10 Moments That Almost Broke America, But Made Us Stronger Instead

By Alex Buscemi, Editorial Manager at Builders | 9 min read

You’ve probably heard it uttered online recently: America is more divided than ever. But we've survived worse. Much worse. And every time we did, we came out stronger than before. As we reflect on our nation’s 250 years, here’s the history worth remembering. History that proves we’re a nation built by Builders. 

1. The American Revolution (1765–1789)

It's easy to forget that the founding of America was, at the time, a wildly reckless idea. A handful of squabbling colonies decided to pick a fight with the most powerful empire on Earth, and for years it looked like a catastrophic mistake. We nearly lost the war more than once. Then we nearly lost the peace: our first attempt at a government, the Articles of Confederation, was such a flimsy mess that the whole experiment almost dissolved before it began.

What pulled us through wasn't unity. It was debate. Loud, contentious, occasionally vicious debate among people who disagreed constantly. Out of that mess came the Constitution, a system built on the radical assumption that people who disagree can still govern together. We've been proving it works ever since.

2. The Civil War (1861–1865)

This one didn't almost break us. It broke us. Clean in half. More than 600,000 Americans died (still more than every other American war combined) and for four years there was no guarantee the country would exist when the smoke cleared.

But the war also forced a reckoning the founders had kicked down the road: a nation built on the words "all men are created equal" could not keep millions of people in chains. The Union held. Slavery ended. And the Constitution gained three amendments that began, however imperfectly, to make the promise of 1776 something closer to true. We were nearly destroyed by our worst contradiction, and we emerged having confronted it.

3. Women's Suffrage (1920)

Here's a moment that didn't almost break America so much as reveal that America was already broken and had been from the start.

For nearly 150 years, half the population was simply not allowed to help steer the country they lived in, paid taxes to, and gave birth in. The fight for the vote took more than seventy years, and leaders such as Susan B. Anthony were even arrested for attempting to vote anyway.

Women finally got the right to vote in 1920 with the passing of the 19th amendment. The deciding vote came from a young legislator who changed his mind only after finding a letter from his mother in his pocket. “Don’t forget to be a good boy,” it read.

4. The Great Depression (1929–1939)

When the market crashed in 1929, it took the country's confidence down with it. One in four Americans was out of work. Families lost everything. Breadlines stretched around city blocks. The Dust Bowl destroyed our agricultural base. Around the world, other nations facing the same despair turned to dictators and demagogues who promised easy answers.

But instead of abandoning self-government, we reinforced it. The era gave us Social Security, deposit insurance so your savings couldn't vanish overnight, and a basic safety net under the highwire of American life. We were tested to see whether democracy could survive hard times and we answered with compassion, building the floor that's caught millions of us ever since.

5. McCarthyism (1950–1954)

Fear is the easiest thing in the world to weaponize, and in the early 1950s a senator named Joseph McCarthy proved it. Riding a wave of Cold War paranoia, he accused, blacklisted, and ruined Americans by the hundreds on flimsy or invented evidence. Careers ended. Friendships dissolved. People ratted out their neighbors to save themselves. For a few years, the land of the free got very afraid of itself.

Finally, journalist Edward R. Murrow seized the courage to challenge McCarthy. He devoted a now-legendary episode of his CBS show, See It Now, to condemning McCarthy for bullying and lack of evidence. Senate hearings followed, which included a devastating rebuke by a young lawyer named Joseph Welch: “Have you no sense of decency, sir?” The Senate voted to censure McCarthy that December. And the country remembered due process isn’t a fair-weather luxury. 

6. The Civil Rights Movement (1954–1968)

Like suffrage, this was not a wound to America so much as the healing of one. For a century after slavery ended, an entire race of Americans lived under a system of segregation and intimidation that made a daily lie of the country's founding creed. A nation cannot honestly call itself free while it does that. We were broken, and most of the country had simply learned not to look.

The movement made us look. Through boycotts, marches, and staggering personal courage in the face of fire hoses and worse, leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and ordinary people like Rosa Parks forced the country to choose between its comfort and its conscience. The Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act that followed made America more genuinely America. 

7. The Assassination of JFK and 1968 (1963–1968)

It's hard to overstate how unmoored the country felt in this stretch. A young president gunned down in Dallas. Five years later, within a span of two months, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy both assassinated. Cities burning, a war souring overseas, a generation convinced the whole thing was coming apart at the seams.

And yet the institutions held. Power transferred peacefully, as it always had. Grief did not curdle into collapse. The country that staggered out of 1968 was bruised and grieving and changed. But it was still standing, still voting, still arguing about its future the way free people do. Sometimes strength isn't triumph. Sometimes it's just refusing to fall down.

8. Watergate (1974)

A sitting president of the United States orchestrated a criminal cover-up and tried to bend the machinery of government to protect himself. If that doesn't shake your faith in a system, nothing will. And for millions of Americans, it did.

But then the system did exactly what it was designed to do. A free press dug. Congress investigated across party lines. The courts compelled the truth. And in the end the most powerful man in the world discovered he was not, in fact, above the law, and resigned. Watergate could have taught us that the powerful always win. Instead it proved the opposite: that no one is too big for the rules. 

9. The Americans with Disabilities Act (1990)

For most of our history, a huge share of Americans were locked out of ordinary life. There were stairs with no ramp, jobs with no accommodation, buses they couldn't board, buildings they couldn't enter. A country isn't truly free if a quarter of its people can't get in the front door.

In 1990, disability rights activists abandoned their wheelchairs and crawled up the 83 steps of the United States Capitol. After the stunning demonstration, the Americans with Disabilities Act passed with broad support from both parties. The ramps and elevators it required finally made our nation accessible to the people we'd left out.

10. September 11th (2001)

On a clear Tuesday morning, the worst attack on American soil in living memory killed nearly 3,000 people in a matter of hours. The shock of it is hard to describe to anyone who didn't live through it. A collective gut-punch of grief and fear that froze the entire country in place.

And then something remarkable happened. Strangers carried strangers down stairwells. Firefighters climbed up while everyone else ran down. And on September 12, every home in the nation had an American flag on proud display. For a while, the petty divisions that usually consume us simply evaporated, and we remembered — all at once — that we were one people. The grief was real and it lasted. But so did the proof, written in the actions of thousands of ordinary people that day, that when it truly counts, Americans show up for each other.

Some of these moments tested whether we could endure. Others tested whether we'd live up to our own promises. We didn't pass every test gracefully, and we're still working on a few of them. But 250 years in, the scoreboard is pretty clear: every time someone declared America finished, America had other plans.

We are not more divided than ever. We are people who have survived worse and built better, again and again, usually by remembering that the person across the aisle is still a neighbor.

That's the history worth remembering. And it's the work still worth doing.

Alex Buscemi can be reached at alex.buscemi@buildersmovement.org

Art by Matthew Lewis

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