Scandal, Protest, Goofiness, and Grandeur at the U.S. Bicentennial
Who knows when our long national nightmare will end. It’s nice to imagine that could happen. But can the past be forgiven?
Ford celebrated the bicentennial for most of his brief and accidental presidency. He lit a lantern at Old North Church in Boston. He stood on the Old North Bridge in Concord. “Behind us are two hundred years of toil and struggle, two hundred years of achievement and triumph,” he told Americans on New Year’s Eve 1975. “We remain, in Lincoln’s words, ‘the last and best hope of the earth.’ » Apparently, however, the White House had not been particularly enthusiastic about the president participating in the opening ceremony of a century-old vault in National Statuary Hall. Getting Ford’s staff to schedule it required a large number of notes from members of the Joint Committee on Bicentennial Arrangements, who “became very concerned about presidential attendance.”
The safe, known as the Century Safe, or Centennial Safe, had been one of the craziest gadgets of 1876, an anniversary marked by a World’s Fair that was both an expression of America’s rising place on the world stage and an illustration of its abandonment of Reconstruction’s commitment to the equality of citizens regardless of race or national origin. In July 1875, Douglass gave a speech in Washington, DC. It was delivered, like his most famous speech of 1852, on July 5, not the 4th, because, as Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. writes in “America, USA: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries,” black Americans commemorated July 5 as Emancipation Day, beginning in 1827 (the year slavery ended in New York). One hundred years after the start of the American Revolution, slavery had ended, the Union had won the Civil War, the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed equal rights and citizenship, and the Fifteenth guaranteed black men the right to vote, but Douglass found little occasion for celebration. The Ku Klux Klan was born. Jim Crow was taking over. And the “great centennial hosannah” to be held in Philadelphia in 1876, Douglass warned, seemed likely to serve to reunite whites, North and South, and, by masking the divisions of the Civil War, to erase slavery from American history. “Where will this tremendous reconciliation leave people of color? he asked. The following year, President Ulysses S. Grant opened the Centennial Exposition at Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park, greeted by four thousand soldiers and accompanied by a bellicose “Centennial Inauguration March,” an original composition by Richard Wagner. (“Between you and me, the best thing about the march was the $5,000 they paid me,” Wagner admitted to a friend.) Douglass sat behind the president, silent.
“Everyone says you can’t wrap your child in bubble wrap, and I thought: why not?”
Cartoon by Barbara Smaller
The Centennial Exhibition – thirty thousand exhibits installed in more than two hundred buildings – showcased the arts and sciences from the four corners of the globe, but above all, as Grant said, “the achievements of our own people during the last hundred years,” including, in the engine room, the gigantic 1,400-horsepower Corliss steam engine and the George Grant Difference Engine, which could perform twenty calculations per minute. The grounds were open twelve hours a day, every day, entry cost fifty cents, and ten million, or about one in five Americans, attended. You could also mount a ladder on the right arm, the torch arm, of the future Statue of Liberty. William Dean Howells, editor of The Atlanticcontinued what he described as “a gloomy, rainy, somewhat cold and thoroughly unpleasant day.” Howells found art indifferent. In the machine room, he complained about “too many sewing machines.” He was disappointed by the presentations of the other nations, feeling that the foreigners did not look foreign enough. (The Egyptian: he “wore a fez, but a fez is very little.”) In the US Hall, he looked askance at “the cot, his table furniture, his sword, his pistols, etc..” ” (“In their capacity as relics, we sternly invoked all the reverence we could.”) But even Howells admitted that, for all the silliness of the fair, it was impossible not to see it “without a thrill of patriotic pride.”
Anna Deihm, Civil War widow and New York magazine editor Welcome to the Centennial and the newspaper Our second centuryhad a much greater appetite for relics than Howells. She had commissioned the construction of the Centennial Vault, which was located at the fair. At the vault, you could stop, look inside, and even flip through “Photographs of the Great American People of 1876,” an album that included photos of every member of the Forty-fourth Congress (the most racially diverse until 1969). And, for five dollars, you too could make it big by signing a “Citizens’ Autograph Album,” which will be preserved for posterity. (Historian Nick Yablon, in his terrific book “Remembrance of Things Present,” credits Deihm with democratizing the time capsule.) “You rarely get such a chance to shine on such cheap terms,” sneered one critic.
