Rejecting the narrative of a struggle between rich and poor, Vance said America’s success was accomplished together by people from all stations of life.
Vice President JD Vance joined July 4th celebrations aboard the aircraft carrier USS Kearsarge in New York Harbor for the Sail250 International Parade of Sail and aerial show of U.S. and international airships to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
Vance’s V-22 Osprey helicopter landed on the deck of the aircraft carrier at 9:47 a.m. He was accompanied by Acting Secretary of the Navy Hung Cao, Ambassador to the U.N. Mike Waltz, as well as his three children.
More than 30 tall ships from allied nations sailed up the Hudson River from the Verrazzano Bridge, past the USS Kearsarge, and continued up the Hudson River toward the George Washington Bridge.
Every 30 seconds or so, a new formation of jets flew over the International Parade of Sail. After the International Naval Review, Waltz and Cao delivered brief remarks before the vice president spoke.
Vance joked his speechwriters wrote “a nice nine-hour address, it’s going to be a long day.”
Speaking for a full 25 minutes in 90 degree weather, Vance talked about the forces that unite Americans across a history filled with resourcefulness and tenacity: “Connected through the generations, rich and poor of every job, we are a people formed by generations of self-governance and personal industry.”
“Our history is one of people carving a great civilization out of the wilderness,” Vance said.
He warned that some voices speak today not of America’s greatness but of its imperfections: “They will tell you that America is just another country where the weak struggle against the strong.”
“These people misunderstand the essence of America,” Vance said. “We all have moments of great power despite those very real imperfections, that there are victims and heroes who live inside of each of us.
“So what I’d ask you to do, my fellow Americans, on our 250th birthday is to reject the two-dimensional view of your fellow citizens and reject the two-dimensional view of your country.”
“Everything that we have done as a country, we have done together. Not as citizens divided against each other, but as a common people working towards a common future,” the vice president said.
In the speech, Vance reached back to the days following the signing of the Declaration of Independence, as British troops gathered in New York Harbor in 1776. He reflected on how Gen. George Washington used the Declaration of Independence to inform and inspire his troops with the values for which they were being asked to fight.
And that, Vance said, is who it was written for. “It wasn’t written for historians. It wasn’t written for academics. It wasn’t written for the generations to come. It was written for the people of this fledgling country. It was written for the soldiers who would fight to turn those words into a new system of government.”
He said Jefferson called the declaration an expression of the American mind, and quoting Jefferson, the Declaration was an effort “to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, the common sense of the American people.”
Vance highlighted the contribution of two naval shipbuilders, civil engineer James Buchanan Eads who built ironclads for the Union during the Civil War and industrialist Henry Kaiser, who helped rebuild the U.S. Navy after the Pearl Harbor attack.
Vance highlighted the stories of their hard work, ingenuity, and role in helping to preserve American freedom. And he also spoke of Kaiser looking after his workers’ welfare.
“Everywhere he went, he organized ordinary Americans to build extraordinary things. And everywhere he went, he believed their welfare and the welfare of the enterprise that he was building went hand in hand,” said Vance, who highlighted that Kaiser made sure his workers could see a doctor, and was a pioneer of health coverage.
“Where some say that America’s story is one of the dispossessed struggling against the powerful, Kaiser shows that America’s greatness is built by cooperation between all of our citizens from every single walk of American life.”
