David M. Shribman
Already it must be said: The semiquincentennial has all the makings of a dud.
Like all the 50th anniversary predecessors, this big anniversary celebration occurred amid controversy, questions about the character of American life, critiques about the nature of our democratic values and disputes about the meaning of our history. All of those conditions were present in 1826, 1876, 1926, and 1976.
But at least there was ambient joy in those commemorations. There was reason to celebrate the survival for 50 years of the first large democracy, the technological and industrial revolutions materializing at the 100-year mark, the blooming of American prosperity and promise after 150 years of relative national isolation, and the emergence of a newly optimistic country during the bicentennial.
Now, the survival of democratic values is uncertain, the technological revolution that has culminated in AI is creating deep uneasiness along with great promise, the national booster hopefulness of the pre-Depression 1920s has no current analog, and the funk of the 2020s is no match for the relative uplift of the post-Watergate, post-Vietnam mid-1970s.
Just as the previous commemorations weren’t rooted entirely in the events of their respective July Fourths, the semiquincentennial didn’t begin, and doesn’t end, with July Fourth. So it’s not too late for an upswing of positivity, or of mere sanguineness, in the remainder of the year, which comes 250 years after the promulgation of the Declaration of Independence and its timeless meaning — a document that, as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. suggested, was a promissory note for the future, one, he said in his famous 1963 March on Washington oration, “to which every American was to fall heir.”
Echoing the Declaration of Independence, King said the metaphorical promissory note “was a promise that all men would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
Perhaps the sour taste this celebration prompts — or, just as troubling, the feeling of emptiness that seems pervasive in the many commemorations — comes from this moment in the American passage. Indeed, the British newspaper The Guardian wrote, “If that’s the way America celebrates its birthday, you would not want to be present at its funeral.”
Only about four in 10 Americans said they felt “proud” about the country’s 250th anniversary, according to an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research survey. Three-quarters believe the signers of the declaration would be disappointed with how the country has turned out, according to Gallup.
This commemoration isn’t entirely without virtue. The Atlantic published the score of Julia Ward Howe’s “Battlefield of the Republic” on its cover this month, accompanying it with an essay on its eternal, always evolving, meaning. The New York Times published a piece examining the changing perceptions of the American Revolution, becoming part of the story as it told the story.
Even Donald Trump’s jeremiad against references in federal historical sites to the struggles of women and minorities had a salutary effect; his attacks prompted an animated discussion about what exactly was involved in the telling of history, and whether successes in crumbling ancient barriers should be as much an emblem of national pride as the achievements that for centuries have been celebrated, whether in textbooks, Disney re-creations, or popular folklore: In short, did Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Frederick Douglass deserve as much attention as, say, William McKinley, whom the president has singled out for special commendation?
But this celebration lacks buoyancy, which is the physical property that allows an object to rise from a submerged state — and there’s little question that the American spirit is under water today. Consider this: 80% of those voters who told the New York Times/Siena University Poll this spring that they were dissatisfied with the state of the country said that they wanted the nation’s economic and political system overhauled or even razed.
During the bicentennial, which is within the living memory of nearly three out of five of Americans today, the country actually was celebrating. Richard Nixon’s resignation two years earlier prompted the promiscuous employment of the phrase “the system worked,” and The Boston Globe plastered an image of the Constitution across the top of its front page. Both are inconceivable today. A popular book about Watergate, which Jimmy Breslin published in 1975, was titled “How the Good Guys Finally Won.” Today people think the good guys are confined to those in their own party.
It was, perhaps more than the early 19th-century era that bore that phrase, an era of good feeling. Much of it was due to the unelected President Gerald Ford, ridiculed and often reviled while in the White House, punished at the polls for his Nixon pardon, now a subject of reverence in the revisionism that has occurred since.
“I have a much higher estimate of him now, especially his values,” former Democratic Rep. Michael J. Harrington of Massachusetts said in an interview the other day. Harrington, two months from turning 90, is one of the few members of the 93rd Congress still alive; he testified against the confirmation of Ford and then voted against him in the House, but he said that “in the current era, it’s not hard to change your mind about Ford, and now I appreciate what he did for the country.”
Ford was, in a phrase identified with George W. Bush, a “unifier, not a divider.” Whatever the legacy of the current GOP president, no amount of revisionism will permit that description to be applied to him.
“Americans in 1876 were living in a time of dynamic economic and technological growth that had already wrought dizzying change within a single lifetime,” Fergus M. Bordewich wrote in “Centennial,” his chronicle, published last month, of the celebration of 100 years of American independence. The same can be said of our own era.
But this time there is no great world’s fair like the one in Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park. Though mired in management woes, it was far more ambitious than the 16-day Great American State Fair now open on the Washington Mall.
In remarks opening that Philadelphia spectacle, President Ulysses S. Grant spoke of the country’s achievement in “rivaling older and more advanced nations in law, medicine, and theology; in science, literature, philosophy, and the fine arts,” adding, “While proud of what we have done, we regret that we have not done more.” When it comes to the semiquincentennial, we already regret that we have not done more.
A Swampscott High School Class of 1972 member, David M. Shribman is the Pulitzer Prize-winning former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
