Support the NAHFM Act
About the NAHFM Act:
On August 17, 2026, Senators Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), Tim Kaine (D-Va.), and Dave McCormick (R-Pa.) introduced the National American History and Founders Month Act, which would permanently designate November as a time to celebrate, study, and remember the American founders and founding principles. Beyond the formal designation, the bill urges schools, communities, and other organizations to host commemorative events and educational programs that teach civics and foster historical literacy.
How to support:
STEP #1: Find Your Senators and Their Contact Info
Click the button to open the Senate's official directory. Search or scroll to your state — each state lists two senators with links to their official contact pages. Open both senators' pages and use their web contact form to submit your letter.
STEP #2: Customize the Letter of support below
Swap in your senator's last name after "Dear Senator," and fill in your name (and organization, if applicable) at the bottom. The bill details are accurate as written, so leave those alone. If sending to both senators, send two versions with the correct name on each — a brief personal line on why the bill matters to you is optional but strengthens the letter.
Letter of support:
Dear Senator [LAST NAME],
Please vote for passage of National American History and Founders Month Bill (S. 5279), a bipartisan bill co-sponsored by Senator Roger Wicker (MS-R), Senator Tim Kaine (VA-D), and Senator Dave McCormick (PA-R).
Sincerely,[YOUR NAME][YOUR ORGANIZATION (IF RELEVANT)]
Please vote for passage of National American History and Founders Month Bill (S. 5279), a bipartisan bill co-sponsored by Senator Roger Wicker (MS-R), Senator Tim Kaine (VA-D), and Senator Dave McCormick (PA-R).
Sincerely,[YOUR NAME][YOUR ORGANIZATION (IF RELEVANT)]
Press Release:
Wicker, Colleagues Introduce Bill to Honor American Founders and Founding Principles
WASHINGTON – U.S. Senators Roger Wicker, R-Miss., Tim Kaine, D-Va., and Dave McCormick, R-Pa., introduced the National American History and Founders Month Act, which would permanently designate November as a time to celebrate, study, and remember the American founders and founding principles.
“Our founders established a system of government that has held firm these 250 years. As the United States has grown from a fledgling nation into a world leader, the founders’ system has endured. And it will remain strong—but only if we pass down their ideals,” said Senator Wicker. “May this legislation inspire educators, parents, and community leaders to share the stories of our founding with the coming generations of Americans.”
“Today’s students will be the engaged leaders of tomorrow only if they have a deep understanding of our nation’s founding and history,” said U.S. Senator Tim Kaine. “Designating November as National American History and Founders Month will mean more opportunities for our students to learn about U.S. history in an engaging way, including lesser-told stories. I encourage all of my colleagues to support this bipartisan legislation.”
“America’s founding principles have guided our nation for 250 years, and we have a responsibility to ensure the next generation understands the rich history that has shaped our country into what it is today. Designating November as National American History and Founders Month will give schools, communities, and organizations across the country a dedicated time to honor our Founders and reflect on our nation’s enduring values. With our nation celebrating its 250th anniversary, there is no better moment for this effort. I’m proud to join Senators Wicker and Kaine in introducing this legislation to keep America’s story, and its founding truths, alive for generations to come,” said Senator McCormick.
“What sustains a nation is not the absence of flaws. It is shared principles and the honesty to confront our history while preserving the ideals that bind us,” said Dr. Jennifer London, President and Founder of the National American History and Founders Month Organization. “November should be the month we do both, every year, from this 250th anniversary of our founding and beyond.”
In addition to designating November as National American History and Founders Month, the bill urges schools, communities, and other organizations to host commemorative events and educational programs that teach civics and foster historical literacy. The legislation is particularly timely as the United States continues celebrating the 250th anniversary of its founding.
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“Our founders established a system of government that has held firm these 250 years. As the United States has grown from a fledgling nation into a world leader, the founders’ system has endured. And it will remain strong—but only if we pass down their ideals,” said Senator Wicker. “May this legislation inspire educators, parents, and community leaders to share the stories of our founding with the coming generations of Americans.”
“Today’s students will be the engaged leaders of tomorrow only if they have a deep understanding of our nation’s founding and history,” said U.S. Senator Tim Kaine. “Designating November as National American History and Founders Month will mean more opportunities for our students to learn about U.S. history in an engaging way, including lesser-told stories. I encourage all of my colleagues to support this bipartisan legislation.”
“America’s founding principles have guided our nation for 250 years, and we have a responsibility to ensure the next generation understands the rich history that has shaped our country into what it is today. Designating November as National American History and Founders Month will give schools, communities, and organizations across the country a dedicated time to honor our Founders and reflect on our nation’s enduring values. With our nation celebrating its 250th anniversary, there is no better moment for this effort. I’m proud to join Senators Wicker and Kaine in introducing this legislation to keep America’s story, and its founding truths, alive for generations to come,” said Senator McCormick.
