The Woman Planning America’s Birthday Party

By Barton Swaim

Washington

Now doesn’t seem precisely apropos for America to honor its 250th anniversary. That the country is “ bitterly divided” has been a cliché since at least the mid-1990s. Our political sphere is loathed by everyone, including its participants. The nation’s history is fiercely contested by a cognitive elite determined to arraign the country for sundry crimes, on the one hand, and, on the other, ordinary Americans and dissident intellectuals determined to celebrate it. The phrase “political violence” is on every news reporter’s lips.

Not the ideal time to celebrate a birthday. Yet the country’s 250th is upon us, and somebody has to figure out a way to organize it. That somebody is Rosa Rios.

Ms. Rios was appointed by President Biden to chair the U.S. Semiquincentennial Commission in 2022. (Semi, half; quincentennial, 500.) By law—enacted late in President Obama’s second term—the Commission’s members include 16 private citizens and eight members of Congress, all appointed in equal numbers by House and Sen-

--ate leaders of both parties, together with ex officio agency heads and other government leaders. Early iterations of the commission attracted allegations of mismanagement, and Ms. Rios has had to negotiate media reports suggesting President Trump is turning the anniversary into a celebration of “MAGA ideology.”

I meet Ms. Rios, 60, on a rainy morning at the Café du Parc on Pennsylvania Avenue, a block from the White House. I’ve scribbled some notes on the Metro ride from Dupont Circle, but they are illegible except for the word “why?” As in: Why would anybody sign up for this job?

“I didn’t,” she says over an omelet. She declined the offer to lead the commission several times. “But in the end, I had to do it. It’s an honor and a privilege, and we all have these responsibilities in life.”

I joke that it must have been for the federal salary.

“I’m a volunteer.” Ms. Rios can talk for long stretches, with great verve, about the many programs and events the commission has planned. “We’re going to engage all 350 million Americans,” she says more than once. “Three fifty for 250.” Among the programs, each of which has been approved by the aforementioned bipartisan com--mission: America’s Field Trip sends the student winners of an essay contest—“What does America mean to me?”—on trips to tour important U.S. cultural sites and institutions. Our American Story is “intended to be the largest oral history project in our country,” Ms. Rios says.

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, passed in July, allocates $150 million to these and similar projects. Ms. Rios expresses particular pride that the commission has persuaded all 50 states and five territories to establish their own America250 commissions. (I can’t recall more than two territories, but she rattles off all five: American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.)

I’m less curious about the programs, state commissions and the rest than about the person of the America250 commission’s chairman. There must be few people in public life who possess the background, credentials, judgment and political savvy to direct a nation so riven in a celebration of its oneness. Ms. Rios, if I’m right, is such a person. In many ways— such was my thought a few minutes into our conversation—she seems invented in a laboratory for her present role.

Start with her background. “I’m one of nine kids,” she says. “My parents came from Mexico in 1958. My dad was a seasonal migrant worker at the Hunt’s tomato factory in Hayward, Calif. They meant to stay for a year.” Instead they built a family here. Rosie was the sixth of nine children. The marriage disintegrated after 11 years, and her father returned to Mexico.

“My mother decided to remain in this great country and had all of us pursue our own American dream,” Ms. Rios says. She raised all nine kids, after those first 11 years, on her own? “Yes, but of course with our Catholic village, our church.”

Like many successful immigrant families, the Rios kids’ immigrant community gave them the social and moral buttresses that wealth and social stability, for all their advantages, can’t by themselves supply. “My mom was the neighborhood driver, the neighborhood interpreter, the neighborhood nurse. We had meetings in our house to put up a new traffic light at the intersection across from our school.” Ms. Rios’s mother, Guadalupe, died in 2023.

All nine siblings went to good schools, and all nine went to college. Ms. Rios earned a bachelor’s degree at Harvard.

“But here’s what’s interesting about my family,” she says. “Of the nine kids, four of us are Democrats, four are Republicans.” She is the exception: “I’m the only one who’s a fiscal conservative and socially liberal.” I am tempted to point out that you can be either of those things and a Republican or a Democrat, but I see what she’s getting at.

“Politics has never been an issue in my family,” she continues. “We don’t talk about Ds and Rs. We never have.” What do they talk about? “About how Catholic are you? Do you go to church every Sunday? Did you go to confession on Saturday? Do you use contraception? Those are the spirited conversations. Not about politics at all.”

