Mostly, people remember the kitsch. There were star-spangled t-shirts and red-white-and blue dentures. You could even buy Minuteman-themed toilet paper. But the Bicentennial commemorations of the American Revolution in 1976 were about more than party favors. Fifty years later, as we again commemorate our nation’s founding, taking a serious look back at the Bicentennial offers some important lessons about the limits of federal power — and the depth of Americans’ political attachments.
It was a time not so different from our own. Crabby about crime and the cost of living, alienated from distant government institutions, and exhausted by the rhetoric of both political parties, Americans of the 1970s eagerly sought alternatives. In that hotly contested presidential election year, Republicans were divided between their establishment traditions and a media-savvy outsider. The Democrats, in organizational disarray, couldn’t decide whether to tack to the left or the center. Everyone had their eye on the price of gas and the mood of swing voters in Pennsylvania.
When Bicentennial planning began, President Richard Nixon declared he wanted a big party, and he intended to preside over it.
When Bicentennial planning had begun a few years earlier, President Richard Nixon declared he wanted a big party, and he intended to preside over it. Maybe a World’s Fair? But by the mid-1970s, the mood in the country seemed to suggest that patriotism had gone out of fashion along with coonskin caps and whitewall tires. After the oil shocks of 1973, Nixon’s resignation in 1974, America’s withdrawal from South Vietnam in the spring of 1975, and an ongoing urban crisis that brought New York City to the verge of bankruptcy that fall, Americans began to speak of an “Age of Limits.” In his 1975 State of the Union address, President Gerald Ford admitted that, “I must say to you that the state of our Union is not good.” Maybe a World’s Fair didn’t make sense. And Congress never delivered the money Nixon had requested. America’s Bicentennial would take a different path.
Across the political spectrum, Americans in 1976 used our Revolutionary heritage to advance their political visions. Native Americans performed a victory dance at Little Bighorn, the site of a massive defeat for U.S. forces on July 4 a century before. In San Juan, New York, and Philadelphia, Puerto Rican nationalists called for a “Bicentennial without Colonies.” Most visibly, the People’s Bicentennial Commission — headed by young radicals fresh from campus antiwar protests — spoke out against corporate power and what they called the “Buy-Centennial Sell-a-Bration.” (PBC protestors even pelted California governor Ronald Reagan with eggs at a January 1976 campaign stop in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.) Conservative voices tapped into the Revolution’s critique of centralized authority to speak out against bureaucratic regulations and an income tax rate that topped out at 70 percent. “We’re a colony declaring independence,” asserted a parents’ group opposed to mandatory school busing in South Boston, Massachusetts.
By the mid-1970s, the mood in the country seemed to suggest that patriotism had gone out of fashion along with coonskin caps and whitewall tires.
Orchestrating the work of the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration (ARBA) was former Secretary of the Navy (and future Virginia Senator) John W. Warner. The American Freedom Train brought priceless American artifacts to nearly 150 communities nationwide. Hundreds of covered wagons followed the Bicentennial Wagon Train’s path to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. On the big day itself, there was pomp and circumstance, kicking off with Washington D.C.’s National Pageant of Freedom. President Ford visited Independence Hall in Philadelphia along with Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II. Ford was then whisked off to New York Harbor where he observed Operation Sail ’76, which gathered more than 200 historic “Tall Ships” for an enormous fireworks display. (Tellingly, the man accused by the New York Daily News of having told the city to “Drop Dead” never debarked from the USS Nashville.)
But behind the headlines, something else was happening. Warner called for a “low-key, non-political program” that featured “state and local initiatives without imposing a single theme.” Local commemorations counted in the tens of thousands. Neighborhood parties and family barbecues gathered millions more. “The Bicentennial,” ARBA observed, would be “a hometown affair,” equal parts quest for meaning and evasion of difficult political questions. The anniversary’s localism had consequences. Before and after July 4 also came a new passion for state and local history; increased interest in folk art and Americana; a renewal of historic crafts such as quilting; a passion for genealogy. These interests, handed down in communities and families, have lasted for generations.
In the end, the unofficial commemorations are the real legacy of the Bicentennial. In our own time, as we struggle to find shared meaning in the Revolution’s legacies, Americans across the spectrum will once again employ our precious heritage to advance their divergent, and incommensurable, political goals. That’s okay. But let’s not forget the parades, the quilting bees, and the barbecues. U.S. House Speaker Tip O’Neill famously quipped that all politics is local. This July Fourth, we might pause to consider whether all patriotism is local too.
Christopher Capozzola is the Elting E. Morison Professor of History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He spent the Bicentennial on a parade float dressed as a Pilgrim.