If Philadelphia founded America, Long Island helped build it

Philadelphia gets the soaring speeches, powdered wigs and parchment. It is where America declared what it intended to be. But if Philadelphia wrote the nation's mission statement, Long Island became the workshop where Americans tried — often brilliantly, sometimes brutally — to make it real.

Long Island had already played a part in the nation's founding. William Floyd of Mastic signed the Declaration, while Jupiter Hammon, born enslaved at Lloyd Manor, became America's first published Black poet — a reminder of the distance between declaring liberty and extending it to everyone.

But before the new nation could reckon with that contradiction, it first had to survive. Just weeks after independence was declared, British forces routed George Washington's army in the Battle of Long Island, which is also called the Battle of Brooklyn. But under cover of darkness and a providential fog, his troops escaped across the East River. America survived through nerve, luck and maritime skill — a formula Long Island baymen might still recognize.

In the next century, Walt Whitman of Huntington sang an expansive, democratic America into being. President Theodore Roosevelt governed from Sagamore Hill in Oyster Bay, carrying into the presidency a characteristically Long Island mixture of confidence, restless energy and enthusiasm for the outdoors.

Nearby, the Gold Coast showcased the rise of American capitalism. Fortunes made in railroads, banking and steel emerged as limestone palaces with more rooms than Nassau County has bagel shops and lawns that made Mitchel Field look like a putting green. The estates inspired "The Great Gatsby," but also highlighted inequality.

Long Island also helped America take flight. The Hempstead Plains became an aviation proving ground, and Charles Lindbergh departed Roosevelt Field for Paris in 1927. Decades later, Grumman engineers in Bethpage designed the lunar module. When Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon, Long Island's fingerprints were on the ladder.

Back on Earth, Robert Moses remade the Island for the automobile age. His parkways carried families toward Jones Beach and helped define a new landscape of recreation, mobility and suburban growth. Yet his legacy, too, embodies the contradictions of American progress: grand projects coupled with displaced urban communities.

Then Levittown turned potato fields into a template for the postwar middle class. Returning veterans could buy a house, a lawn and modern appliances for less than many had paid in rent. But discriminatory policies excluded Black families. Levittown became both achievement and indictment — the American experiment in miniature.

Long Island's influence has been cultural and athletic as well. Jim Brown went from Manhasset High School to become one of football's greatest players. Jerry Seinfeld carried Massapequa's observational instincts into a television show that found national comedy in parking spaces, waiting rooms and minor grievances. Mariah Carey rose from Huntington to supply America — and every shopping center on Earth — with its modern Christmas soundtrack.

At Brookhaven and Cold Spring Harbor laboratories, researchers like Nobel Prize winner Barbara McClintock have pushed the boundaries of physics, medicine and genetics. Meanwhile, commuters reenact another Long Island innovation every weekday: home in the suburbs, work in "the city" and dinner somewhere east of Jamaica.

Philadelphia gave America its ideals. Long Island gave them a stress test — in war, espionage, wealth, mobility, housing, science, sports and popular culture.

At 250, the nation remains unfinished, still experimenting and still commuting toward a more perfect union. Very possibly with a change at Billy Joel's Hicksville.

This guest essay reflects the views of Scott D. Reich, of Port Washington, an attorney and author who lectures on presidential history at the University of Pennsylvania.