Scandal, Protest, Goofiness, and Grandeur at the U.S. Bicentennial
Just after noon on July 1, 1976—an otherwise sleepy Thursday except that it was less than seventy-two hours until the Bicentennial—President Gerald Ford entered the U. S. Capitol. He then made his way to the National Statuary Hall, strode across its marble floor, and approached an ornate, thirty-five-hundred-pound, five-foot-tall, four-foot-wide cast-iron safe that had been sealed a hundred years earlier. Photographers stood poised, fingertips hovering over shutter buttons. The President, in a three-piece suit, was there to open the safe.
Two hundred years before that, on July 3, 1776, John Adams, in Philadelphia, wrote to his wife, Abigail, in Massachusetts, that he hoped succeeding generations of Americans would celebrate the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence “with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.” He didn’t say anything about a safe. All the same, his wish came true. Early American Fourths of July brought out the star-spangled bandstand, helping to build a sense of national unity where there hadn’t really been one, not because Americans agreed about what the anniversary meant but because they disagreed, publicly, boisterously, and pyrotechnically.
That the anniversary of the nation’s founding ought to be celebrated with especial extravagance every fifty or a hundred years, a tradition that the unlikely President Ford inherited, is an idea that started in 1826, the jubilee of independence. Late that June, Thomas Jefferson, eighty-three, gave thanks for the spread of the self-evident truths of the Declaration—“that the mass of mankind has not been born, with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them”—and expressed his hope that “the annual return of this day” would “for ever refresh our recollections of these rights and an undiminished devotion to them.” Days later, on July 3rd, on his deathbed at Monticello, Jefferson is said to have gasped, “Is it the Fourth?” He died the next afternoon. That evening, in Massachusetts, Adams, ninety, followed him. “They are dead,” Daniel Webster said, in a eulogy at a joint memorial service in Boston, but “to their country they yet live, and live for ever,” their memory all the more sacred for having died, together, more than five hundred miles apart, fifty years to the day that they first ushered in an era “distinguished by free representative governments, by entire religious liberty, by improved systems of national intercourse, by a newly awakened and unconquerable spirit of free inquiry, and by a diffusion of knowledge through the community, such as has been before altogether unknown and unheard of.” And that, more or less, if usually not so eloquently delivered, was the canonical Fourth of July speech for a very long time, even if it was utterly eviscerated by Frederick Douglass in 1852. “This Fourth of July is yours, not mine,” Douglass said. “You may rejoice, I must mourn.”
Whether to rejoice or to mourn has been the question of the Fourth of July every half century since the first one. Each anniversary is a yardstick used to measure Americans’ fidelity to or betrayal of the nation’s founding principles, its people’s moral progress or decay, its economy’s growth or decline, and the strength or weakness of civil society, of democracy, of freedom, of equality. You can use that yardstick to measure anything. Still, by almost any measure, 2026 is a goat rodeo.
One good idea, at the start of the planning for the two hundred and fiftieth, was to look back at the two hundredth. In 2018, a congressional commission hired a historical consultant named Brian Martin to prepare a report on the lessons of the Bicentennial. The next year, Martin submitted to the commission a report in which he concluded that “both federal bicentennial planners and their critics learned about the hazards of coopting history and the Bicentennial for present political gain.” His recommendation? “Consider how facilitating and coordinating a grassroots Semiquincentennial may mute the inevitable political noise.” He also remarked that one of the best things the Bicentennial Administration had done was to adopt the slogan “200 years, not 200 years ago.” Donald Trump and his staff ignored Martin’s findings. Martin told me, “The White House never referred it back to Congress.” It was as if the Bicentennial had never happened.
