America at 250 and What the Centennial and the Bicentennial Can Teach Us

John Adams wrote the party instructions himself, and he wrote them the day after the vote. On July 3, 1776, he told his wife Abigail that the day of independence "ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more." He named the second of July as the day, not the fourth, but the plan was sound. Adams wanted fireworks. He also wanted something more important, and we tend to skip that part of the letter. He said the day should be marked "by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty."

Pomp, parade and devotion. That is the founding generation's formula for a birthday: a party with a purpose. Two centuries later, we can check how well each generation followed it. The country has now held two great round-number celebrations, in 1876 and 1976, and Congress created a commission in 2016 to prepare for the third. The three are worth setting side by side, because each says something about the nation that threw it. And what they say is not always flattering, which is the best reason to read them.

I will not describe the events of 2026 here. This is a post about the two birthdays we can already judge, and about the standard we ought to hold the next one to.

The three celebrations at a glance

Now the details, because a table can only point at things.

1876: the machine that ran on faith in progress

The Centennial International Exhibition opened in Philadelphia on May 10, 1876, and it ran until November 10. It was America's first world's fair, held in Fairmount Park, and it drew something on the order of ten million admissions in a country of more than forty million. Count that again. A very large share of the nation went to see it.

The centerpiece was the Corliss steam engine, a giant machine in Machinery Hall that powered a great part of the exhibition through a system of shafts and belts. On opening day President Ulysses Grant and the visiting Emperor of Brazil, Dom Pedro II, started it together. Dom Pedro also gave the fair one of its best-remembered moments when Alexander Graham Bell demonstrated his telephone and the Emperor, listening at the receiver, reacted with astonishment that a voice could come through a wire. The Statue of Liberty's torch arm, still years from completion of the full statue, was displayed on the grounds as part of the effort to raise money for the project.

Read the choice of attractions. The Americans who organized the Centennial did not mark one hundred years of liberty with a parade of speeches about liberty. They marked it with machinery. The argument was implicit but unmistakable: a free people, allowed to invent, trade and build, produces engines, telephones and abundance. The Declaration set the principle, and the Corliss engine was the exhibit. A skeptic could call that vulgar. I call it a very American form of evidence.

But the party happened against a hard background. The country was still in the long depression that followed the Panic of 1873. Reconstruction was collapsing across the South. On June 25, 1876, in the middle of the exhibition, a force under George Armstrong Custer was destroyed at the Little Bighorn, and the news reached the East in early July, right around the Fourth. The presidential election that November would be one of the most bitterly disputed in our history, and it was settled in early 1877 by a political compromise whose costs fell on the freedmen. The people strolling through Machinery Hall in 1876 did not have a calm country.

The lesson of 1876, then, is double. It shows what we do well: build, invent and invite the world to look. It also shows what a celebration can hide. A nation that spends its centennial admiring steam engines may be tempted to leave the Declaration's other promise, that "all men are created equal," as a thing to be admired rather than kept. Frederick Douglass had said as much about the Fourth of July two dozen years earlier, and anyone who wants the sharp edge of that argument should read What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July and Why Douglass Kept the Constitution.

1976: the country goes on tour

The Bicentennial was a different animal. The centennial had a place. The bicentennial was everywhere. Congress had set up a commission in the 1960s and then reorganized it as the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration in 1973, and the idea behind it was local participation: towns, counties and neighborhoods were encouraged to mark the occasion in their own way, and many communities did.

Three set pieces stand out.

Operation Sail. On July 4, 1976, a fleet of tall ships from many nations sailed into New York Harbor in a review that ran past the Statue of Liberty and was watched by an enormous crowd along the shore. President Gerald Ford spent the holiday in Philadelphia and New York, and the harbor review was the picture of the day. A square-rigged ship under full sail is a lovely thing, and it was an elegant choice for a country that began as a set of colonies connected by water.

The American Freedom Train. From April 1975 through the end of 1976 a train pulled by a restored steam locomotive carried a traveling exhibition of historic artifacts across the lower forty-eight states. The point was to bring the national treasures to the people instead of making the people come to Washington. Large crowds went through the cars.

The wagon train pilgrimage. Several wagon trains set out from different parts of the country and converged on Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, arriving around the Fourth of July. They were a deliberate nod to the westward movement, and a reminder that the country's story is one of people moving toward something with their families and their belongings in a wagon.

Look at the mood behind the pageantry. The country in 1976 had just been through the end of the Vietnam War, the resignation of a President in 1974 after Watergate, and a long public examination of the conduct of the intelligence agencies. Trust in institutions was low and the temptation to cynicism was high. The Bicentennial was in part an act of repair. Tall ships, steam locomotives and covered wagons all share a quality: they are things you can touch. They offered Americans a way to love the country that did not depend on liking the government that week.

That is the great lesson of 1976, and it is a conservative one. Patriotism is not the same thing as approval of the people in office. It is attachment to a place, a history and a set of principles, and it can be kept alive even when trust in the people running things is at a low. In fact it is most needed then.

2016: the planning commission

The third entry in the table is a different kind of thing, and I include it on purpose. In 2016 Congress passed and President Barack Obama signed the United States Semiquincentennial Commission Act, creating a commission to plan the observance of the nation's 250th anniversary. The statute is a reminder that anniversaries do not arrive by themselves. Somebody has to decide what to do with them, years in advance, and somebody has to be accountable for the result.

The commission's founding statute gave it a job description in broad terms, to plan, encourage, develop and coordinate commemorative activities. A lot of the rest is left to those who serve on it and to the many private and local groups that join in. I will not describe what the commission did or did not accomplish, because the point here is about the standard to hold the observance to, and that standard exists before the fireworks do. Let me state it.

