The US celebrated the end of a ‘long national nightmare’ as it turned 200. What about now?

Summary

A decade in the making, the 1976 bicentennial had a cathartic impact on the wounded national polity Americans: how do you feel about the country’s future after 250 years of independence? I t felt like a proper jamboree – a coming together of diverse peoples who thought they had something to celebrate. But the defining moment of the 1976 bicentennial, the US’s last epic birthday celebration, came two years before. “My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over,” Gerald Ford declared in his presidential inauguration speech of 9 August 1974. “Our great republic is a government of laws and not of men.” Ford’s words, spoken in the immediate aftermath of Richard Nixon ’s resignation over Watergate , were intended as balm to a nation already polarised by the trauma of the Vietnam war and the civil rights upheavals of the 1960s. But they also set the tone for a nationwide commemoration of America’s 200th birthday that had been a decade in the making and which, when it arrived, had a badly needed cathartic impact. The 1976 bicentennial is popularly remembered for visual events such as the tall ships parade in the New York harbour that featured 16 traditional vessels and 100 modern boats from around the world sailing down the Hudson River. It drew state visits from the heads of state of the US’s two longest-standing allies, Queen Elizabeth of Britain and Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, the president of France. Ford himself, in a 4 July speech, memorably characterised the American Declaration of Independence as “not a protest against government, but against the excesses of government”. But the 1976 anniversary is chiefly recalled by historians as an event extolling the robustness and endurance of the US political system, which was widely deemed to have functioned in the face of adversity in a manner that feels distant and remote in the era of Donald Trump . “The 1976 celebration was a more vital and happy one because of a broad belief that two years earlier the system had worked, and we were celebrating a system that had cleansed itself,” said Jonathan Alter, a historian and biographer of Jimmy Carter , who was elected president in 1976 after defeating Ford in that year’s presidential election. “We were in a period of renewal and relief, and today we’re in a period of fear and loathing,” said Alter. “We don’t have any reason to celebrate our founding documents, because we’re living in an authoritarian state that is quite different from the one that the founders created.” The prevailing mood 50 years ago was perhaps best summed up by the title of a book by the New York newspaper columnist Jimmy Breslin , How The Good Guys Finally Won, which described the role of Congress and the courts in bringing Nixon to account. Within a week of becoming president in 1969, he ordered a shake-up of the American Revolution Bicentennial Commission – a bipartisan body established by Congress three years earlier to organise celebrations – to facilitate the appointment of his allies and supporters to key positions. “There is a really easy comparison to be made between how Richard Nixon initially wanted to celebrate the bicentennial, and how Trump wants to now, which is that both administrations micromanaged and tried to exercise tremendous control over a kind of top-down patriotic commemoration,” said MJ Rymsza-Pawlowska, a history professor at the American University in Washington. Amid widespread criticism even among Republicans, and with Watergate gradually consuming his presidency, the commission was eventually wound up by Congress while Nixon was still in the White House, and replaced with a new body that promised to support small-scale and decentralised events in local communities across the country.