Up until the two hundred and fiftieth, which, save a miracle, is going to break all earlier records for dismal misadventure, regrettable calamity, and shocking violence, no fifty-year anniversary of the founding was more turbulent than the Bicentennial. At the time, the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., noting a rising “bicentennial gloom,” pointed out that “the centennial year was not so hot either.” Fair enough. But the Bicentennial lasted longer than any other anniversary, since from the start of planning—and the start was 1965—the idea had been to celebrate a “Bicentennial Era” that would run from 1970, on the anniversary of the Boston Massacre, to 1987, on the anniversary of the Constitutional Convention. This was a remarkably terrible idea. No country and no people, any more than any family, can endure twenty-two years of pained self-scrutiny; it’s like a marriage where you go to couples counselling every day, year in and year out, until the therapy is the marriage. The Bicentennial went from scandal to scandal. In 1972, not long after the Washington Post published the Pentagon Papers, it published a series about leaked government documents that became known as the Bicentennial Papers, indicting Richard Nixon’s American Revolution Bicentennial Commission for corruption, malfeasance, mismanagement, and “repeated attempts to exploit the bicentennial both politically and commercially.” After Vietnam, and after Watergate, planning for the Bicentennial descended into chaos. Ford found himself mired in that chaos. But he was determined to turn the Bicentennial to a different end: letting bygones be bygones. “My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over,” he said when he was sworn in after Nixon’s resignation, in August, 1974. “Our Constitution works; our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here, the people rule.” A month later, he pardoned Nixon.
Who knows when our own long national nightmare will end. It’s nice to imagine that it could happen. But can the past be pardoned?
Ford rang in the Bicentennial for nearly the entirety of his brief, accidental Presidency. He lit a lantern at Old North Church, in Boston. He stood on the Old North Bridge, in Concord. “Behind us lie two hundred years of toil and struggle, two hundred years of accomplishment and triumph,” he told Americans on New Year’s Eve, 1975. “We remain, in Lincoln’s words, ‘the last, best hope of earth.’ ” Apparently, though, the White House hadn’t been especially keen for the President to participate in the ceremonial opening of a hundred-year-old safe in the National Statuary Hall. Getting Ford’s staff to put it on his schedule had taken no small number of memos from members of the Joint Committee on Arrangements for Commemoration of the Bicentennial, who were “becoming quite concerned as to Presidential participation.”
The safe, known as the Century Safe, or the Centennial Safe, had been one of the goofier gimmicks of 1876, an anniversary that featured a World’s Fair that was at once an expression of America’s rising place on the global stage and an illustration of its abandonment of Reconstruction’s commitment to equal citizenship regardless of race or national origin. In July, 1875, Douglass gave a speech in Washington, D.C. It was delivered, like his more famous 1852 speech, on the Fifth of July, not the Fourth, because, as Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., writes in “America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries,” Black Americans commemorated the Fifth as Emancipation Day, beginning in 1827 (the year slavery ended in New York). A hundred years after the start of the American Revolution, slavery had ended, the Union had won the Civil War, the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed equal rights and birthright citizenship, and the Fifteenth guaranteed Black men the right to vote, but Douglass found little occasion for rejoicing. The Ku Klux Klan had arisen. Jim Crow was establishing itself. And the “grand Centennial hosannah” to be held in Philadelphia in 1876, Douglass warned, seemed likely to serve to reunite whites, North and South, and, by papering over the divisions of the Civil War, erase slavery from American history. “In what position will this stupendous reconciliation leave the colored people?” he asked. The next year, President Ulysses S. Grant opened the Centennial Exposition, in Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park, after having been ushered in by four thousand troops and accompanied by a bellicose “Centennial Inauguration March,” an original composition by Richard Wagner. (“Between you and me, the best thing about the march was the $5000 they paid me,” Wagner admitted to a friend.) Douglass sat behind the President, silent.
