Celebrating America Shouldn’t Be Such a Partisan Task

By 1973, three years before the United States was set to celebrate its 200th birthday, the American Revolution Bicentennial Commission (ARBC), an official government body tasked with organizing the country’s anniversary events, was already making headlines for nakedly pro-Nixon partisanship and brazenly corrupt self-dealing. William Randell, a literature professor, wrote about the scandals in The Nation, warning that the Bicentennial could be used for nefarious ends: “The patriotic impulse, if we aren’t on our guard, is likely to be exploited for partisan advantage and commercial profit.”

Shortly thereafter, the ARBC was dismantled and replaced with federal funding for local and state commemorative projects. But just as in this semiquincentennial year, when there have been semi-official religious revivals on the National Mall and UFC fighting on the White House lawn, back in 1976 the crude and corporatized official Bicentennial celebrations were not the only Washington spectacle to see.

A year after exposing the chicanery of the ARBC, The Nation profiled the People’s Bicentennial Commission (PBC), an initiative headed by antiwar activist Jeremy Rifkin to highlight more relevant aspects of the Revolutionary legacy. The PBC began in 1973 with a “Boston Oil Party” that Rifkin organized at the height of the oil-supply crisis; activists threw empty oil barrels into Boston Harbor to protest the petroleum industry’s stranglehold on American life.

The PBC had been able to “capitalize masterfully on the spiritual vacuum at the heart of the Bicentennial,” writer Robert Karen observed in The Nation in 1974. “[I]t feeds off the bicentennial blahs. It views the upcoming celebrations as the greatest single opportunity to snatch the flag for the American Left.”

The PBC skewered mainstream celebrations and ridiculed the Nixon administration’s attempts to co-opt the national celebration for conservative ends. But it also refused to discount the radical legacy of the Revolution. “We were not pleased with the fact that people on the left were saying that America’s terrible,” Rifkin, who has spent the decades since as a globe-trotting clean-energy activist and consultant, recently told me, “because there’s been another tradition from the beginning, and that was people like Sam Adams waging war against big business and geopolitical control. It’s been an activist tradition that says this is a nation of the people, not a handful of elites. That’s why we started the People’s Bicentennial Commission.”

Attacking inequality and plutocracy, Rifkin and his fellow activists staged readings of the Declaration of Independence meant, as Karen put it, to draw “broad analogies between the tyranny of King George and that of King Richard and the corporations.” Karen quoted Rifkin calling for an end to corporate sponsorship of Bicentennial events: “Corporations are not fit to celebrate the bicentennial of a revolution. They are Tories in every sense of the word. If they really want to celebrate the bicentennial, the best thing they can do is abolish themselves.”

The Nation took a similar stance when the Bicentennial year finally arrived. In the first issue of 1976, an editorial called for popular resistance to corporatized commemoration. “The hucksters are framing their plans,” the piece warned. “It’s only a matter of time before their overpriced, nonnutritious, red-white-and-blue cornflakes dominate the marketplace. Before it is irrevocably polluted, the Bicentennial ought to be reclaimed.” The magazine urged readers to resist “ideological bombardments,” such as pronouncements about “the sacred marriage of American democracy and American capitalism.”

Instead of any forthright reckoning with the true radicalism of the American Revolution, most Bicentennial rhetoric was likely to ignore “the spirit of the anti-colonial rebellion,” the editorial continued. Worse, “the entire 200-year history of the United States will be splashed with a heavy coat of whitewash.”

The truth, though, was far more complicated:

This nation’s achievements have been great, but just as great have been the pain, suffering and rank injustice that have followed its growth across the continent and into the world at large since the signing of the Declaration against George III. Rights to vote and to live equally under the law have spread far beyond the hopes—and desires—of at least many of the revolutionary founders. American capitalism has produced an economic empire far more formidable than the anti-colonial rebels could have imagined. But the consequences have been devastating to those who have been trampled and exploited by the American advance and to the environment in which they have lived.

Fifty years later, some of those rights have been stripped away; the economic and environmental destination is more staggering by the year. At home and abroad, the pain, suffering, and injustice inflicted and ignored by a government only ostensibly still of, by, and for the people is sometimes hard to fathom. A would-be tyrant who puts both King George III and Nixon to shame is using the republic’s 250th birthday to reap millions in bribes and celebrate the very worst aspects of the American tradition.

It would be easy enough for the rest of us to just let the MAGA flag-wavers have their party. But Trump’s hijacking of the 250th shouldn’t go uncontested. Let’s remember, as Jeremy Rifkin and the PBC reminded an earlier generation of understandably jaded Americans, that telling the truth about the country’s past and present is its own kind of patriotism.