There is a natural tendency in these fallen times to harken back to the rosier-colored memories of the 1976 bicentennial celebration. The Tall Ships! The Queen (this one, not that one) in Boston! Schoolhouse Rock! I was there, in Toughskins, and it was awesome.
"On the one hand, it's truly sad that we will never be able to celebrate America's 250th the way we did the Bicentennial in 1976," National Review's Jeffrey Blehar lamented Friday. "I love this country every bit as much as I did when I was born in 1980. But this was the most foreseeable outcome imaginable."
Those of us born in 1968 or before can testify to a couple other salient facts about '76 that may yet help us salvage or at least contextualize whatever it is that we're all doing in 2026. Beginning with: The bicentennial was not greeted as an artistic or planning success in real time. Far from it.
The Tall Ships revue, majestic as it eventually was, launched with a widely mocked crash. The great cities of the Revolution—Boston, Philadelphia, New York—were in apocalyptic disarray. Much of the day-to-day bicentennial experience came not as soberly shared reflections on our creedal heritage, but rather the latchkey-kid consumption of cornball car commercials.
"The feeling persists that, amidst all the clamor and energy, a great opportunity was somehow lost," averred the New York Times art critic Hilton Kramer at the end of that celebratory year. "We seem not to have been quite equal to the occasion."
President Lyndon Johnson's original idea back in 1966 was to use the bicentennial as a showcase for the self-evident glories of…urban renewal. Philadelphia leaders countered with a possible 1976 World Fair, hoping to recapture the glory of the Centennial Exposition a century before. But "an expensive, celebratory international exposition," noted historian M.J. Rymsza-Pawlowska in The Inclusive Historian's Handbook, "was out-of-step with the troubled contemporary moment."
Then came backlash against the heavy-handed ministrations of a vulgar Republican president. Richard Nixon replaced LBJ's picks on the bipartisan American Revolution Bicentennial Commission with his own cronies and donors, prompting would-be participants to back out of what was shaping up to be a more explicitly partisan exercise. The commission would eventually come under investigation and be replaced by a congressionally authorized American Revolution Bicentennial Administration (ARBA). Then as now, Washington treasured its narcissism of small bureaucratic differences.