The Centennial Exposition—thirty thousand exhibits installed in more than two hundred buildings—showcased arts and sciences from four corners of the globe but especially, as Grant said, “the attainments made by our own people during the past one hundred years,” including, in Machinery Hall, the mammoth, fourteen-hundred-horsepower Corliss steam engine and the George Grant Difference Engine, which could perform twenty calculations a minute. The grounds were open twelve hours a day, every day, it cost fifty cents to enter, and ten million, or about one in five Americans, attended. You could also climb a ladder onto the right arm—the torch arm—of the future Statue of Liberty. William Dean Howells, the editor of The Atlantic, went on what he described as “a dull, drizzling day, somewhat cold and thoroughly unpleasant.” Howells found the art indifferent. In Machinery Hall, he complained of “too many sewingmachines.” He was disappointed in the displays from other nations, finding that the foreigners didn’t look foreign enough. (The Egyptian: he “wore a fez, but a fez is very little.”) In the U.S. Hall, he looked askance at George Washington’s “camp-bed, his table furniture, his sword, his pistols, and so forth.”(“In their character of relics we severely summoned what veneration we could.”) But even Howells admitted that, for all the fair’s silliness, it was impossible not to see it “without a thrill of patriotic pride.”
Anna Deihm, a Civil War widow and a New York publisher of the magazine Centennial Welcome and the newspaper Our Second Century, had a far greater appetite for relics than Howells had. She’d commissioned the building of the Centennial Safe, which was housed at the fair. At the safe, you could stop by, peer inside, and even page through “Photographs of the Great American People of 1876,” an album that included pictures of every member of the Forty-fourth Congress (the most racially diverse until 1969). And, for five dollars, you, too, could become great, by signing a “Citizens’ Autograph Album,” to be stowed away for posterity. (The historian Nick Yablon, in his terrific book “Remembrance of Things Present,” credits Deihm with democratizing the time capsule.) “Rarely is such a chance given to become illustrious on such cheap terms,” one critic sneered.
Deihm had decreed that the Centennial Safe be opened by the President of the United States on the nation’s two-hundredth birthday, in 1976. But the President of her day, Rutherford B. Hayes, who seized the office in the swindled election of 1876, failed to show up for the safe’s sealing. This did not bode well.
The Centennial wasn’t so hot, Schlesinger said. But it was a lot better than what happened in 1926, two years after the United States all but closed its borders under the terms of the Immigration Act of 1924. No one especially knew what to call the hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary, a sesquicentennial that promoters tried to bill, complete with punctuation, as “the Sesqui!” But planning for another World’s Fair in Philadelphia, modelled on the Centennial Exposition, hadn’t really begun until 1925; much of what had been planned, including a fake 1776 Philadelphia, was never built, not least because a great deal of the allotted money had been pocketed by grifters. Attendance at an entirely underwhelming and much smaller than planned exposition was dismal, a commercial and political failure. Nor did the Sesqui! escape controversy. After planners granted a permit to the K.K.K. to hold a “Klonvocation” at the exposition, Philadelphia’s Black, Jewish, and Catholic communities organized to object, and the permit was revoked. But, that September, fifteen thousand hooded Klansmen marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington in a show of the strength of American nativism, white supremacy, anti-Catholicism, and antisemitism.
Walt Whitman had wanted to read at the Centennial. He revised “Democratic Vistas” for 1876, picturing 1976. “Long ere the second centennial arrives, there will be some forty to fifty great States, among them Canada and Cuba,” he prophesied. “The Pacific will be ours, and the Atlantic mainly ours.” He even wrote a “Song for the Exposition,” an ode to the United States: “Thee, ever thee, I sing.” But he was deemed too radical to read at the Centennial.“I, too, sing America,” Langston Hughes wrote in 1926. He was too radical for the Sesqui.
Lyndon Johnson had the idea that the Bicentennial could help deliver the promise of the Great Society. In 1965, the year of the Voting Rights Act and the Immigration Act (which lifted the restrictions imposed in 1924), and the founding of the National Endowment for the Humanities, with a mandate to make plain how the humanities are essential to a functioning democracy, Johnson established the American Revolution Bicentennial Commission, signing the bill on July 4, 1966. Johnson’s plan for his thirty-four-person commission, whose members included Democratic and Republican senators, as well as artists and writers, Ralph Ellison among them, was to use the occasion to send money to cities for Bicentennial-themed public services, social programming, and urban-renewal projects. None of what the A.R.B.C. was tasked with doing had anything, really, to do with history, as the scholar M. J. Rymsza-Pawlowska has argued. The idea, instead, was to look to the future, all of which comported well with plans already on the ground in Philadelphia. If the Sesqui! hadn’t been such a disaster for the City of Brotherly Love, the stakes for the Bicentennial might not have been so high. But the city fathers of Philadelphia, regretting 1926 and determined not to miss the next opportunity, had begun planning for the Bicentennial in the nineteen-fifties.
