Bari Weiss: American Regeneration This Independence Day, we don’t just celebrate the birthday of the words that made us—but the choice to live by them two and a half centuries later.
The ‘Join, or Die’ cartoon was created by Benjamin Franklin and first published on May 9, 1754. (Pierce Archive via Getty Images)
As we approach July 4, I’ve been thinking a lot about this cartoon. It appeared in this country before it was a country, in “independent media” before anyone called it that. It was the original American meme—one created more than 250 years ago, in a century when a tweet was the sound a bird makes. The now immortal image was first published on May 9, 1754, in The Pennsylvania Gazette—one of about 15 newspapers in the American colonies at the time. That paper happened to be owned by Benjamin Franklin, who made the cartoon himself. (It ran alongside a profile of a soldier who had had some success in Western Virginia and Pennsylvania. His name was George Washington.) The context for the cartoon’s creation was the French and Indian War, then in its opening stages. Franklin’s fear—the colonists’ fear—was that if the British colonies didn’t band together against the French and their native allies, they would disappear...
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