Vice President JD Vance Delivers Remarks Aboard the USS Kearsarge in New York Harbor, NY

How we doing? Hoorah! Semper Fi! And Happy Birthday to all the sailors and the Marines and all the service members of this incredible ship. Please, please, ladies and gentlemen, take a seat. I know it's 100 degrees out here, but my speechwriters wrote me a nice nine-hour address, so it's going to be a long day. It's going to be a long day. But let me start by saying, first of all, thank you for being here on this incredibly historic occasion. I have to give a shout out to Admiral Caudle and of course Acting Secretary Cal, two great Americans. Thank you for your leadership and for everything you've done to prepare us for this incredible celebration today. And I also of course got to give a thank you, but also special greetings from the President of the United States for reviving this incredibly proud naval tradition as we celebrate 250 years of American daring and 250 years of American naval excellence. [01:13] Today we celebrate 250 years of America facing the future without fear. We celebrate 250 years of proving what a free people can achieve by the providence of our Almighty Creator. [01:34] I want to welcome the incredible sailors who are with us today, all the Marines, the Coasties, and countless others from all of our forces who serve our nation and do so proudly. And I especially want to thank and welcome our wounded warriors and Gold Star families, many of New York's finest police officers and bravest firefighters. And of course, we have a number of local leaders from across this tri-state area. I'm honored to welcome the dozens of Navy chiefs and other guests from other countries around the world who represent the vessels joining us in today's review. And to the Americans who are watching back home, we have over 50 countries from all over the world who chose to send fighters or naval vessels here to honor our country. And we say from the bottom of our hearts, we are grateful for our friends, grateful for our allies on this special anniversary. [02:33] It is a very American thing to ring in 250 years of American history by parading our naval and air force might for the world to see. But I can't help but consider that 250 years ago, the waters of New York Harbor looked very, very different. While the Continental Congress met in Philadelphia to ratify the Declaration of Independence, General Washington was right here in Manhattan, peering out on this beautiful land and beautiful sea. [03:17] His attention was fixed on the horizon, watching for sails of the most powerful navy on earth. One week before, the British had begun landing troops on Staten Island, and they had landed 32,000 in just over six weeks. One colonist still in the city recounted it seemed as if all of London was afloat and heading to the new nation. War was coming, and everyone knew it. By July of 1776, 80% of New York's population had emptied out in anticipation of the coming violence. [03:52] And that brings us back to our great General Washington. He knew the battles to come would be bruising and would demand much of his men. But they needed to know, through hot summers and cold winters, exactly what they were being asked to fight for. And so, just a few days after the Declaration of Independence was signed, George Washington read aloud the words of the incredible declaration. [04:36] "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, and that among these rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Even today, 250 years to the day later, these words command a tremendous power over us as Americans. For 250 years, they've stirred our hearts and they've reminded us of who we are as a people. [05:07] But to Washington's soldiers, to the people to whom they were first read, think about this: they were entirely new. What has become standard American parlance, they had never heard those words before. And I think it's something striking to reflect on, that in 2026, the declaration was written with the assumption that its audience would immediately grasp its words. Though they had never heard it, they would know exactly what it meant. 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. As a document, it does not hand-hold its readers, its citizenship at a very hard level. It does not pause to explain who this Creator is. It doesn't explain what the equality of men means. It doesn't try to go into details about the consent of the governed. It simply declares these truths to be self-evident. [06:14] 250 years later, it's worth asking, self-evident to whom? You know, the declaration proclaims truths the founders believed to all mankind, yes, but it says those truths in language intended to be familiar specifically to the American nation that it was authored to, authored by, and authored for. It was, as Jefferson put it later in his own life, an expression of the American mind. A document whose purpose wasn't, quote, "to find out new principles or new arguments, but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, the common sense of the American people." [07:01] That people had been generations in the making. 1776 was not an accident. The patriots of that era understood themselves to be heirs to an older civilization who would carry it forward. Now, they shared with Great Britain the same language, the same God, the same system of common law. They even read many of the same books and observed many of the same customs. They shared the same understanding of justice and public life. [07:29] You know, George Washington's boyhood offers a small but revealing example. When he was 13 years old, he copied down more than 100 entries from a tiny little book called The Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior. It was not an American work, but it was first published in London more than a century before George Washington was born. Yet the America that formed Washington demanded qualities that no book, no manual could teach. Before General Washington commanded an army, he spent his 20s surveying America's wild interior, saving up money, learning self-reliance on a continent that rewarded initiative more than pedigree. It didn't care if you were a nobleman, it cared what you could do. [08:26] Now, our society at the time reinforced the habits Washington learned in the wilderness. Frontier life rewarded resourcefulness, while America's colonial assemblies taught citizens to govern their own affairs. It taught citizens to be self-governing human beings. Churches at the time, especially those who were touched by the Great Awakening, reminded congregants that no earthly hierarchy outweighed the equal dignity of every human soul before its