However ambitious the A.R.B.C.’s plans, nearly all of them were scuppered after Nixon won the Presidency in 1968. The next year, Nixon disbanded Johnson’s commission and set up his own, entirely partisan, commission consisting of campaign donors and other supporters. Its charge was to celebrate American greatness. (The members of Johnson’s commission had submitted resignations upon Nixon’s election; these were routine, and would routinely have been ignored, but Nixon accepted them.) It soon became clear that a World’s Fair could not possibly go ahead. The Times architecture critic, writing in 1970, asked, “Are gaudy, extravagant, technological displays obsolete? Is a World’s Fair–type Bicentennial festival appropriate for a country racked with social, racial, and environmental agonies?”
On July 3, 1971, Nixon gave a speech from the National Archives in which he officially rang in the Bicentennial Era, now newly defined as a celebration of America’s “open borders, open hearts, open minds.” That summer, speakers at the Democratic National Convention accused him of trying to “steal” the Bicentennial. His commission, quietly abandoning an international exposition, decided instead to use the Bicentennial to celebrate American history under the banner of “Heritage ’76,” a commemoration that would largely be privately funded by American corporations. This altered the direction of the celebration, and also embraced the history of not only the American Revolution but any aspect of the American past. Having set aside the international exposition, the commission now proposed to build Bicentennial Parks in all fifty states. That plan fell apart, too.
The simmering resentments of the Bicentennial reached their fullest expression, unsurprisingly, in Philadelphia, as the historian Marc Stein recounts in “Bicentennial: A Revolutionary History of the 1970s.” Frank Rizzo, the city’s mayor, had traded support for Nixon’s reëlection bid for a promise that Philadelphia, and not Boston, would be chosen to host the international exposition. That would have involved razing homes in Black neighborhoods. Philadelphia’s Black community organized an extraordinarily successful opposition, staging events like a “Rally Against the Bicentennial” and march after march in which activists carried signs reading “Bicentennial Is a Ruling Class Ripoff” and “Bicentennial Is a Racist Pig Scheme.” A poll from 1971 showed that more than two in three Philadelphians opposed the Bicentennial, in its entirety.
A growing public dissatisfaction with the American Revolution Bicentennial Commission led Jeremy Rifkin, a charismatic New Leftist who charged Nixon’s commission with “political, ideological, and commercial exploitation of the observance by the White House and commissioners and staff,” to found the People’s Bicentennial Commission in 1971. It was the People’s Bicentennial Commission that leaked A.R.B.C. documents to the Washington Post the next year—documents that demonstrated the commission’s collusion with the G.O.P., including a memo in which the director of the commission described the Bicentennial as “the greatest opportunity Nixon, the Party, and the government has as a beacon of light for reunification and light within the nation and with the world.” The Post then published a series of articles, beginning with “The Big Birthday Bungle.” The Congressional Black Caucus called the Bicentennial a “fraud on the American people.” Jesse Jackson urged Americans to boycott it.
The Democratic Presidential candidate George McGovern charged Nixon’s commission with “secretly planning a bicentennial of boosterism and false patriotism designed for the re-election of President Nixon, the swelling of the GOP campaign fund, and the commercial profit of Nixon’s Tories.” A congressional investigation in 1972 gave some hint at the intensity of national division. The American Indian Movement activist Russell Means, in a statement, told the Senate that the Bicentennial “should not be a celebration of the past . . . for no American can truly celebrate . . . the events of Sand Creek, Washita or Wounded Knee.” Nor ought it be a celebration of the present, “for who can celebrate the unemployment, the bad health and the poor housing which characterize the lives of so many American Indians, Eskimo and Aleut people?” He called, instead, for a celebration of “a new beginning.”