After Harvard, Ms. Rios made a career in finance and economic development. A glance at her résumé— appointed U.S. treasurer by Barack Obama, she served seven years—would lead you to assume she is a Democrat. But before Mr. Obama came on the scene, the George W. Bush administration invited her to join a panel of advisers dealing with the 2007-08 financial crash. Ms. Rios tends to emphasize that experience over the later one. In our conversation she mentions Mr. Bush and his Treasury secretary, Hank Paulson, more often than their successors, Mr. Obama and Timothy Geithner. She recalls, similarly, taking one of her brothers, a “strong Republican,” to Mr. Obama’s inauguration in 2009. And she attended Mr. Trump’s inauguration in 2016.

‘I’m a public servant,” she says. “I’m not about Ds and Rs.” I believe her. Still I keep wondering: Is such a celebration even possible in a country whose media and academic elite think, or claim to think, so poorly of it? Only five years ago, corporate leaders, university bigwigs and famous intellectuals were expressing their certainty that America is “systemically racist.” That performative self-loathing had emerged from generations of tendentiously revisionist histories—more or less from Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” (1980) to the New York Times’s “1619 Project” (2019).

I put all this to Ms. Rios, halfexpecting her to give me a nuanced answer about how we have to look at the good, bad and ugly of American history or some such.

Her answer is far savvier than that; and, I think, truer.

“When you understand our history and what it took to become the oldest democracy in the world, and how our Founding Fathers envisioned this journey to become more perfect—that’s what we are trying to do collectively, right?”

“Right,” I say, not quite keeping up. Ms. Rios speaks in a rapid staccato, and I am a Southerner.

“Think about it, the American Revolution didn’t end in 1776, right? It ended 1783. It took 12 years to get from the Declaration of Independence to the ratification of the Constitution. Then the next year, 1789, is when George Washington became president. And then we got to the Bill of Rights.” Achieving the aims announced in the Declaration, she says, took years. “To establish the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness didn’t happen by just announcing it,” Ms. Rios says. “It was a journey. And we’re still on the journey.”

Now I think I see where she’s going. “That’s why people still choose to risk their lives to come to this country—to be on this journey. It’s why my parents came to this country, and why my mother stayed, nine kids and all.”

Ms. Rios’s answer to my rather pessimistic question is at once conservative and liberal: She speaks of the Founding Fathers and the Constitution in tones of unfeigned admiration, yet her metaphor of a “journey” toward greater rights is fully the liberal conception of America. Her answer strikes me, given the realities of present-day American politics and culture, as the only good one a person in her position could give.

She stresses that the America250 commission’s congressional mandate “includes having a bipartisan approach.” Its schedule of programs, or “playbook” as Ms. Rios calls it, was unanimously approved by the commission last year. “And thankfully the playbook has no ideology,” she says. “None whatsoever. That alone is a miracle.”

I’m not sure what she means by “ideology,” or indeed what anybody means by that word, but an unabashed celebration of America is hardly a neutral activity. It is an ideology of sorts. And a good one.

On July 3, the president, speaking at an Iowa rally, announced that a UFC fight—Ultimate Fighting Championship—would take place on the White House lawn as part of the 250th anniversary celebration. Perhaps mischievously, I ask Ms. Rios if that will happen.

Some other person in her role, I imagine, would offer an eye roll and a smirk to signal knowledgeclass disapproval of the president’s gaucherie, then sidestep the question. Ms. Rios shows no such sign of contempt. “That’s up to the president,” she says, giving no hint of irony.

“The UFC fight”—she uses the phrase as if it’s entirely conventional—“ isn’t an official America250 activity.” But “the president absolutely can lead on the things he cares about.” Ms. Rios goes on to say that the America250 commission will engage in three sorts of events: official ones, i.e., the agreed-upon programming in the playbook; activities done with corporate and other “partners”; and things that would happen “whether we existed or not,” like Ken Burns’s documentary on the American Revolution, “which we can amplify or elevate.”

Igather that the UFC fight falls into that third category: not official, but the commission can “amplify” it or not. Another presidential initiative falling outside the official America250 playbook is a White House initiative called America Prays, a kind of national, ecumenical prayer schedule. “We support the executive branch,” Ms. Rios says. “We support the administration in whatever way possible.”

As we rise from the table, Ms. Rios asks which of the programs she described do I like the best. The field trip one, the American story one . . . I think there was one called America Gives, about volunteerism? To be honest, I zoned out a bit during the programming part of our conversation, feeling as I do there’s no way to judge these things till after they happen and then it’s too late to matter.

I answer, “The part about your mother.”

Ms. Rios clasps a tiny icon hanging from her necklace. “This belonged to her.” She presses it forward for me to see. It’s a tiny icon of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the patron saint of Mexico. “I keep it with me,” she says, “so my mom is always with me.” I am a hardened Presbyterian, but the child of a Mexican migrant worker clasping a tiny Guadalupe on her necklace even as she governs the U.S.A.’s birthday celebration—it all seems pretty American to me.