E Pluribus Unum

The motto the country chose for itself before it had finished becoming a country: out of many, one. It appears on the seal, on the coin, in the founding idea that a single people could be made from many origins without erasing the many. Whitman turned it into poetry, singing the one self that is also the crowd, the e pluribus unum made into verse and breath. The Union lens lives here. The hard, unfinished work of the phrase is the whole American experiment: the one, made from the many, on purpose, again and again.