away from the approaching light, away from the people and machines advancing across the land.

The painting invites us to welcome progress without dwelling on the human cost of its arrival.

It does not show us the treaties broken, the communities displaced, the violence of conquest or the people whose understanding of the land had existed long before the arrival of the settlers.

They are present, yet their perspective is absent.

Gast was painting more than a landscape. He was giving visual form to Manifest Destiny, the nineteenth-century belief that American expansion across the continent was justified, inevitable and often understood as divinely sanctioned.

The woman represents Columbia, a personification of America. Her white clothing, illuminated figure and serene expression transform national expansion into an image of virtue and enlightenment.

She advances with such confidence that the viewer is encouraged to follow her rather than question her destination.

Even the light appears to take sides.

The settlers move towards brightness and possibility. Indigenous communities are pushed into darkness, as though their displacement were a natural consequence of civilisation rather than the result of decisions made by human beings.

There is no uncertainty in the woman’s movement. She does not pause to consider what is being displaced.

That certainty is what makes the painting so revealing.

Gast presents progress as something unquestionably desirable. Yet the image itself contains the evidence needed to challenge that assumption.

Can a nation call itself great while refusing to consider the people who paid for its greatness?

America was built through extraordinary ambition, invention, labour and courage. It also grew through slavery, territorial conquest and systems of exclusion. These histories do not cancel one another. They belong to the same country.

There is, of course, another way to understand the desire to make America great again.

For some Americans, those words express a longing for secure employment, thriving manufacturing towns, affordable homes and the possibility that a family could build a comfortable life through honest work. Others hear a desire for safer communities, stronger institutions, national independence and renewed confidence in their country’s future.

Those aspirations deserve to be understood rather than dismissed.

A worker who has watched a factory close, a parent struggling to afford a home or a community that has lost its economic foundations may not be longing for an era of segregation or racial exclusion. They may be remembering a time when their efforts appeared to offer greater security.

Wanting a country to provide opportunity, stability and dignity to its citizens is a legitimate aspiration.

But memory is selective.

The same period that offered prosperity to some Americans denied basic freedoms and opportunities to others. A comfortable family home could exist within a society where another family was legally prevented from living in the same neighbourhood. Economic growth could coexist with racial discrimination. National confidence could accompany the dispossession of people whose rights were considered obstacles to expansion.

The challenge is to distinguish between what deserves to be recovered and what should never be repeated.

Gast’s painting makes this distinction unavoidable. The railways, telegraph wires and educational ambitions were genuine signs of transformation. Their achievements did not make the displacement of Indigenous peoples an acceptable price.

A society must be capable of celebrating progress while examining the conditions under which it occurred.

That responsibility becomes even clearer when we consider what happened to Americans who pursued the nation’s promises and were punished for their success.

By the early twentieth century, Greenwood, a predominantly Black neighbourhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, had become a flourishing community of entrepreneurs, professionals, families and institutions.

Its businesses, churches, schools and homes represented the American promise of enterprise and self-determination. Here were people who had worked, saved, invested and established opportunities for their children.

They were doing precisely what the nation encouraged its citizens to do.

Then, between 31 May and 1 June 1921, white mobs attacked Greenwood.

Homes and businesses were looted and burned. Residents were killed, thousands were displaced, and more than 35 blocks of the neighbourhood were destroyed.

It was not a failure of Black ambition.

It was the violent destruction of Black achievement.

The families of Greenwood had not rejected the American dream. They had pursued it. Their prosperity demonstrated what was possible when people created opportunities despite discriminatory barriers.

Yet their success did not protect them from racial hatred.

The violence was not confined to individual prejudice. Public authorities also failed the community, and thousands of Black residents were detained in the aftermath.

Greenwood exposes a contradiction at the heart of America’s historical promise. A nation that celebrated individual enterprise could also tolerate systems that prevented certain citizens from enjoying the rewards of their own enterprise.

And that brings us back to Gast’s painting.

Columbia carries a book, yet she does not appear to be reading the history of the people before her. She brings knowledge, but the image offers little acknowledgement of the knowledge already possessed by those being displaced.

There is a difference between bringing progress and assuming that nothing of value existed before one’s arrival.

That difference matters in art. It matters in history. And it matters in leadership.

When John F. Kennedy stood before the American people in January 1961, he spoke of duty, sacrifice and public service. His inaugural address challenged citizens to consider what they could contribute to their country rather than focusing only on what their country could provide for them.

Two years later, Martin Luther King Jr. stood at the Lincoln Memorial and challenged America to honour the promise of equality on which its democratic identity rested.

Kennedy spoke with the authority of the presidency. King challenged institutions that had failed to protect the rights of Black Americans.

Neither belonged to an innocent chapter of American history. Kennedy governed during an era of entrenched segregation, and his administration’s civil rights record included both action and hesitation. King faced imprisonment, surveillance, hostility and threats for demanding that America fulfil its stated principles.

Their importance does not lie in proving that an earlier America possessed a moral superiority absent from the present.

It lies in the responsibilities they articulated.

One called upon citizens to serve their nation. The other demanded that the nation fulfil its obligations to its citizens.

