“Let’s Go America!”
My son and his buddies predictably deliver a “Let’s go!” after a good play, win, whatever. Football field—let’s go. Basketball court—let’s go. PGA on the Xbox… yes, “Let’s go!” after Scottie Scheffler goes 387 off the tee.
I discovered this rah-rah America chant while combing through some video archives. Old films and TV intersect where my career and hobbies collide. Having spent 30 years (with a brief government hiatus) in the creative space, I enjoy anything old, marketing or film related—old advertisements, war propaganda, B&W movies, you name it. Although I was already a policy wonk before moving to Washington, D.C., my time there piqued my interest in U.S. and world history.
Finally, after spending 20 years in startups and SMBs as an entrepreneur, I love to celebrate exceptionalism. Seeing an entrepreneur nail a concept and provide a superior solution to a customer's pain point is pretty awesome. It doesn’t have to be my solution. Just seeing someone crush it and thinking to myself, “Wish I’d thought of that,” is fun.
That’s the wind-up. Here’s the pitch.
Let’s Go America! is an 8+ minute short film recorded three years after the New Deal—right smack dab in the middle of the Great Depression. It’s not as politically volatile as Make America Great Again, but the core message shares a bit of DNA. Like MAGA, LGA (Let’s Go America!) espouses American exceptionalism and advancement. Unlike MAGA, it isn’t a political time bomb that will turn off roughly half the country—or LGA shouldn’t be. It’s a depression era rallying cry, of sorts.
When you live long enough, you start to see patterns evolve. Some of the details are different, but at a high level, you get the feeling that we’ve been here before.
When you watch the "Let’s Go America!” video, you’ll get a sense of déjà vu. For example, the fashion industry is well known for recycling old trends. Recently, social media was set ablaze with a commercial about blue jeans. When I was younger, newspapers and television couldn’t stop covering a controversial blue jeans commercial. What goes around comes around.
Nostalgia drives trends. We romanticize the past. The problems you face today are unique and top of mind. Yesterday was so much better, right? Simpler values, easier times, clearer roles. But more often than not, we’re remembering a version of ourselves that’s been filtered by the passage of time.
The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) sponsored/produced this video. It wasn’t only a feel-good reel. NAM is what we’d call a special interest group today. They needed to give American workers a reason to stop pining for yesteryear and start working.
It was a call to remember that America’s strength didn’t come from what it had, but from what it could build next. If we don’t assume that every piece of content created by anyone was done for some nefarious reason, we might believe Let’s Go America! It would be a great slogan on a hat.
That kind of optimism on display in the short film wasn’t naïve. It was necessary. The country was in a slump, and morale needed a lift.
We’ve mapped the human genome and landed rovers on Mars. Connected the globe in real-time, and brought internet access to nearly every corner of the planet. We’ve reversed the course of deadly diseases, built machines that can think and learn, lifted millions from poverty, and extended life expectancy by decades. Yet, it takes a nanosecond to find someone complaining about something.
Progress isn’t perfect. But it’s real.
Gratitude seems to be in short supply today, but if we read between the lines in this short film, Americans 90 years ago took too much progress for granted. I devoted an entire chapter to gratitude in my book, writing:
“Gratitude turns what we have into enough, what we’ve done into momentum, and what we hope for into fuel.”
Let’s Go America! didn’t ignore the struggles of its time—it reframed them as fuel for innovation. It didn’t say “everything’s fine.” It said, “Let’s make it better.”
Let’s celebrate how far we’ve come, not out of arrogance, but out of gratitude. Not to pause and reflect, but to recharge and go forward, farther.
Let’s go, America!!