What an anniversary should teach

Here is the argument, set out the way it should be, in numbered premises.

1. An anniversary is an act of memory, and memory has a moral function. We commemorate the Declaration because it told the truth about human beings: that "all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." A celebration that leaves out the claim has celebrated nothing.
2. The claim is a promise as well as a description. The same men who signed the Declaration held a continent's worth of unfreedom in their own states. A nation that is honest about its birthday will admit the gap between the principle and the practice, because the gap is exactly what later generations spent their blood closing. Lincoln understood this, and the Reconstruction Amendments are the record of it.
3. The Declaration ends with a pledge, not a boast. "And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor." Fifty-six men signed that sentence. A commemoration should return to it, because it names the real cost of liberty and the real source of its protection.
4. A birthday is for the living. The best use of an anniversary is to give ordinary people something to do: read, visit, remember, serve. The 1976 train and wagon trains worked because they asked citizens to participate instead of watching.
5. The standard is truth, not triumph. A celebration that cannot survive honest history is propaganda. A celebration that cannot survive love is just a seminar. The Founders' own gloss on this is in the Preamble: the Constitution was ordained "in Order to form a more perfect Union." More perfect. Not perfect.

The strongest objection

The objection runs like this. Anniversaries are commercial. In 1976 you could buy a Bicentennial version of nearly anything, from a plate to a pair of pants. The corporations that sponsor these events care about brand exposure, not the Declaration. Federal commissions are exactly the sort of body that spends money on ceremony while the substance of self-government decays. Why take any of this seriously?

The objection deserves a fair hearing, because it is partly true. Commerce does attach itself to every public occasion, and a government commission can be a way of looking busy. But the objection proves less than it thinks. Commercial exploitation of an event does not remove the event's meaning. A family that buys a flag for the Fourth is still celebrating the Fourth. The right response to commercialism is not to abolish the observance. It is to make sure the observance contains something that cannot be bought, such as a reading of the document, a visit to the site, or a conversation between a veteran and a child.

Another version of the objection says that patriotic celebration is naive, because the country has done grave wrongs. I would answer that the people who say this are quietly relying on the very ideal they dismiss. You cannot call slavery a betrayal of American principles without the principles. The Declaration is the standard that indicts the failures. That is why abolitionists quoted it, why Lincoln built his politics on it, and why the civil rights movement invoked it. A people that forgets the standard loses the ability to complain about the shortfall.

What the two birthdays teach, together

Set the two completed celebrations next to each other and a pattern appears.

The Centennial taught that liberty produces things. It was a showcase of abundance, and it made the case, still the best case there is, that free people with property rights and the freedom to invent will outbuild any planned economy. If you want to see that argument at the scale of a single man, read Thomas Edison's Menlo Park Was the First Invention Factory and It Changed Work, or Henry Ford's Five-Dollar Day and the Assembly Line That Built a Middle Class.

The Bicentennial taught that liberty produces fellowship. It sent the country on the road and asked it to gather, to sail, to ride, to meet one another. After a decade of division, it was a way to remember that Americans are a people, not merely a market or a voter file.

Put the two lessons together and you have a good definition of a healthy country. It builds, and it gathers. It has an economy that makes things and a civil society that shows up. Where one of the two fails, the other tends to go with it.

And notice the quieter lesson hidden in both: each celebration was held at a moment of national trouble, and each helped. A nation in a good mood does not need a birthday party. A nation that is anxious, divided or tired needs one badly, and the Founders knew it. That is what Adams was asking for in 1776, in a year when the army was losing New York and the outcome was far from certain. He wanted the day kept forever more, because he knew the hard days would come back.

How to use a milestone year

There is no need to wait for a commission or a harbor review. You can use the occasion in a way that costs almost nothing.

1. Read the Declaration, all of it, including the list of grievances. Most people stop at the second paragraph. The grievance list is a lesson in what the Founders thought tyranny looked like, and it is startlingly specific.
2. Pick one chapter of the American story you know least well and read a good book or primary source about it.
3. Visit one place in your region where something happened, a battlefield, a courthouse, a church, a factory, a railroad depot.
4. Talk to someone older about what the country felt like in 1976, if they remember it, and write down what they say.
5. Support a local effort to mark the day that includes a reading, not just a concert.

For ideas about how a family can make the day local and personal, see How to Mark America's 250th Birthday in Your Own Town and With Your Own Family. For the earlier anniversaries of the Constitution itself, see Constitution Day and How Americans Marked the Charter's Great Anniversaries. For the story of the monument that greeted millions of newcomers and was paid for by small donors, see The Statue of Liberty Was Built on a Pedestal Paid for by Small Donors. And for a plain reading of the date everyone argues about, see Why July 2 Was Independence Day and Other Fourth of July Questions Answered. The Founders' page on this site is a good place to start if you want to meet the people behind the dates.

The case in brief

1. The Centennial of 1876 showed a free people proving the Declaration with machines, and it also showed how a celebration can hide an unfinished promise.
2. The Bicentennial of 1976 came after Vietnam and Watergate and worked because it asked ordinary Americans to take part: tall ships, a freedom train, wagon trains.
3. The 2016 law creating the Semiquincentennial Commission is a reminder that anniversaries need planning and accountability, and that the standard has to be set before the fireworks.
4. An anniversary should teach the claim of equal creation, the honest gap between claim and practice, and the pledge of lives, fortunes and sacred honor, and it should give the living something to do.

What you can do: read the Declaration of Independence aloud, grievances included, with your family before the next Fourth of July, and ask your town council what it plans to read or display on the day.