Both ideas remain necessary to any serious understanding of national greatness.

Admiration becomes meaningful when it survives knowledge rather than depending on ignorance.

The same principle applies to the images through which a country presents itself.

Gast’s American Progress was commissioned by George A. Crofutt, a publisher whose promotional publications celebrated westward expansion. Reproduced as a print and circulated through publications associated with western travel and settlement, the image reached audiences far beyond those who might have encountered the original painting.

Its influence did not depend upon viewers knowing the artist’s name.

The composition offered a national story that could be understood almost immediately. Light represented civilisation. Railways and telegraph wires represented advancement. The movement of settlers appeared purposeful and beneficial, while those retreating before them were positioned outside the promised future.

The painting did not merely describe America. It helped shape how America was understood.

Today, political speeches become short video clips, public disagreements circulate across continents and carefully selected images can influence how millions understand an event before they have examined its circumstances.

The technologies have changed, but the power of representation remains.

A nation can be made to appear triumphant, threatened, prosperous or humiliated according to what an image reveals and what it conceals.

Gast’s illuminated Columbia reminds us that beauty and authority can work together. We may admire what a figure represents before examining what is being done in that figure’s name.

An image can invite belief long before it invites understanding.

The responsibility of the viewer is to look beyond its immediate appeal.

That responsibility matters beyond America’s borders.

For generations, the country has been encountered through images of opportunity, from the Statue of Liberty welcoming arrivals in New York Harbour to the photographs of civil rights demonstrators confronting segregation.

Both have shaped how America is understood around the world, yet they tell different parts of its history.

One offers a promise. The other records the struggle to make that promise meaningful.

A nation’s image of itself is never the only image that matters.

The same country can inspire admiration and provoke distrust. Its scientific achievements, artistic traditions and democratic ideals have influenced the world, while its military interventions, racial divisions and uses of economic power have also shaped how others experience it.

Its achievements travel. So do its contradictions.

The world is not merely an audience for the American dream. It contains people whose lives have been affected by the decisions made in pursuit of it.

This returns us to the deeper problem with national nostalgia.

To remember a country’s achievements is necessary. To preserve its cultural inheritance is valuable. To recognise the sacrifices of previous generations is an act of gratitude.

But remembrance becomes something else when it demands that we overlook those who were excluded from the celebration.

A nation’s past cannot be made honourable by editing out its victims.

There is dignity in a country capable of acknowledging the distance between its principles and its conduct. There is strength in the willingness to examine failure without treating criticism as an act of disloyalty.

For a nation, this responsibility extends across generations.

The children who will shape America’s future deserve more than a carefully arranged portrait of its past.

They deserve its complexity.

Imagine placing Gast’s painting before a child. At first, the child may notice the beautiful woman, the bright sky and the movement of the trains and wagons. The painting appears exciting, full of promise and possibility.

Then the child looks more closely.

The people on the western side are moving away. The buffalo are fleeing. The darkness seems to retreat before the approaching settlers.

The image that first appeared to celebrate a nation’s progress begins to reveal a conflict.

The child discovers that the same event can represent advancement to one group and loss to another.

That recognition does not require the child to reject the achievements of the people who built railways, established communities or developed new technologies.

It requires the child to understand that those achievements took place within a larger human history.

Understanding is the beginning of responsibility. The same scrutiny applies to the word progress.

Technology can advance without justice advancing at the same pace. Wealth can increase while opportunity remains unequal. A nation can extend its influence across the world while neglecting the people living within its own borders.

Greatness, then, cannot be treated as a permanent possession.

It cannot be inherited without question from celebrated leaders, impressive institutions or moments of national triumph.

Each generation must determine what it intends to preserve from the past and what it has the courage to change.

America’s struggles for abolition, civil rights and equality are themselves part of its history of greatness. They demonstrate the courage of people who refused to accept that the country’s existing arrangements represented the limits of what it could become.

Those who demanded freedom were not standing outside the American story.

They were helping to write it.
This is why the meaning of again matters.

If it refers to restoring opportunity, encouraging invention, strengthening communities and ensuring that people can build secure and dignified lives, it expresses ambitions that deserve serious consideration.

If it refers to an imagined past in which the nation’s contradictions disappear, it asks history to provide a certainty that history cannot sustain.

The America of yesterday cannot be recovered in its entirety.

Nor should it be.

Gast’s painting invites us to believe that those retreating into darkness were leaving history. They did not vanish from it.

Their descendants continue to defend their communities, cultures and rights. The descendants of enslaved Americans have helped transform the nation’s politics, institutions, literature and artistic inheritance.

The people left at the margins of one generation’s image have become indispensable voices in the story of the next.

A great nation should be able to look at its past without turning away from its contradictions. It should be able to teach children pride without teaching them denial, and responsibility without teaching them shame.

Above all, it should understand that greatness is not established by the certainty with which a nation describes itself.

It is tested by what that nation is prepared to recognise in others.

Gast imagined America advancing towards a future whose direction appeared already decided.

John Gast painted America moving towards its future. The destination was never his to determine. It belongs to the generations who follow.