From Thirteen States to a Shared American Ideal
Written and illustrated by one Ralph Losey, assisted by many AI.
E Pluribus Unum means “Out of Many, One.” The words appear on the Great Seal of the United States, carried on a scroll in the beak of the American bald eagle.
The phrase is short. The idea behind it is not.
How can people who come from different places, hold different beliefs, belong to different groups, and sometimes disagree sharply still remain part of one nation? Americans have been wrestling with that question since the beginning.
Where Did E Pluribus Unum Come From?
On July 4, 1776, only hours after approving the Declaration of Independence, the Continental Congress appointed Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson to propose a seal for the new United States. They consulted the artist Pierre Eugène du Simitière, whose design included the Latin phrase E Pluribus Unum. Congress did not accept that first design, but it kept the motto. Six years later, on June 20, 1782, Congress adopted the final Great Seal. National Archives: Original Design of the Great Seal of the United States.
The original meaning was quite practical. The thirteen former colonies were becoming states in a single country. Charles Thomson, Secretary of the Continental Congress and principal designer of the final seal, explained that the shield represented the states joined together and that “the motto alludes to this union.” The U.S. Department of State still describes E Pluribus Unum as expressing the union of the original thirteen states. U.S. Department of State: The Great Seal.
The words themselves were older than the United States. E Pluribus Unum had appeared on British publications before the American Revolution, including The Gentleman’s Magazine, which gathered many contributions into one publication. A similar Latin expression appears in an ancient poem called the Moretum, traditionally associated with Virgil, describing different ingredients being mixed into a single dish. The exact route by which the phrase reached the founders is less certain than the history of its adoption on the Great Seal. The important point is that the Americans gave an old phrase a new political meaning.
One Nation Did Not Mean One Kind of Person
Originally, the “many” referred mainly to the states. Over time, Americans gave the motto a broader meaning.
That expansion was neither automatic nor easy.
The Declaration of Independence announced that “all men are created equal” and possess rights including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Yet the new nation permitted slavery. Women could not vote. Native Americans were largely excluded from the political community the new government was creating. America began with an ideal much larger than its actual practice. Library of Congress: Creating the Declaration of Independence.
That gap between principle and practice became one of the central struggles of American history.
Abraham Lincoln used the image of a divided house in 1858 while confronting the conflict over slavery. He warned that “a house divided against itself cannot stand.” Seven years later, near the end of a Civil War that had actually divided the country, Lincoln’s Second Inaugural called for reunion “with malice toward none” and “with charity for all.” Library of Congress: Lincoln’s House Divided Speech Library of Congress: Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address
After the war, constitutional amendments abolished slavery, established national citizenship and equal protection of the laws, and prohibited denying the vote because of race. Later amendments and civil-rights laws continued expanding participation in American democracy. The history was uneven and often painful, but the legal meaning of who belonged to the American “one” became far broader than it had been in 1782. National Archives: Amendments 11–27.
Today, E Pluribus Unum can therefore be understood at more than one level: many states forming one country, and many kinds of people sharing one civic home.
Unity does not require Americans to erase their religions, cultures, family histories, regional identities, or political beliefs. Political scientists have even studied E Pluribus Unum as the challenge of maintaining a common national identity while allowing ethnic and other identities to remain meaningful. Pérez, Deichert & Engelhardt, “E Pluribus Unum?” The Journal of Politics.
The Modern Problem: We Disagree, and We Dislike
Americans have always argued about politics. Something more troubling happens when disagreement becomes affective polarization.
That term sounds technical, but the idea is simple. It means that people do not merely disagree with members of another political party. They increasingly dislike, distrust, or fear them as people.
Research reviewed by the Carnegie Endowment finds that this kind of partisan hostility has increased over recent decades. At the same time, the evidence does not support the simple idea that ordinary Americans have separated into two perfectly opposed ideological armies. Political leaders are often more sharply polarized than the public, and ordinary voters regularly misunderstand what people on the other side actually believe. Rachel Kleinfeld, “Polarization, Democracy, and Political Violence in the United States”
That distinction matters.
America Is Not Simply Red Versus Blue
In 2026, the Pew Research Center surveyed 10,357 American adults and examined their answers to 30 questions about government, economics, immigration, culture, political leaders, and other subjects.
Instead of finding two neat camps, Pew identified nine political groups.
Some were strongly ideological and closely attached to one party. Others mixed conservative, liberal, and moderate views in combinations that do not fit comfortably into the usual red-blue picture. Pew concluded that most Americans fall within what it called a large and politically messy center, although many still lean clearly toward one party. Pew Research Center, “Beyond Red vs. Blue: The 2026 Political Typology”
This does not mean America is secretly in agreement.
The nine groups disagree about immigration, government, abortion, race, economics, religion, foreign policy, and many other important questions. But nine groups are quite different from two solid blocks.
A person labeled “Republican” or “Democrat” tells us something about that person’s politics. It does not tell us everything.
The Perception Gap
Another body of research examines what has been called the perception gap: the difference between what people on one side actually believe and what people on the other side think they believe.
A 2019 More in Common study of 2,100 Americans found that Democrats and Republicans substantially overestimated the percentage of people on the other side holding extreme views. A later research review by Carnegie reached a similar conclusion: many partisans have major misconceptions about the other party’s preferences, and these errors can be especially large among highly politically engaged people. More in Common, “The Perception Gap” and Carnegie Endowment review of polarization research.
In plain English: we sometimes argue with an exaggerated picture of the other side.
The loudest politician, television personality, viral post, or anonymous social-media account is not necessarily a good representative of millions of ordinary Americans.
What Does 90.9% Really Mean?
One study provides an especially striking example.
Psychologists Lukas Wolf and Paul Hanel reanalyzed data from more than 2,000 liberal and conservative Americans who had answered questions measuring basic human values. Those values included broad ideas such as security, achievement, caring for others, independence, and respect for tradition.
The researchers found statistically significant differences between the groups. But when they looked at the full distributions, rather than merely comparing group averages, the median overlap was 90.9%. Wolf & Hanel, “Correcting Misperceptions of Fundamental Differences Between U.S. Republicans and Democrats”.
That number needs careful handling.
It does not mean Republicans and Democrats agree on 90.9% of political issues. It does not mean their political differences are trivial. And the original dataset identified respondents as liberals and conservatives; the researchers used Republican and Democratic labels in their experimental graphs because those identities are highly correlated.
What the 90.9% figure shows is narrower and still remarkable: the distributions of fundamental human values in the two groups overlapped extensively.
Wolf and Hanel then conducted three experiments involving 2,529 participants. When people saw graphs showing the overlap rather than graphs emphasizing differences in averages, they consistently perceived Republicans and Democrats as more similar. In some experiments they also saw more potential for compromise and expressed more hope about the country’s future. The effects on partisan hostility itself were mixed. Full peer-reviewed study and results.
That is a useful lesson in statistics and citizenship at the same time.
Two groups can have real average differences and still contain enormous overlap among individual people.
Common Ground Is Not the Same as Agreement
Nothing on this page asks Americans to pretend that serious conflicts are unimportant. Democracy exists partly because people disagree about what government should do.
The more modest claim is also the more defensible one:
Our differences are real, but the people behind the political labels are more varied, more complicated, and sometimes more similar than our political culture encourages us to believe.
That makes E Pluribus Unum neither a description of perfect harmony nor a demand for conformity. It is a continuing challenge.
How do many people remain one people while continuing to disagree?
Research cannot answer that question for us. But it can help identify practices worth trying.
Continue to: Four Civic Practices →
© 2026 Ralph Losey.
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