But there are better ways of saying that.
"Out of many, one" implies 13 states becoming one entity. Not 13 separate but equal entities. We had a confederation before the federation we're in now, and it didn't work. It's a singular word, "one." And it's neuter. A collective entity.
It also refers to many peoples coming together to form one people. Not separate but equal peoples. We tried that. It wasn't the ideal that much of the US set for itself, at least not long term. It didn't work. In the desire to be sure that we're all true to our skin color and the culture and values that apparently are intrinsic to those skin hues, in an attempt to hold onto unchanging cultural traits that change over a hundred years and are learned but serve as a demand for power and status, we really want it the way one politician put it in a notorious gaffe: That our motto is "out of one, many."
The Latin motto is close to a restatement of the melting pot; the gaffe reverses that in a way that was trendy when he was in college and to the present. People have to do some fancy footwork to make it mean "salad bowl." But we do that. A lit professor told me a certain early 1800s work had women's rights as its central theme. My objection was that women simply didn't occur as main characters, and as peripheral characters were just mixed in with the peripheral men. "Precisely. Silence. The contrived manner in which women were marginalized and relegated to the periphery is the primary message. It screams for women's emancipation and right to vote."
It was a work that dealt with an army office and his aide after their small unit was destroyed behind enemy lines in the early 1800s and how they fought their way back to their all-male unit. The peripheral characters were the occasional local villagers, almost all hostile and therefore either avoided or to be killed, or their sweethearts in memories and flashbacks--up there with roast beef and warm rooms. Simple topic, no women soldiers at the time. Written by somebody who lived in the area and fought on that "front." Silence, sometimes, is just silence. The naive reading is correct. Anything but silence in that work would have necessarily been contrived. But since she required that every work be about her pet topic, there you have it. (She'd have been happier if a strong local woman had killed the men. Then it would have been pro-women, anti-male, anti-imperialist and pro-indigenous struggles. Alas, such was not the Caucasus in the early 1800s.)
E pluribus unum.
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