America’s 250th anniversary has arrived, and, at a national level, the narrative is set: Presdient Donald Trump has made the semi-quincentennial into his personal party.
The White House has rolled out a series of headline-grabbing events, from a UFC fight on the South Lawn to a failed concert series eventually replaced with — what else? — a full-fledged Trump rally. His transportation secretary called artists who decided not to perform “libtards.”
The Great American State Fair is kind of a flop, too. And while Washington, DC, might see a record-setting fireworks display, no one knows exactly when, because it’s going to have to wait for Trump to finish his big speech on the Mall (at potentially 11 pm, or even later).
But Trump’s vision of America doesn’t have to be how the whole country celebrates. After all, this has (kind of) happened before; America’s 1976 bicentennial under President Richard Nixon wasn’t smooth sailing either.
Ultimately, according to MJ Rymsza-Pawlowska, a historian at American University and the author of History Comes Alive: Public History and Popular Culture in the 1970s, many of the bicentennial festivities ended up taking place at the local level, buoyed by grassroots support and a desire for a celebration that looked more like America.
Rymsza-Pawlowska spoke with Today, Explained co-host Noel King in early June about how the bicentennial celebrations ended up the way they did, what Nixon’s original vision called for instead, and why even the most iconic national celebrations are often shaped less by official plans than by the people who take part in them.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation about America’s upcoming birthday, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
Let’s dip back into the mists of time. It is 1976. America is a different country than it is today. What is the mood leading up to the bicentennial celebration of USA?
It is not dissimilar as the mood now, and it’s actually also not dissimilar as the mood in 1876. We never have an uncomplicated national commemoration, it turns out.
In 1976, President Richard Nixon had just resigned under a cloud of scandal. He was a president who many people really, really disliked, who was accused of having an imperial presidency. We are coming out of a deeply unpopular war that had launched a lot of criticism and social movements, and Americans have been protesting for 10, 20 years. We live in a world where there have been very active social movements but where things have also changed a great deal in a short period of time.
Bicentennial planning started in 1966 when Lyndon Johnson was president. Lyndon Johnson formed the American Revolutionary Bicentennial Commission, which was the national body that was charged with planning the bicentennial. What Johnson really wanted to do is he wanted to have a commemoration that reflected his priorities for the domestic agenda, which was The Great Society. He envisioned a commemoration where the federal government would pump tons of infrastructure and resources into American cities. And the way that he wanted to do this is he wanted to have an international exposition. Several cities competed — Philadelphia finally won — and the idea is that [for] the bicentennial, the World’s Fair would be a kind of model city. It would be a showcase for all of Johnson’s domestic programs.
And then what happened?
And then, Nixon came in in 1968, and he wanted to make it his own thing. Nixon also originally wanted an international exposition — a World’s Fair. But unlike Johnson, he was less interested in using it as an opportunity to build infrastructure and more interested in using it as an opportunity to celebrate America and Richard Nixon.
The first thing that I’ll say is that he took the American Revolutionary Bicentennial Commission, which, under Johnson, had been a nonpolitical commission. Nixon stocked it with people from his own cabinet and also his political allies. He put people in who shared his vision for the commemoration. But the thing that happened is that even when Nixon came in, he was a contentious, unpopular president. He had supporters, but he also had a lot of detractors. And the Vietnam War was intensifying. He immediately tries to do this kind of very celebratory World’s Fair. He gets a lot of pushback.
There’s an organization called the People’s Bicentennial Commission. They had a lot of support from civics teachers, and they had all these protests. And their idea was, basically, you should make the bicentennial a moment for reflection. Why don’t we try to plan a bicentennial that reflects the diversity of experience and the diversity of opinion across America?
One thing that I recall from being an American civilization major is that the 1970s were a time for everybody’s movement. It was the civil rights movement. It was the women’s rights movement. It was the Native American rights movement. These groups were calling on Nixon to complexify the plan, or to not make it so simple. Was it the same argument of, yes, America’s a great country, but it also has some problems and we need to acknowledge those?
Yes, absolutely. They were saying that a commemoration should be an opportunity to also reflect on the past, the present, and the future of America. For the American Indian movement, the thing that they said is: “This is a colonial history. This is not a history of freedom, of expanded rights — at least, not for us.”
You have President Nixon wanting to do the simple, patriotic Nixon-centric version, and you have all this pushback. What ends up happening?
The thing that’s really exceptional, and the biggest difference between 1976 and what we’re seeing now, is that the Nixon administration listens.
Part of the reason they listen is probably because they have a lot on their plate. This is all going on more or less simultaneously with Watergate. At the beginning of the Nixon administration, they had a lot more time and energy to micromanage the bicentennial. By the end, they are putting out lots of other fires. But the Nixon administration basically realizes that their vision for this kind of patriotic, celebratory, straightforward bicentennial is not flying. And so, they totally change course.
The mission totally changes. Nixon gives this speech in early 1974 when he’s announcing this new direction. And what he says is: “The bicentennial is not going to be invented in Washington, printed in triplicate by the government printing office, mailed to you by the US Postal Service, and filed away in your public library. Instead, we shall seek to trigger a chain reaction of tens of thousands of individual celebrations, large and small, planned in and carried out by citizens in every part of America.”
Wow. What does this tell us?
This is the bicentennial that we got. You had all of this grassroots energy of people really advocating for and planning their own commemorative activity that was more reflective of their experience.
What they ended up doing is creating this new American Revolutionary Bicentennial Administration whose sole purpose was to disperse funding through the states to really hyperlocal groups — and even individuals who were planning bicentennial events — and then to publicize those events. The actual experience that most people had of the bicentennial was grassroots. a very ’70s take on commemoration.
This is very wholesome, what you’ve just described.
It is.
But it started out as a similar kind of politicized fury as what we’re seeing now.
Absolutely.
Do you think there is any chance that this heavily politicized celebration that President Trump has planned could morph into something perhaps a bit more hands across the water?
I think that in some ways it already is.
As a public historian, as a fairly community-engaged person, I live in a world of the structures created for me by the bicentennial. One thing that happened when the bicentennial switched to kind of funding these small local projects is that a lot of small local projects and organizations were funded. And that capacity is still there.
Your local museum probably got a new exhibit. Your library probably videotaped a bunch of people talking about what the commemoration means to them. That ethos is still there. And when I look at the kind of stuff that’s happening here in Washington, DC, for example, and in other cities where people that I work with in the public history community are involved, I see a lot of really great local projects.
Here in DC, the public library is doing an exhibit about Washingtonians’ contributions to America. There’s a great organization called Made By Us that does these talk-back walls for people to write down what they wanna see for the next 250 years. There’s stuff; you just have to look for it.
