Can Americans come together over the next week to celebrate the nation’s 250th anniversary? With the country seemingly split into irreconcilable, and increasingly violent, camps, storm clouds darken the summer commemorations.Those worrying that the Semiquincentennial will be a giant bust should look no further than the Bicentennial.
Plagued by similar fears, the Bicentennial turned into the biggest party the country had ever seen.Today, Americans should take heart and party like it’s 1976.America’s two-hundredth anniversary came either at the worst possible moment or just in time.
The previous 13 years had been among the most violent and disruptive since the Great Depression, possibly even the Civil War.The upheavals of the Civil Rights Movement had been punctuated by the tragic assassinations of President John F.
Kennedy, the Rev.Martin Luther King Jr., and presidential candidate Robert F.
Kennedy.America’s postwar consensus had spectacularly disintegrated barely two decades after the resounding victory in World War II.To many, America had fundamentally changed.
After the assassinations and riots, and the lies of Vietnam and Watergate, the country had become more cynical and distrusting of government, the elites, and big business.As a Boston Globe columnist wrote, the great issue in the 1976 presidential campaign would be "to restore confidence of the American people in their government and themselves," short of which he feared the country would remain "purposeless, rudderless, powerless."MS NOW GUEST ADMITS 'GREAT TREPIDATION' ABOUT CELEBRATING AMERICA'S 250TH, CLAIMS COUNTRY IS BEING DESTROYEDFireworks fill the night sky over New York Harbor and the Statue of Liberty in celebration of America's Bicentennial, New York, New York, July 4, 1976.
(Allan Tannenbaum/Getty Images)In a country at once exhausted and divided, it could well be questioned whether Americans would celebrate or jeer the Bicentennial of the Declaration of Independence.Overwhelmingl...