But the pageantry’s momentum now seemed to be driving, very fast, to the past. In 1973, Boston held a reënactment of the Boston Tea Party, which was protested by Native Americans, by Vietnam veterans opposed to the war, by marchers carrying a banner reading “GAY AMERICAN REVOLUTION,” and by feminists urging the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. The leader of Philadelphia’s Gay Raiders handcuffed himself to a bannister in Independence Hall, by the Liberty Bell.
The commission fell apart after Watergate—Congress dismantled it. But, before Nixon left office, Congress started a new entity, an eleven-member, nonpartisan American Revolution Bicentennial Administration, and appointed as its director John Warner, the former Secretary of the Navy. The change effectively absolved the federal government of any role in what became known as the D.I.Y. Bicentennial but was, in fact, exactly what the People’s Bicentennial Commission had been urging for all along. “The Bicentennial is not going to be invented in Washington, printed in triplicate by the Government printing office, mailed to you by the U.S. Postal Service and filed away in your private library,” Nixon said. “Instead, we shall seek to trigger a chain reaction of tens of thousands of individual celebrations.” The A.R.B.A.’s main task was to anoint “Bicentennial Communities,” keep track of what was going on, and where, and when, and make a calendar and list of events available to the public. The Times reported that those events included “a square dance convention in southern California, a shuffleboard contest in Truth or Consequences, N.M., and an outrigger voyage from Hawaii to Tahiti. ‘It’s not hard to get on that list,’ said one Wisconsin Mayor, ‘and it’s not hard to be named a bicentennial community. All you have to do is apply.’ ” But it was this move, the devolution of Bicentennialism from D.C. to the rest of the country—a move made out of necessity, given Nixon’s diminishing political power—that saved the Bicentennial, to the degree that it was saved: abandoning national leadership and leaving the planning to the states and especially to cities and towns as a “hometown affair.” Warner, sworn in to the position in 1974, said, “The success of the Bicentennial will be judged by the number of participants, not spectators.”
Warner took not only to calendaring the Bicentennial events but also to counting them, issuing a monthly newspaper, the Bicentennial Times, that kept track of, and advertised, the many things going on, all over the place, much of it in the form of arts and culture, including, by one count, “1,000 plays, 100 major orchestral compositions, 300 operas and several hundred ballets.” Between 1974 and 1976 alone, the National Endowment for the Arts distributed nearly forty million dollars in grants to sixteen hundred projects. The National Endowment for the Humanities wrote checks day in and day out. The new regime oversaw a tremendous investment in American history, civic education, and civil society. Estimates vary, but something between a third and half of all local and state historical sites, houses, parks, and museums were either founded or received substantial funding from the federal government during the Bicentennial decade, from 1970 to 1980. (Ironically, many of these initiatives are now being dismantled due to both a lack of funding and ideological pressure.) The federal government also funded more than a hundred thousand programs across the country and, relying on rudimentary punch-card computers, kept track of everything going on everywhere and made that information available all over.