Creator. [09:01] All of that came together, and so it was no surprise that when Washington's soldiers first heard the declaration 250 years ago, they understood precisely what it meant. They understood the meaning that was conveyed. It was seismic, but it was their birthright as citizens of this new republic. The words might have been new, but they expressed a feeling, something that already lived in the heart of every single American patriot, and I believe those words still live in the heart of every single American patriot today. [09:30] And for seven long years, they fought for that birthright. It wasn't easy. On some days, it was hotter even than it was today, as hard as that is to believe. Many suffered and died for that dream and died for those principles. But by the grace of Almighty God, they secured for us a free, a proud, and an independent republic that endures, and doesn't just endure, but thrives to this very day. [09:55] As Washington traded in the uniform for the presidency, he remained preoccupied with the physical land that had shaped him. He imagined wagons crossing mountains, paths out of the Alleghenies and the Appalachians, and canals connecting the Potomac and the Ohio River to its western valleys. Our first president would not live long enough to see that vision of a continent connected. He would not live to see it to completion. But the rivers he surveyed in his youth carried on westward without him. [10:44] They carried settlers and new riches and cities waiting to be built. And eventually, they carried a 13-year-old boy by the name of James Buchanan Eads. In the fall of 1833, Eads and his family, like many Americans, moved west to the nation's growing frontier, the land of opportunity. And as their steamboat approached St. Louis, its boiler exploded, throwing him into the turbulent waters of the Mississippi. The family lost everything, every earthly possession, and the river nearly killed young Eads. From that moment on, he vowed not to be a slave to that mighty river, but to make it his own. [11:51] He received no formal education, but to support his family, he sold apples on the St. Louis riverfront, captivated by the bustle and frontier of boomtown St. Louis. At 16, he took a job on the water, and not long after, he conceived of an idea that most engineers at the time they thought it was crazy. They thought it was insane. You know, sunken ships and other treasures lay scattered along the bottom of the Mississippi. No business in the world existed to salvage them, to take that buried treasure on the bottom of the mighty Mississippi and bring it to work for people. Unlike the more peaceful streams out east, the river's strong currents and turbid waters, most insisted that ordinary diving in the mighty Mississippi was impossible. You could not do what Eads proposed that we do. But he disagreed, and so he did whatever American does when they're told they can't do something: he went out and did it anyway, and he did it himself. [12:54] He bought a 40-gallon whiskey barrel, fixed it to a diving bell, and climbed in, and down he went all by himself. The riverbed was pitch black, the current pulling his feet every which way. Sand swirled around him like a dense snowstorm, he later recalled, but he located his target. A large hunk of lead, tied on the cable, and came back to the surface. Eads went on to become one of the nation's greatest civil engineers. He built the very first bridge spanning the Mississippi River south of its confluence with the Missouri. An impressive feat for a man who'd never built a bridge before. The people who told him you can't build the most difficult bridge because you've never built a bridge before, he said, "Yes, I can, because I'm an American and I'm going to do it myself." [13:38] It was the first on the planet, that bridge, to be made of steel. And residents of St. Louis still use that bridge to this very day, nearly 200 years later. That is American ingenuity and American greatness. At the river's mouth in Louisiana, Eads raised jetties that helped calm its violent flooding to prevent the build-up of silt. And by doing so, he transformed New Orleans from the ninth largest port in the United States to the second most powerful port in the world, rivaling only the city that stands behind us. [14:02] But Eads had already faced a still greater test. Because as the Civil War broke out, the government summoned him to Washington for his help building the ironclads, which the United States Navy would seize the Mississippi with. It was no matter that Eads had never built a gunboat in his life, he had never built a gunboat ever. Instead, he completed 700 of them in 100 days. It's unbelievable. The river ships that Eads built were so strong that the Navy deployed them into the ocean to secure the Gulf. They served their purpose, they defended the Mississippi, and in doing so, they helped preserve our Union. [15:00] And so it kept growing. And of course, the American frontier made way to farms and factories, stretching further and further west. River towns became great cities. Railroads reached the Pacific. Steel mills rose where once wilderness had stood. [15:21] The American mind widened, and the Republican whose independence Washington won, that James Eads had helped sew together, grew into the most powerful industrial powerhouse in the history of humanity. For other nations, growing industry brought dispossession before it did prosperity. In the Old World, the one our ancestors had left behind, the industrial revolution threw society into chaos. And into that chaos rushed vacuums and ideologies that answered the dignity of man with labor camps and killing fields. Where the Old World led to communism and fascism, the Americans recognized that at root they were a denial of everything that Washington and Jefferson had read to his men 250 years ago. The free world needed to win. But in order for the free world to beat communism and fascism, it had to out-produce them. And as in every conflict before, America looked to her sailors for help, and to the builders who made sure those sailors had the very best ships to sail on. [16:20] Among them was a man that we know as Henry Kaiser. Like Eads, Kaiser had grown up with very little. The son of German immigrants, he dropped out of school at 13 to work the stockroom at a dry goods store in Utica, making a buck fifty a week and commuting four miles each way on foot. Eventually, he moved to Spokane for better job opportunities, setting his sights on starting his own company. Now, he walked into a bank with no business, no workforce, and no history, just a single proposed contract and what the banker would later describe as sheer audacity. He walked out with a $25,000 loan. [17:09] And with his workers, he erected the Hoover Dam and hundreds of miles of highway across the West. 