“What sustains a nation is not the absence of flaws. It is shared principles and the honesty to confront our history while preserving the ideals that bind us,” said Dr. Jennifer London, President and Founder of the National American History and Founders Month Organization. “November should be the month we do both, every year, from this 250th anniversary of our founding and beyond.”
In addition to designating November as National American History and Founders Month, the bill urges schools, communities, and other organizations to host commemorative events and educational programs that teach civics and foster historical literacy. The legislation is particularly timely as the United States continues celebrating the 250th anniversary of its founding.
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Why National American History and Founders Month is Important
When the last delegate signed the Constitution in September 1787, Benjamin Franklin pointed to the sun carved into the back of George Washington's chair. He confessed that for four long months, he could not tell whether it was rising or setting. Only now, he said, did he know it was rising.
History tells us that as Franklin left the final session of the convention; a Philadelphia woman asked him what kind of government the delegates had given the country. His reply has echoed for two and a half centuries: “A republic, if you can keep it.” The conditional clause was the whole point. Madison studied the ruins of every democracy and republic that came before precisely because they can fail, and they fail when citizens stop understanding what they have inherited and what it costs to maintain. A free people cannot preserve what they do not understand. Washington and Jefferson both asserted that an educated citizenry is vital to preserve a self-governing nation. Self-government is not a birthright that transfers automatically. It is a skill, and skills must be taught.
Consider how improbable it all was.
Thirteen quarrelsome colonies, historically jealous of one another, took on the most powerful empire on earth and won an eight-year war they could barely fund. Then, having won it, they did something even rarer: they built a government peacefully, through argument and ballot rather than bayonet. Madison himself marveled at it on the floor of the Virginia ratifying convention. Nations had formed confederacies under the pressure of war before. To form one general government freely and deliberately, with no common enemy at the gates, was something new under the sun.
It happened because seven very different men brought seven very different gifts to the same table.
Franklin, the Uniter, spent 40 years preaching that separate filaments of flax are weak until they are twisted into thread, and at 81, he coaxed a deadlocked convention into the compromise that saved it.
Adams, the Visionary, gave the movement its structural imagination by drafting the Massachusetts constitution that became the national model.
Hamilton, the Federalist, argued the Constitution into existence in print and then built the financial machinery that turned a bankrupt confederation into a profitable nation.
Jay, the Statesman, ran the Revolution's counterintelligence, wrote the peace that doubled the country's territory, and absorbed the abuse of a nation to buy it the time it needed to grow strong.
Madison, the Architect, studied every government in recorded history and distilled the lessons into a blueprint that still stands.
Jefferson, the Defender, gave the cause its voice and stood guard against concentrated power, insisting on a Bill of Rights so that liberty would be written down, not merely assumed.
And Washington, the Executive, held it all together by the sheer weight of his character, twice walking away from power at the moment he could have kept it, and in doing so teaching the world what the leader of a self- governing nation looks like.
Their differences were not incidental to their success. They were the engine of it.
Motivated variously by duty, honor, liberty, unity, and the raw ambition to build, they disagreed with one another constantly, publicly, and sometimes bitterly. Yet the system they created did not require them to agree. It required only that they keep arguing within the rules they had made together. That is the quiet genius of the founding. Franklin compared the work to a craftsman making a broad table: when the edges of the planks do not fit, the artist takes a little from both and makes a good joint.
The Connecticut Compromise was such a joint. So was the Bill of Rights, a document Madison and Jefferson sparred over until Jefferson convinced Madison of its necessity.
An honest reckoning requires us to say plainly what these men did not resolve. Most of them owned other human beings while pledging their lives to liberty, and the contradiction was not lost on them; the Constitutional Convention debated slavery and then compromised on it, deferring the question to later generations who would pay for that deferral in blood. The Declaration's promise that all men are created equal was, at its signing, an aspiration rather than a fact. But it was an aspiration with far-reaching impact. Every subsequent generation of Americans who fought to widen the circle of liberty, from the abolitionists to the suffragists to the marchers of the civil rights movement, made their case not against the founders' words but with them.
The founders built better than they lived. That is not a reason to discard their work. It is the strongest reason to study it.
That conviction is why the National American History and Founders Month Bill is important: to ensure that each November, and in every classroom and community it can reach, Americans return to the people, the ideas, and the events that built our country, studying the full American story, its triumphs, and its shortcomings alike.
November is the month of Thanksgiving, a day Washington designated as a day of gratitude for our country to unite the colonies and a day Lincoln formalized as a day of thanksgiving and unity to unite the country. As a month of unity and thanksgiving November is a fitting time to reflect on our founding.
Two hundred and fifty years on, history still has much to teach us:
- That union is strength, and disunion is an invitation to every enemy of liberty.
- That compromise is not surrender but craftsmanship.
- That ambition, harnessed to the public good, can raise an orphan to a treasury and a farmer's son to a presidency.