Probably the best thing to happen to the Bicentennial was Nixon’s resignation. “The lifting of the Watergate pall,” the Washington Post reported, had “suddenly put the bicentennial into a new and happier light.” There was no end to the kitsch: Bicentennial beer mugs, flatware, dishes, glassware, placemats, and salt shakers; little glass Liberty Bells; patriotic yo-yos and egg timers; Bicentennial coffee grounds and coffeepots; Red, White ’n Blueberry ice cream; Bicentennial Barbie with a white lace mobcap, a flouncy red skirt, a blue bodice, and white pantaloons. You could get a Bicentennial auto loan and screw Bicentennial license plates onto your new car. At diners, where you likely ate off placemats made to look like replicas of the Declaration of Independence, your coffee came with Bicentennial sugar packs, displaying a short but sweet biography of an American President, and your 7 UP in a commemorative sixteen-ounce bottle. You could wipe your hands on Bicentennial towelettes, featuring a silhouette of Paul Revere on a horse. Kellogg’s ran a Bicentennial contest (“Make a picture of your favorite American Revolutionary hero—like George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Betsy Ross, or others—eating a good balanced breakfast”); entrants got a red-white-and-blue kite. Campbell’s soup cans came with an offer for a Colonial Campbell’s Kids Doll. Log Cabin maple syrup was packaged in a special Bicentennial flask. You could buy Old Glory Bicentennial condoms; Kotex Bicentennial sanitary supplies that promised both “200 Years of Freedom” and “Personal Hygiene and Cleanliness”; and two-ply Bicentennial toilet paper. “Nobody asked for Bicentennial Schlock,” the historian Jesse Lemisch wrote. “And nobody will take responsibility for it.”
But there was also a lot of wacky fun and meaningful celebration. Canoe races and costume balls, bike races and game booths, folk festivals and powwows. Schoolkids painted fire hydrants red, white, and blue, and made patriotic macramé plant holders and pot holders and, out of clay, the head of George Washington. At the dime store, you could buy a cap-gun musket. If you could get there, you could see the Tall Ships or explore the Freedom Train or visit the Wagon Train. On TV, CBS ran “Bicentennial Minutes,” news reports from two hundred years ago, sort of like “Drunk History” but only tipsy. “Schoolhouse Rock!” was, in part, a Bicentennial project. John Denver, in a P.S.A., said that the whole point of the Bicentennial was for Americans to get more involved in government. “For better or worse, the bicentennial has begun,” the Times reported, “and there is a consensus of those in and out of the Government that, for better or worse, it is a celebration of the people.”
At the end of 1974, the National Park Service started filming interviews with park visitors from all over the country, and park rangers, too, from the Tetons and Yellowstone to Shenandoah and Santa Fe, for a vox-pop documentary called “The Birthday Party.” There was plenty of skepticism. “Right now, we don’t have a great deal to celebrate,” a middle-aged white guy, seemingly a tourist, said outside the White House. “I feel that it might leave a lot of people out,” a Black man with a red leather cap and aviator glasses said, stroking his chin. “Have we been preserving the ideas, the principles, of freedom, of liberty, of justice, of equality?” a young woman with long, brown Carly Simon hair asked. She was doubtful. But there was also quite a bit of openheartedness. “No one has the right answer to what the Bicentennial means in this country,” a park ranger said, just about summing it up.
It wasn’t perfect. “America has got the blues,” Gil Scott-Heron said in “Bicentennial Blues,” riffing on the “B-U-Y-Centennial. Buy a car, buy a flag, buy a map. . . . It’s a half-ass year.” But it wasn’t a no-ass year.
That Centennial Safe from 1876, five by four feet of cast iron: pretty much everyone forgot about it until, in 1971, a guy in Gainesville, Florida, read an article about it in the newspaper (“Smithsonian Can’t Find Keys to Centennial Safe”). That’s when he realized that he himself had the key; it had been left to him by his great-aunt Emma when she died, in 1932. He had to pressure Congress to elicit any interest in the Centennial Safe, but eventually it was brought to Statuary Hall on the eve of the Bicentennial. In January, 1976, at the start of the Bicentennial Congress, politicians flocked to the National Statuary Hall to watch the opening of the exterior steel door. The key didn’t work. In the end, staff at the Capitol had to hire a safecracker and jimmy the thing. “1876 Iron Box Draws a Crowd,” the Washington Post reported, “ ‘I heard they were going to be taking pictures,’ said Representative Claude Pepper, a Florida Democrat. ‘And naturally I want to be identified with anything concerning the Bicentennial.’ ”
That July, for the grand opening of the inside glass door, Ford was convinced by his staff that he had to make an appearance. His speechwriters grabbed the metaphor by the hinges. When the day came, the President strode to the safe and began his brief remarks. “There is no safe big enough to contain the hopes, the energies, the abilities of our people,” he said, reading from typewritten index cards. “Our real national treasure does not have to be kept under lock and key in a safe or in a vault. America’s wealth is not in material objects but in our great heritage, our freedom, and our belief in ourselves.” O.K., it wasn’t the Gettysburg Address. But it wasn’t bad. “As we look inside this safe,” he said, “let us look inside ourselves. . . . And let us look outside ourselves to the needs of our families, our friends, our communities, our nation, and our moral and spiritual consciousness.” He opened the safe door. Most of the stuff inside its velvet-lined interior turned out to be dead boring: a temperance pamphlet, books featuring the autographs and photographs of eminent and mostly eminently forgettable Americans, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s inkstand.