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. [17:31] Kaiser pioneered health coverage at his construction sites, that's why we know the name of Kaiser. Because he understood that men working in dangerous conditions, they deserve to see a doctor. He saw his workers as partners, and he walked the walk long before it was fashionable to do so. 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. [18:11] Now, that cooperation was important, but it became profoundly important the day after Pearl Harbor. The United States Navy at the time needed ships bigger and better and faster than anyone thought they could be built. We didn't have the biggest navy in the world, but we needed one and we needed one fast. So Kaiser did what Americans always do when confronted with the impossible, he put it on his shoulders and said, "Let's go do it." [18:41] Kaiser had never made a ship in his life. But that wasn't going to stop him. First, he built shipyards all up and down the Pacific coast. Then he filled them with American workers, 250,000 of them. Farm boys from Iowa, miners from Appalachia, mothers from Detroit who had never held a welding torch. Together they launched nearly 15,000 Liberty ships, vessels that carried American cargo and sailors across two oceans. His Richmond yard built one of them, the SS Robert E. Peary, in an astonishing four days and 15 hours. [19:15] The shipbuilders Kaiser hired, they weren't just a means to an end, they were his partners. Kaiser looked at his workers and saw people, Americans who got sick, who had families to raise, who showed up in Richmond and Portland with little more than a hat in their hand, but who had amazing potential. He saw the potential of normal Americans when unshackled from destitution. And he saw them not just as mouths to feed or as workers to pay, he saw them as fellow citizens who could build amazing things. [19:51] So he built housing near these shipyards and nursery schools to help mothers join the war effort. He extended the health plan he had started at his dams to every worker in every yard, opening it to the public after the US won World War II. [20:10] And though separated by generations, I tell the story of these three men because Kaiser and Eads and Washington, they were exactly the kind of men that Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence for. Kaiser was an American. He looked at what needed doing and he did it. And he trusted the men and women around them to do the same, knowing that he could only do his job if they did theirs too. [20:39] Our Declaration of Independence may have spoken to universal human truths and broadly shared human desires, of course it does. But it was a document written by and for a particular kind of people, the American people. From General Washington to James Buchanan Eads, from Henry Kaiser, one of America's great shipbuilders, to the sailors standing here today. [21:02] And by the way, what you folks watching at home on TV may not realize is that everything that you saw, everything that you see today was destroyed last night in a storm. But these great sailors rebuilt it in 12 hours so that you all could be here so that we could have this amazing procession and so we could celebrate our 250th birthday in style. [21:30] All of us connected through the generations, rich and poor of every job. We are a people formed by generations of self-governance and personal industry. We are formed by frontier assembly hall and congregation, by river valley and prairie and factory floor. We are formed by the conviction that we are bound to one another not only by bloodline nor creed alone, but by a common character, a shared fate, and a shared future. [22:04] Ladies and gentlemen, I have to address what you will hear from some loud voices today. Because as much as all of us, whether we're Democrat or Republican, whatever our political persuasion, all of us are celebrating. But you will hear a couple small but loud voices today speak obsessively not of our national greatness, but of our national imperfections. They will speak of the powerless and the dispossessed. They will tell you that America is just another country where the weak struggle against the strong. And if they acknowledge that there is anything to be proud of in our history, they'll say it's the fact that sometimes the powerless have won a zero-sum battle. [22:48] They're wrong. They'll talk about America's sins with the anger and zeal of a brimstone preacher, but without any of the grace or forgiveness that must be present in the Christian faith. These people misunderstand the essence of America, from Thomas Jefferson to Henry Kaiser. They misunderstand that 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, from the most ambitious leaders and builders to steel welders like my grandfather. People who had their own role to play in turning this dangerous wilderness into the proudest civilization in history. [23:36] 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. Reject that America is a place for zero-sum thinking, because it is not. Our history is one of people carving a great civilization out of the wilderness. Reject the view of your nation that sees only its sins, but not its grace and its greatness. [24:09] Everything that we have done, 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. [24:23] When we won our independence, we were led by General Washington to liberty and greatness, but the marching ahead of him were thousands of boys from all over the new nation who gave Washington's military genius its foundation and its firepower. When we saved the world in World War II from tyranny in the 20th century, of course we needed great military leadership and tactical genius from our generals, but we also needed Rosie the Riveter, Iowa farm girls who built the machinery of war, and the sweethearts they sent to a world away to storm the beaches at Normandy. [25:02] When we went to the moon, of course our great astronauts flew the rockets and our great men of science and engineering built them. But there were clerks and janitors and welders like my grandfather who each played their distinctive American part. All of us have a part. All of us had our part, our role to play in creating 250 years of a proud American story. And all of us will need to do our part to create the next 250 years of American greatness. So I say to all my fellow Americans, I'm proud of you. Happy Birthday and Happy Birthday to our great nation. Today, my friends, we celebrate, and tomorrow we get back to work. God bless you. Thank you for having me.