We long for that perfect Fourth of July. Perhaps there was some festival, some county fair, some town picnic you went to as a kid, and you can still remember the crispness of the coating on the corn dog or the smell of the kettle corn.
The enthusiasm of the band, banging out some Sousa with gusto or even some toe-tapping rock ‘n’ roll, the dusk dropping slowly, sky melting into fireworks which, as a kid, were bright and loud and wondrous. If you were born before 1970, you might even wax nostalgic for the tall ships that glided with so much grandeur and grace into New York Harbor. Even just 11 years ago, the Capital Fourth was mobbed with people of these diverse United States, welcomed to eat the overpriced snow cones in humid Washington and spread out on the National Mall to listen to cannons go off in the “1812 Overture” and whisper to each other, “that’s not about the War of 1812, y’know.”
Oh, the nostalgia of the corn dogs and our tall ships.
It doesn’t feel terribly celebratory right now, as divisive as things are, with our 250th birthday hijacked in D.C. to score political points and to suck up taxpayer money to line someone else’s pocket. The Freedom250 festival in Washington has been a giant bust, but even if people had showed up, the fenced-off, algae-filled Lincoln pool and constant National Guard patrols would probably have turned them away. I keep thinking it’s like a teenager planning a 16th birthday bash (or quincenera or high school graduation, whatever) for years, only to find mom married a skeezy stepdad who gives out creepy looks and crashes the party drunk and ruins everything, man! We only had one shot at this party, and it’s been screwed up.
But the idea of a glorious Fourth has often been more imaginary than actual. What we’ve been also really good at is glorious protest. For 250 years, people have used the day to point out that the promise of liberty has not always been delivered. In that, 2026 fits right in, and you may find yourself feeling a little proud, by the end of this, to carry on a tradition of disagreeing with policy. It’s flippin’ patriotic!
Read It and Weep!
The Declaration hadn’t even been signed yet, on July 8th, 1776, when it was printed and distributed to the crowds at large. The Continental Congress had voted for independence on July 2nd–John Adams famously thought THAT would be independence day. But the words proved more compelling. The Declaration of Independence was formally approved, after much debate about the words ( see the movie 1776), and signed by the president of Congress, John Hancock, in large letters. Those present signed, but it had to be sent to the states to gather all the signatures, and that took until August 2nd.
However, the interim version was also sent to the printers with the date prominent on the top and the Hancock prominent on the bottom. Jefferson’s draft had included the word “inalienable,” although the movie has Adams saying “I’ll speak to the printers about it.” Apparently, he successfully contrived to have it changed because the printed and final signed draft says “unalienable.” I’ve always heard the former, though, and textbooks include it. The first of many ongoing debates about liberty.
From July 5th through the 9th in 1776, the printed version brought happy rebels out into the streets. They stood on stoops, reading the declaration to the crowds. Loyalists and Tories stayed inside, but those whose lack of fervor didn’t embrace the new ideals found their “Windows Paid for their Obstinacy,” according to a Philadelphia observer.
A few years later, as the Congress again came together to debate the really important document, the Constitution, argument and speakers inside were mirrored by grandstanding outside. Hamilton and the Federalists were pushing for certain views which we now take for granted, but there were Anti-Federalists, later to be called the Democratic-Republican party by Jefferson. There was also a New York vs. Virginia vibe, something like the red/blue state views we have today. Both wanted freedom and liberty, but disagreed on how best to achieve it.
When the Constitution was passed in its current form, it fell to the states to ratify it. This took several years. In the intervening time, states which had passed the agreement already would send out a large parade in force, pushing for acceptance by putting on a grand show. In states that hadn’t ratified yet, other states would send groups who put on parades, speeches, fireworks (illuminations), and other means of entertainment and persuasion. One scholar notes that in 1788 in New York, plans were for a joint celebration by Federalist and “Anti-Federalists,” but it turned into a shouting match, then a “full-scale street battle.” Militiamen firing guns into the air in gleeful anticipation of the Second Amendment. The Anti-Federalists burned a copy of the Constitution. One person died, several wounded. Birth of the Constitution was a painful one!
