The Spirit of ’76
When the United States celebrated its 200th birthday in 1976, it wasn’t the best time for a party. In 1974, President Nixon had resigned from office following the Watergate scandal and inflation hit a post war high of 11%. In 1975, Saigon had fallen despite the sacrifice of 58,000 American lives and unemployment hit a post war high of 8.5%. The bicentennial came at a low point in American history.
And yet, as historian Dominic Sandbrook wrote in “Mad as Hell: The crisis of the 1970s and the rise of the populist right;”
The biggest party in the nation’s history began at 4:31 a.m. on Sunday, July 4, 1976, on Mars Hill in northeastern Maine. As the first rays of the rising sun struck American soil, National Guardsmen fired a fifty-gun salute and raised the Stars and Stripes. Across the nation, the American people woke to a gorgeously warm, sunny morning. “The sun always shines in Pennsylvania,” Gerald Ford said to laughter from the huge crowd at Valley Forge, where at nine o’clock he greeted the Bicentennial Wagon Train.
Two hours later he was in Philadelphia, standing alongside Charlton Heston and the nation’s guest of honor, Queen Elizabeth II, before the great bronze Liberty Bell outside Independence Hall. He reflected on the struggles of the Republic’s early years, the injustice and prejudice that had blighted the American experiment, and he looked forward to the nation’s third century, “The world may or may not follow,” he said, “but we lead because our whole history says we must.” He asked for a moment of silent prayer, and in the streets and squares around Liberty Hall a million people bowed their heads.
By early afternoon, Ford was in lower Manhattan for the main event of the day, the arrival of the tall ships in New York Harbor. Along the shore, on Brooklyn’s Belt Parkway and on the crumbling West Side Highway, an estimated seven million people watched as more than two hundred sailing ships, clippers and schooners and some of the grandest windjammers in the world, slipped under the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge and headed north toward the Hudson. In the skies, helicopters circled the towers of Manhattan; on the water, bobbing in the sunlight, thousands of little boats jostled for a better view. Ninety feet above them, on the flight deck of USS Forrestal, thousands of guests waved and cheered, among them Prince Rainier and Princess Grace of Monaco, seventy ambassadors, fifty congressmen, and most of the cabinet. At two o’clock precisely, Ford solemnly rang the ship’s bell thirteen times, once for each of the original colonies. At exactly the same moment, in Philadelphia, the cracked Liberty Bell was softly struck with a rubber mallet, and across the nation, in every church and school, every city and town, bells rang out, a chorus of patriotism and pride.
That night, as the crowds lingered along the shores of the Hudson, chatting and laughing and eating ice cream, the biggest fireworks display in New York’s history lit up the skies above them, rockets streaming up from Liberty Island, Ellis Island, and Governors Island. After the last burst of color had died away, the crowds turned toward the Statue of Liberty and sang “The Star-Spangled Banner,” while overhead a helicopter towed a gigantic flag made from thousands of red, white, and blue lightbulbs. There were fireworks, too, along the Charles River in Boston, where 400,000 people crowded the Esplanade to hear the Boston Pops, with thousands more watching from sailboats on the river. As the orchestra reached the climax of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, the church bells pealed, howitzers thundered, fireworks sent shards of color wheeling through the sky, and red, white, and blue geysers burst from a fireboat behind the Hatch Shell. On television, pictures showed girls applauding on their boyfriends’ shoulders, fathers lifting their children in the air, a South Boston priest waving an enormous American flag. “In a day marked by crescendos,” Walter Cronkite told a nationwide audience, “this is perhaps the high point.”
The bicentennial celebrations spoke of a zest for life and a sense of fun too often overlooked in all the gloom about inflation and energy crises. With official programs approved in more than twelve thousand communities, there was barely a street untouched by the birthday spirit. And despite the flood of commercial kitsch—the red, white, and blue bicentennial toilet seat, the bicentennial coffins and grave markers, the patriotic fifteen-hundred-gallon septic tanks, or even the $150 red, white, and blue dentures sold by a Miami firm promising to “set dentistry back two hundred years”—it was hard to find anyone with a bad word for what The Washington Post called “the birthday party of the century,” a moment “of deep and moving reconciliation.” “It was better, glory be, than anyone expected,” agreed the Chicago Tribune, calling it “a great, spontaneous, do-it-ourselves celebration of neighbors, communities, churches, fellow countrymen” that made it possible “to feel a historic sense of good, of right, of mission about our country again.”
Will America’s 250th birthday be like that?
Gallup recently found that the percentage of Americans who were “Extremely/Very proud” to be American had fallen from 81% in 2016 — exactly where it was in 2007 — to a record low of 53%. While 70% of Republicans are “Extremely/Very proud” to be American — up just two points from the number in the last two years of President Obama’s time in office — just 14% of Democrats described themselves that way; down from 56% in 2013.
This is commonly attributed to a revulsion toward President Trump. That might explain much of the decline among independents — there is a definite break there in 2017 — but the decline among Democrats started before that so there must be something more to it.
Your opinion toward the government of the day should not dictate your opinion toward your country. If it does, then it is not your country you love but your political party and you have no right to chide anyone else for belonging to a “cult.” “Our patriotism is medieval, outworn, obsolete,” Mark Twain wrote in 1905. “The modern patriotism, the true patriotism, the only rational patriotism, is loyalty to the Nation all the time, loyalty to the Government when it deserves it,” he concluded, in words all Americans, even the most “progressive” of our countrymen and women, should be able to agree with.
The United States of America has been in many worse spots than it is right now. It barely survived its first winter of existence when George Washington’s army was disintegrating by the banks of the Delaware. It nearly broke in two, and might well have, in the Civil War, if not for the heroic sacrifices of men like those Minnesotans who fought and died at battles like Gettysburg and Nashville. And then there was the 1970s, as the country prepared for its last big birthday. A knowledge of history gives people perspective, among other things, an ability to assign the correct weighting to events. That is, perhaps, why there is an attempt to make sure American kids know ever less of it.
Two years before the bicentennial, Johnny Cash sang “Ragged Old Flag;”
She waved from our ships upon the briny foam
And now they’ve about quit waving her back here at home
In her own good land here, she’s been abused
She’s been burned, dishonored, denied, and refusedAnd the government for which she stands
Is scandalized throughout the land
And she’s getting threadbare and wearing thin
But she’s in good shape for the shape she’s in
‘Cause she’s been through the fire before
And I believe she can take a whole lot moreSo we raise her up every morning
We take her down every night
We don’t let her touch the ground and we fold her up right
On second thought, I do like to brag
‘Cause I’m mighty proud of that ragged old flag”
If you think America is going through a tough time, remember that we have pulled through tougher ones. As President Clinton put it in his First Inaugural Address, “There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America.” Such a remarkable country is worth celebrating, whatever your politics.