Thank you for that generous introduction. I am deeply honored to accept this award and to join the distinguished company of my fellow inductees, doubly so on the eve of our great national milestone.
The individuals recognized by this Academy over the decades share no single origin or path to their achievements—only a common sense of possibility, which we have come to call the American Dream.
I have been blessed with a fulfilling and successful career. But my presence here today was far from predetermined.
I was born and raised in the South Carolina Low Country. When I was nine years old, I started working two summer jobs. And I haven’t stopped working since, in a career that has taken me to nearly seventy countries over forty years.
In November 2024, the call for public service came from the President-elect to serve as the seventy-ninth U.S. Secretary of the Treasury. Nothing else in my life has ever matched this whirlwind, but the privilege of shaping the trajectory of the United States for the next 250 years is purposeful, consequential, and all-consuming.
In short, my life has been the “only in America” story that I am determined to preserve for this and future generations. Yet, I mention that story not because it is unique, but because it is familiar. Because it could be anyone’s. Because ours is a country that has staked itself on the proposition that the circumstances of one’s upbringing are never the boundaries of one’s life.
I recently highlighted at an event with our great First Lady and a group of foster children the remarkable story of Alexander Hamilton. Before he became America’s first and most iconic Treasury Secretary, Hamilton was an orphan, sustained by little more than a belief that his origins need not define his fate.
An indigent boy from the Caribbean could in fact become “the man who made modern America.”
The United States itself was founded on that premise. But every generation must be able to see in the those that came before it what is possible for those that follow.
That is why I find such hope in this Academy as you connect extraordinary young people with individuals who have excelled in every field of human endeavor.
In convening men and women of accomplishment with young scholars of promise, the Academy perpetuates possibility. It transforms achievement from something to be admired into something to be emulated. More than commemorate the American Dream, the Academy works to extend its reach.
So, if a story like mine merits a place in this collection, I trust it will not endure as the record of a particular individual. Let it stand instead as a small reminder of a larger idea that has animated this country for two and a half centuries: that possibility is never preordained but awaits each of us according to our will to pursue it.
That great insight has been a source of America’s strength since its founding.
It’s what transformed a small republic on the edge of a continent into the most prosperous nation over the long sweep of human civilization.
And it is what I see today in the young scholars here before me—the same conviction that this country’s best days always lie ahead and are theirs to bring about.
So thank you again for conferring on me this great honor. I join my fellow honorees in gratitude to the Academy for preserving our stories—and to this country, on the cusp of its 250th anniversary, for making each of them possible.
Thank you.
###