“Your Celebration Is a Sham”
Nevertheless, the Constitution was ratified and entrenched itself as the law of the land. But there were a lot of clauses left out. The men in the room where it happened in 1776 had removed the anti-slavery clause, and subsequent interpretations of the Constitution quantified and qualified and bent rules into a pretzel to argue that freedom didn’t apply to human property.
Starting even from the 1790s, the abolitionists put down a strong July 4th tradition of protest. Free Northern Blacks and the sympathetic whites would gather for picnics on the Fourth and on other days, such as on Haitian Independence Day in 1804 and the emancipation of the West Indies in 1833. Some called it a “freedom holiday,” a core idea of using the celebration of freedom for political action to explicitly draw attention to those who were not free.
When Frederick Douglass was invited to speak in Rochester on July 5, 1852, it was already his tradition. The audience likely knew what was coming, another famous speech read out aloud (text here).
I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. — The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony.
Following the end of the Civil War and Emancipation, Blacks met in Washington D.C. on July 4, 1865 to celebrate. Naturally, they read a copy of the Declaration. However, as sharecropping and lynching replaced one set of ills for another, the tradition of protest/picnic continued on more Fourth of Julys throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, praising emancipation but pleaded for real freedom. Even the 1963 March on Washington was a form of tradition, as protesters showed up dressed in their Sunday best, passively, to listen to speakers, like Martin Luther King Jr.
To Add to Independence, Liberty
Other movements used the Fourth to raise awareness, as we call it today. In the burgeoning Temperance movement, beginning in the 1820s, groups would meet on the Fourth of July and “declare their independence from King Alcohol,” e.g. on July 4, 1844 in D.C.
Women also began to push back against the oppression of the Victorian Age. The more they spoke out, the more they were told that they should remain in the domestic sphere to which they had been “appointed by God…a sacred duty.” They also advocated for temperance, against slavery, and against war itself. Julia Ward Howe was a huge pacifist in the burgeoning Peace Movement.
In 1844, they gathered together in Seneca Falls to write their own Declaration, following the words of the earlier one, and putting forth a call for new sentiments:
We hold these truths to be self-evidence: that all men and women are created equal…
Like the Broadside version of the 1776 Declaration, this one was printed and distributed widely, and read aloud in meetings of the suffragists for decades to come.
A Fractious Centennial
The first hundred years were celebrated in large form in the northern cities especially: New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and so forth. The exhibits in Philadelphia attracted eight million visitors. (That’s what America250 might have been, once upon a time.) The National Women’s Suffrage Association issued another Declaration of Rights.
Not everybody got with the program, however, which I hope you’re starting to see is part of the program. Southern states didn’t feel a lot like celebrating what was viewed as oppression. They had fought for their own freedom, to earn money with their peculiar institution. For decades after the end of the Civil War, Independence Day was viewed as a Yankee holiday. Southern states used the observance to write editorials about Northern tyranny. “[Our] self-respect has not perished with defeat” announced a Wilmington, North Carolina newspaper on the Centennial..
Some cracks were sealed; some wounds were healed. Reconstruction was abandoned in favor of Reconciliation. That is, helping the former enslaved came to be seen as hurting too many whites. Nationalistic fervor helped buoy up the economy as presidents also started adding territory to U.S. “soil” in Panama, Guam, and so forth. The latter part of the 19th century did see a rise in requests for unquestioning patriotism, with the creation of Flag Day and the pledge in the 1890s, for example.
The Ku Klux Klan began rising in power, too, and they particularly loved to parade on the Fourth of July, using flags as a cloak for their ideas. On July 4, 1923, 200,000 met in Kokomo, Indiana to “celebrate the state’s transition from a KKK Province to a Realm with a new Indiana Grand Dragon.” Meanwhile, thousands of Black men marched silently in the streets of Washington to advocate for an Anti-Lynching bill, but it was not passed. (Not until a few years ago, signed by Biden).
Liberty continued to be highlighted by other groups. The Mormons in the 1880s viewed themselves to be under siege legally as Congress banned polygamy and tried to break the religious government that had established itself in Utah. On July 4, 1885, the American flag in Salt Lake City was flown at half-mast as a protest against the oppression of the anti-Mormons in Washington.
