David M. Shribman
Now begins the run-up to an important marker in our national life, one that will spark contemplation and controversy.
The 250th anniversary of American independence — a year from this month — comes at a time of great national tumult. The nature of our democracy is shifting. Large portions of the country are uneasy about its new direction and its very survival. Underway is a great reckoning about our national character, even as there is a resurgence of an ages-old narrative about the country’s passage from primitive colonies to fragile confederation to world superpower. The battles of the current age are in many respects battles over, and about, the past.
The country’s semiquincentennial — get used to that word, employed to mark a half-century after the bicentennial — arrives at a time of great unease. In that regard, it matches the 1976 commemoration, which came a mere two years after the Watergate scandal and the resignation in disgrace of President Richard Nixon.
In many respects, the questions that shared bicentennial attention with the Tall Ships in American waterways are the same as those that will be in the air next year: Is this a country of laws or of men and women? How much power does the president have? Is the judicial branch a sufficient check on executive-branch prerogative? What are the limits of a president’s war-making powers?
Indeed, it is remarkable how many of the questions of the Watergate experience and the Nixon presidency remain unanswered — especially remarkable when we acknowledge that we thought so many of those questions had been settled a half-century ago.
Here’s one among many, the notion that “when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” That’s not a contemporary remark but an exact 48-year-old quote from Nixon in one of his famous conversations with the journalist David Frost. The Supreme Court addressed that issue last summer, but some ambiguity, and much discomfort, remain.
Some of the questions, about the intentions and motivations of the founders, that are in the fevered air of the mid-2020s have been asked since the very beginning of the republic. Here’s one that would make for animated dinner-party conversation, a faculty-lounge debate and an undergraduate final-examination essay:
Does the “all men are created equal” phrase of the Declaration of Independence render the founders, many of them slave owners, vulnerable to charges that they were self-interested hypocrites worthy of our skepticism, if not contempt? And does the Constitution — a document setting out an elegant equipoise of checks and balances — they created during a hot Philadelphia summer make them seem instead political visionaries worthy of modern praise?
All these questions and more should be part of our celebration of 250 years of American democracy. Already the debate is on. We need it.
That debate begins, as so many things in contemporary American life do, with Donald Trump. To oversimplify:
The president — he was not a history major at Penn — contends that many historians focus unnecessarily on the negative, propelling what he believes are peripheral issues to the forefront of their examination of the country’s past, warping the American past by making it seem racist, sexist, even genocidal.
For their part, many academic and popular historians agree that the founders were revolutionaries in thought and deed, but that their motives were complex, and that in the course of the American Pageant — the title of a history text that’s been used, with revisions, for generations — there have been episodes and currents of thought that were harmful and that today are regrettable and embarrassing.
All this will be played out as Trump and his associates reveal plans for a National Garden of Heroes; as the administration gives shape to the national celebration of what it calls “A New Era of American Greatness”; as the documentary filmmaker Ken Burns rolls out his 12-part documentary on the American Revolution, beginning Nov. 16; and as cities and towns plan their own star-spangled commemorations.
Ruled both by the decimal system of the ancient Greeks and by the American system of the founders, we go into spasms of introspection every 50 years.
That first 50-year reflection ended with the deaths, both on July 4, 1826, of the onetime-rivals-turned-patriotic-pen-pals John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. It is a moment of synchronicity that gives pause even to those who are skeptical of the notion, sometimes dated to John Winthrop in 1630, that the United States was part of the plan of an especially idealistic God.
Then, in 1876, the commemorations neatly summarized America at age 100. There was a centennial exposition in Philadelphia that attracted 10 million people to stare at the massive Corliss steam engine, which stood in Machinery Hall and powered 800 machines on the fairgrounds; an effort by suffragists, including Susan B. Anthony, to read their Declaration of the Rights of the Women of the United States to an assembly of political and cultural leaders; and the massacre of six Black citizens in Hamburg, South Carolina, on July 4.
A century ago, in the marking of the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, a Republican president so different from the current incumbent — modest, quiet, spare of boasts and verbosity — issued an eloquent statement in Philadelphia:
“Certainly enough time has elapsed to demonstrate with a great deal of thoroughness the value of our institutions and their dependability as rules for the regulation of human conduct and the advancement of civilization,” said Calvin Coolidge. “They have been in existence long enough to become very well-seasoned. They have met, and met successfully, the test of experience.”
Then the 30th president, known as Silent Cal for being taciturn, did something quite uncharacteristic. He went on.
“Amid all the clash of conflicting interests, amid all the welter of partisan politics, every American can turn for solace and consolation to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States with the assurance and confidence that those two great charters of freedom and justice remain firm and unshaken,” he said. “Whatever perils appear, whatever dangers threaten, the Nation remains secure in the knowledge that the ultimate application of the law of the land will provide an adequate defense and protection.”
A few days short of a year from now, Trump — who said the silver lining in his 2020 defeat is that he will be president for the semiquincentennial — will deliver his commemorative remarks. Would he — could he — give a speech much like Calvin Coolidge’s?
David M. Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
