Part of a seven-part series exploring what 100+ independently written letters from America's business community reveal about the country and its people at 250. Read more in the series.
By Sarah Bonk and Chip York
The last time America marked a major anniversary, the mood was no better than today. The Bicentennial arrived two years after a president resigned, a year after the last helicopter left Saigon, in the middle of double-digit inflation, 9% unemployment, and gas lines.
Plenty of people thought a party was the wrong idea. The country threw one anyway.
But the more interesting thing about 1976 isn’t the celebration. It’s what happened after. The companies that kept hiring through the worst of it. The chambers that kept recruiting employers to downtowns people had written off. The founders who started something in a year when nobody would have blamed them for waiting. Fifty years on, a lot of what we take for granted traces back to decisions people made when the news was bad.
At 250, the particulars have changed and the mood hasn’t much. A December 2025 Pew survey found that 59% of Americans believe the country's best years are behind us.
The business leaders who wrote Birthday Letters to America this year are in the other 41%. Not because they think things are going well — several of them say plainly that they aren’t — but because they’re already working on what comes next. Asked about the future, almost nobody answered in the abstract. They pointed at things underway, in places they could name.
Here’s what that looks like in their own words.
America is not a completed work
Mobile, Alabama is older than the country it's celebrating. French colonists founded the city in 1702, more than seven decades before the Declaration. Bradley Byrne, president and CEO of the Mobile Chamber, traces what has passed through its port over three centuries: furs and timber, then cotton, then coal and steel, then the shipyards that launched vessels in World War II.
That history, he writes, teaches one lesson.
“America is not a completed work. It never has been. It is a continuous act of construction, carried forward by communities, businesses and individuals who decide, in each generation, that the future is worth building.”
For all that history, Byrne’s case for the future is built on what he can see out the window.
“I find my confidence in the nation's future rooted not in abstractions, but in the work I witness here at home, in the businesses expanding at the Port, in the manufacturers choosing Mobile for their next investment, in the young professionals discovering their capacity for leadership and civic contribution.”
That work, he writes, reflects an old American premise: that liberty and opportunity, paired with responsibility and community, “produce something no government can mandate and no crisis can permanently extinguish.”
Two hundred and fifty years, Byrne writes, is “just the beginning.”
A city that refused to accept its fate
In 1976, as the nation celebrated its 200th birthday, Grand Rapids prepared to welcome its most famous native son, President Gerald Ford, for a motorcade downtown. The Secret Service nearly canceled it. The city had deteriorated enough that securing the route was a problem.
“Business and civic leaders looked at what their city had become and refused to accept it. Volunteers and retired police officers stepped up, and the motorcade went off without a hitch.”
Rick Baker, president and CEO of the Grand Rapids Chamber, calls that moment a turning point. Decades of investment, large and small, by people from all walks of life, turned Grand Rapids into a city regularly ranked among the best places in America to live and work.
His lesson for the country is a practical one.
“The task of shaping the future falls to each generation. America does not need us to agree on everything. It needs us to show up and participate at the school board meeting, the business roundtable, the community cleanup, helping a neighbor, coaching a kids' sports team, improving a park, whatever need is in front of us.”
Baker doesn’t pretend any of it was inevitable. Momentum, he writes, “is not assured but built one act of leadership at a time.”
Paying it forward
Lisbeth Lyons Black directs the Women in Print Alliance, a community of business women who push the boundaries of design and print production. Her letter starts with a line she says keeps running through her mind as the 250th approaches: well-behaved women rarely make history.
The American experiment began with boldness, she writes, with patriots advancing the audacious idea that a different future was possible.
“America's progress over the past 250 years has been built by trailblazers who expanded what was possible for those who followed. The grit, hard-earned wisdom, and courage of one generation have paved the way for the next to succeed and shine.”
Boldness rarely exists in isolation, and the Alliance treats that as a working principle.
“That American spirit of paying it forward runs deep in our Women in Print Alliance community. We see it through mentorship, meaningful connections and celebrating one another's achievements.”
Black’s answer to where the country goes next rests on whether the people who’ve made it reach back for whoever’s coming up behind them.
The people who will build what’s next
The State Chamber of Oklahoma turns 100 this year. When it was founded in 1926, Oklahoma was not yet 20 years old. President and CEO Chad Warmington says the state has always built that way: towns rising out of the prairie almost overnight, wildcatters, farmers and ranchers who endured the Dust Bowl and rebuilt.
He starts the letter further back than that, with the merchants who signed the Declaration. John Hancock was one of Boston’s leading merchants. Robert Morris, a Philadelphia merchant, put his own credit on the line to keep the Continental Army supplied.
“From the beginning, the people who built businesses understood that the freedom to govern ourselves and the freedom to work, trade, and build were part of the same promise.”
Warmington is clear that none of it runs on its own.
“That idea does not sustain itself. … We have to prepare a workforce for jobs that are changing quickly, produce the energy a growing economy needs, keep pace with global competitors in technology and manufacturing, and make sure the next generation inherits more opportunity than we did.”
Two hundred and fifty years ago, Americans pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to an idea. “The responsibility that comes with that inheritance still belongs to us.”
A plan, not a wish
The Virginia Chamber of Commerce was founded in 1924, when chambers across the Commonwealth decided business would speak with more authority as one voice than as many. It now represents more than 30,000 organizations. President and CEO Brad Hall doesn’t treat the 250th as an occasion for looking back.
“...this milestone isn't just about history books or museums. It's about the active legacy we create every day.”
In Virginia, that legacy has a name: Blueprint Virginia 2035, a business-led roadmap for the next decade. It was built on input from more than 10,000 Virginians and offers 171 recommendations covering workforce development, housing affordability, energy infrastructure, healthcare, and innovation. It’s the most concrete answer in these letters to where the country goes from here, a plan “designed by the very people who have a stake in getting it right.”
Where we go from here
When we started A Birthday Letter to America, we didn’t know if anyone would write one. Asking a CEO to sit down and write something personal about their country is an unusual request. It would have been easy for every one of them to pass.
More than a hundred didn’t. Nobody told them what to say, and no two letters sounded alike.
What we noticed, reading them all, is that almost nobody wrote about the future in the abstract. Asked where the country is headed, they pointed at things: a port, a downtown, a plan with 171 recommendations, a mentor making room for the next person. They named real problems too — a changing workforce, rising costs, eroding trust, division. Then they spent most of their words on what they’re doing about it.
We started this series wondering what business leaders see when they look at America at 250, and what they hope for the future. It turns out those are the same question. They see the work in front of them, and they’re already doing it.
Or as Rick Baker in Grand Rapids put it: “The best is still ahead if we build it together.”
Happy birthday, America.
Sarah Bonk is a civic entrepreneur and the founder/CEO of Business for America. She spent over 20 years leading strategy, design, and organizational change at Apple and American Electric Power. Today, she works with business leaders to help fix what's broken in American politics.
Chip York leads marketing and communications for Business for America, building coalitions across the business community. His 20+ years in global marketing and creative communications span agency leadership at Ketchum and in-house work at The Coca-Cola Company.
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