The late 19th century saw the influx of waves of immigrants, followed by waves of anti-immigrant bills. In response to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Thomas Nast drew this political cartoon, showing an Irishman and a German wondering whether they are next. In contrast, states used the observance to create mass “naturalization rituals.” Henry Ford famously made his immigrant workers walk through a physical “melting pot.” So, in 1918 in Cleveland, 75,000 immigrants marched in a Fourth of July Americanization parade, with a similar one in Indianapolis. (Immigrants downtown, KKK off in the boondocks, both a show of force in Indiana.)
These manufactured acts, patriotic-enforced processes of absorbing people (provided the right kind of people) into American ideas continued, as even in 1996, hundreds took the oaths of office in Detroit, Boston, and El Paso. Five thousand people were naturalized in 1997 on a football field in Long Island. Anything like that planned for this year, do you suppose? Yeah, maybe not.
The Independence Dance
An interesting tradition developed within indigenous American cultures. The expansion of the pioneer sentiment of liberty across wide, open spaces usually meant removing the people already there. Native Americans began to protest on Fourth of July just as the abolitionists and others had throughout the 19th century. In some cases, participation on Independence Day was forced on children in the “Indian schools,” compelling patriotism as part of their education, while their parents’ land was being taken.
William Apess, who came from the Pequots, wrote several books to argue for the end of oppression to the tribes, roughly the same era as when Douglass had given his famous speech:
Let every man of color wrap himself in mourning…the 4th of July [is] a day of mourning and not of joy…Let them rather fast and pray to the great Spirit, the Indian’s God, who deals out mercy and not destruction.
Native American ceremonies for a time were specifically banned in an effort to stamp out the culture. However, they were allowed in a form during the Wild West shows, popular at the latter part of the century. Often those shows would feature a mock battle, where cowboys and Injuns faced off, with the cowboys reigning triumph. Many were tribe members who later spoke of using the shows as a kind of remembrance. Even if defeated in a performance, they were allowed to fight. Lots would sign up to participate in a re-enactment of Custer’s Last Stand.
The sacred dances, too, had also been banned but could be performed on the designated special days. On July 4th, tribes held Independence Day ceremonies that combined the American flag with indigenous feathers. They created a series of annual Greater Indian Shows, connecting them to Fourth of July but mixing in mystical Native American notes. Many tribes still create large-scale ceremonies, powwows staged on the Fourth but featuring Native ceremonies, such as the Oglala Sun Dance. It began as a form of protest against banned practices which now have themselves become traditional.
Annual Reminders
Waves of protests continued throughout the 20th century, often using the Fourth of July as a backdrop. In the first week of July, 1963, hundreds gathered in a park in Baltimore to protest segregation. Waves of sit-ins had begun in 1960 and continued throughout the early years, all precursors to the March on Washington in August 1963.
Years before the Stonewall Uprising, LGBT organizations had arranged for what they termed “Annual Reminder” days, held on the Fourth of July. From 1965-1969, protest groups would meet outside Independence Hall in Philadelphia on the Fourth of July to leaflet, speak, and protest as tourists streamed in and out of the hall. Initially, the group that ran the protest wanted ordinary-looking people, reinforcing the idea that LGBT people were like everybody else. But the group pushing back in Stonewall was young, rebellious, and unwilling to look or act a certain way. The Annual Reminders in Philadelphia were discontinued after 1969, and the annual Pride Parades sprang up in their place, to take place a week earlier. Like every other American group, they clothed themselves in the trappings of requests for liberty, repurposing the famous “Gadsden flag” with the rainbow colors.
Overall, our Fourth of July history is full of stories of people reminding their neighbors of the “true meaning of freedom.” Protest has been one of the most common themes across these past 250 years, with disagreement taking on a number of forms, from speeches to political cartoons to dances.
Thus, if you don’t feel up to bland patriotic speeches or performative acts that ring hollow, you are in a lot of good old-fashioned American company. Protest to your heart’s content! Complain and kvetch about the lack of liberty! Instead of Yankee Doodle Dandy, maybe you need a good Norma Rae or Milk or Selma. We’re going for Born Yesterday.
Billie: I don’t want some stuffy old tutor!
Harry: Be nice to him or I’ll crack you one.
Billie: It’s a free country.
Harry: That’s what you think!
Yes, Harry. Yes, Harrys of the world, that is what we think, and we will be happy to prove it to you. The 250th belongs to ALL of us.