On the day itself, July 4, 1976, ABC News broadcast from a Bicentennial Center whose floors were red-and-white stripes. Harry Reasoner—white shirt, big fat red tie, pale-blue blazer—sat behind a blue-spangled desk. “What happened this Bicentennial is that, in a dozen years of backing and filling an argument, we never did decide on one big national celebration,” he said. “And maybe that was a good thing, because what filled the void was a lot of special things around the country.” Across its coverage, correspondents reported from all over the U.S.: a half million people gathered under the Gateway Arch, in St. Louis, to listen to American music; Marian Anderson read the Declaration of Independence outside Independence Hall, in Philadelphia, at the start of a nearly six-hour-long parade; the Smithsonian Folklife Festival displayed handicrafts on the Washington Mall; the People’s Bicentennial Commission protested against “big business” at the Lincoln Memorial; Americans celebrated the contributions of immigrants to American life at Battery Park, in New York.
That night, from the balcony of the White House, Gerald and Betty Ford—dressed, inevitably, in red, white, and blue—watched the fireworks display over the Washington Monument. “Rarely in the history of the world had so many people turned out so spontaneously to express the love they felt for their country,” Ford later said. “The nation’s wounds had healed.” If only.
This year, for the two hundred and fiftieth, on July 4, 2026, an optimistic if useless Congress is scheduled to bury a time capsule that is to be opened by the President on July 4, 2276, the nation’s five-hundredth anniversary: a Quincentennial Safe. Will there still be a President? A United States? A habitable planet?
No one in 1976, apparently, thought anyone would be holding a bash in 2026; I have seen not a single mention of celebrating the two hundred and fiftieth in the records of the Bicentennial. But someone had the idea that a congressional committee ought to pick some stuff to be locked up in the Centennial Safe before it was closed again, to be reopened at the Tricentennial, in 2076. That task was forgotten. Nevertheless, all over the country, Bicentennial Americans buried their own Centennial Safes. Wilmington, Delaware, buried a time capsule to be opened in 2076. So did the towns of Monticello, Arkansas, and Cinnaminson, New Jersey, and Brookings, South Dakota, and Wausau, Wisconsin. In Sandwich, Massachusetts, townspeople opened a time capsule that had been buried in 1884. The Reynolds Metals Company sold hundred-pound aluminum boxes and gave one to every state and territory in the Union. In Nebraska, a sixty-eight-year-old hardware-store owner—his store sold “everything for the farmer but the rain”—buried a 1975 Chevy coupe, a Kawasaki motorcycle, “a Teflon frying pan, a bolt of polyester fabric with a zipper and a pattern, a pair of bikini panties and a man’s aquamarine ‘leisure suit’ stitched with yellow flowers,” having taken advice from local morticians on the design of his crypt.
Time capsules are, generally, a bust. So is relitigating the past as a means of partisan political battle. Still, I like to think that groovy aquamarine suit is out there, buried somewhere in Nebraska, its yellow flowers fading. Long may it remain. “Art is long, and Time is fleeting,” Longfellow once wrote, dipping his pen into an inkstand later locked in the Centennial Safe. The poet was mourning the death of his wife. He was trying to find peace, resolve, courage. He decided to stop looking back: “Let the dead Past bury its dead.” ♦