Commemoration has been a complicated undertaking in this country from the start. On July 4, 1826, President John Quincy Adams decided to forgo making a major speech and instead rode by carriage in a parade to the Capitol, where he listened to celebratory remarks and a reading of the Declaration. He would later find out that two of his predecessors—his father, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson—had died that day. Once fierce rivals, the two men were responsible for the country’s first peaceful transfer of power between parties, after Jefferson and his Democratic-Republican Party defeated Adams and the Federalists in the election of 1800.
The nation’s centennial, in 1876, arrived in the wake of a civil war that had left some seven hundred thousand Americans dead. The Declaration’s insurrectionist contention—that people, when unjustly provoked, have the right to dissolve their government—hung heavily in a country that had just witnessed the eleven states of the Confederacy make the same argument. That year, President Ulysses S. Grant, who had commanded the Union forces, spoke in his annual address to Congress of the great economic and social progress that the United States had made during its first hundred years. But, though the guns of war were a decade in the past, the nation had not escaped the spectre of conflict. The Presidential election of 1876 pitted the Democrat Samuel J. Tilden against the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, but disputed returns from Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina, where there had been violence directed at Black voters, cast the results into doubt. With neither candidate gaining a clear majority in the Electoral College, the election was turned over to a special commission, which declared Hayes the winner. A compromise was then struck, insuring that Hayes could take office in exchange for the Republicans’ promising to cease the federal occupation of the former Confederate states—thereby ending the period known as Reconstruction. Grant was compelled to celebrate the nation’s hundredth anniversary just as its boldest experiment in democracy to date was being dismantled.
The nation’s bicentennial, the only major commemoration in living memory, was framed by the exigencies of the Cold War and by the scarcely healed scars of the Vietnam War, as well as by Watergate and President Richard Nixon’s consequent resignation. President Gerald Ford’s Fourth of July address hit the boilerplate notes of progress and enduring values in a speech so anodyne that his audience might have overlooked the fact that the national festivities were being led by a man who had been elected to neither the Vice-Presidency (Nixon appointed him, in 1973) nor the Presidency (he assumed that office when Nixon resigned). The cumulative lesson of all this recollection is that, in commemorating the past, we may not like all that it calls attention to in the present.