The argument between federal power and individual liberty was never meant to end, only to be conducted honorably. And what these founders made was never merely a government. It was, and remains, an idea called the United States of America. Whether the sun over that idea is rising or setting is not a question the founders answered for us. It is the question they entrusted to us, as they entrusted it to every generation before ours: to learn the history, to understand the principles, and to keep the republic.
The Founders gave us an unfinished sentence and trusted us to keep writing it. The least we owe them is to remember and understand how it began.
History tells us that as Franklin left the final session of the convention; a Philadelphia woman asked him what kind of government the delegates had given the country. His reply has echoed for two and a half centuries: “A republic, if you can keep it.” The conditional clause was the whole point. Madison studied the ruins of every democracy and republic that came before precisely because they can fail, and they fail when citizens stop understanding what they have inherited and what it costs to maintain. A free people cannot preserve what they do not understand. Washington and Jefferson both asserted that an educated citizenry is vital to preserve a self-governing nation. Self-government is not a birthright that transfers automatically. It is a skill, and skills must be taught.
Consider how improbable it all was.
Thirteen quarrelsome colonies, historically jealous of one another, took on the most powerful empire on earth and won an eight-year war they could barely fund. Then, having won it, they did something even rarer: they built a government peacefully, through argument and ballot rather than bayonet. Madison himself marveled at it on the floor of the Virginia ratifying convention. Nations had formed confederacies under the pressure of war before. To form one general government freely and deliberately, with no common enemy at the gates, was something new under the sun.
It happened because seven very different men brought seven very different gifts to the same table.
Franklin, the Uniter, spent 40 years preaching that separate filaments of flax are weak until they are twisted into thread, and at 81, he coaxed a deadlocked convention into the compromise that saved it.
Adams, the Visionary, gave the movement its structural imagination by drafting the Massachusetts constitution that became the national model.
Hamilton, the Federalist, argued the Constitution into existence in print and then built the financial machinery that turned a bankrupt confederation into a profitable nation.
Jay, the Statesman, ran the Revolution's counterintelligence, wrote the peace that doubled the country's territory, and absorbed the abuse of a nation to buy it the time it needed to grow strong.
Madison, the Architect, studied every government in recorded history and distilled the lessons into a blueprint that still stands.
Jefferson, the Defender, gave the cause its voice and stood guard against concentrated power, insisting on a Bill of Rights so that liberty would be written down, not merely assumed.
And Washington, the Executive, held it all together by the sheer weight of his character, twice walking away from power at the moment he could have kept it, and in doing so teaching the world what the leader of a self- governing nation looks like.
Their differences were not incidental to their success. They were the engine of it.
Motivated variously by duty, honor, liberty, unity, and the raw ambition to build, they disagreed with one another constantly, publicly, and sometimes bitterly. Yet the system they created did not require them to agree. It required only that they keep arguing within the rules they had made together. That is the quiet genius of the founding. Franklin compared the work to a craftsman making a broad table: when the edges of the planks do not fit, the artist takes a little from both and makes a good joint.
The Connecticut Compromise was such a joint. So was the Bill of Rights, a document Madison and Jefferson sparred over until Jefferson convinced Madison of its necessity.
An honest reckoning requires us to say plainly what these men did not resolve. Most of them owned other human beings while pledging their lives to liberty, and the contradiction was not lost on them; the Constitutional Convention debated slavery and then compromised on it, deferring the question to later generations who would pay for that deferral in blood. The Declaration's promise that all men are created equal was, at its signing, an aspiration rather than a fact. But it was an aspiration with far-reaching impact. Every subsequent generation of Americans who fought to widen the circle of liberty, from the abolitionists to the suffragists to the marchers of the civil rights movement, made their case not against the founders' words but with them.
The founders built better than they lived. That is not a reason to discard their work. It is the strongest reason to study it.
That conviction is why the National American History and Founders Month Bill is important: to ensure that each November, and in every classroom and community it can reach, Americans return to the people, the ideas, and the events that built our country, studying the full American story, its triumphs, and its shortcomings alike.
November is the month of Thanksgiving, a day Washington designated as a day of gratitude for our country to unite the colonies and a day Lincoln formalized as a day of thanksgiving and unity to unite the country. As a month of unity and thanksgiving November is a fitting time to reflect on our founding.
Two hundred and fifty years on, history still has much to teach us:
- That union is strength, and disunion is an invitation to every enemy of liberty.
- That compromise is not surrender but craftsmanship.
- That ambition, harnessed to the public good, can raise an orphan to a treasury and a farmer's son to a presidency.
The argument between federal power and individual liberty was never meant to end, only to be conducted honorably. And what these founders made was never merely a government. It was, and remains, an idea called the United States of America. Whether the sun over that idea is rising or setting is not a question the founders answered for us. It is the question they entrusted to us, as they entrusted it to every generation before ours: to learn the history, to understand the principles, and to keep the republic.
The Founders gave us an unfinished sentence and trusted us to keep writing it. The least we owe them is to remember and understand how it began.