Fourth of July celebrations have consistently invited Americans to ask, and in some cases re-litigate, fundamental questions about the political character of the country. The historical record of such celebrations suggests a propensity for evasion, rather than scrutiny.
The Collapse of the American Myth
The main pillars of the founding narrative have fallen on hard times. Today, its meaning is up for grabs. Writing during the carnage of the first world war, the iconoclast intellectual Randolph Bourne described the American revolutionary inheritance as a squalid marriage between the town capitalist and plantation patriarch. Glittering generalities of freedom and democracy, Bourne observed, were indelibly marked by their long captivity to the money counters and owners of human chattel.
In the land lorded over by the likes of Donald Trump, leader of one of the most indecently corrupt, violently inept administrations in the country’s history, the 250th anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence would seem to affirm this judgment. Our moment, defined by the mobilization of market frenzy, machineries of war, deportation deliriums and nativist passions, echoes Bourne’s; it is a time of social fracture, moral failure and hegemonic collapse, with cynical reason ascendant.
The Emancipation-Expansion Dialectic
Emancipation and expansion are twin pillars of the American revolutionary narrative. Both are closely bound to the histories of slavery and freedom, mobile frontiers and the United States’ continental and global reach, and both have been variously used to support the idea of a democracy upholding opportunity and affluence for the majority of US citizens and residents. In the great muddle of the present moment, however, the idea of a virtuous expansionist-emancipatory dialectic has fallen on hard times, undone by growing wealth inequality, civil rights reversals, violent policing and unpopular wars of choice.
Recent years have seen growing numbers of mainstream detractors from this consensus history – among the most prominent, the New York Times’s 1619 Project, which offered an account of a “new founding” adjacent to the one championed by civil rights liberals, but wildly traducing the original. The revolutionary war, its lead author Nikole Hannah-Jones argued, was primarily motivated by the tawdry desire to give a free hand to Bourne’s plantation patriarchs “in order to ensure that slavery would continue”.
Historical Celebrations and Evasion
The US centennial in 1876, at the end of the bitter Reconstruction period following the civil war, barely mentioned slavery, focusing instead on the US’s emerging industrial might and expansion across the continent and into the Pacific world. The Chicago World’s Fair that began on 4 July 1893, a time of racial segregation, anti-Black terror and imperial adventurism, affirmed this narrative. In a famous lecture to the American Historical Association, held in conjunction with the fair, historian Frederick Jackson Turner described movements across a series of western “frontiers” as the motor of force of the US’s democratic expansion in which “the slavery question” was but “an incident”, secondary to the geographic largesse that underwrote the creation of a free society of individual property holders.
Coming at the end of the long, brutal US war in Vietnam, and a contentious civil rights era, the US’s 1976 bicentennial celebrations reverted to plantation nostalgia and commemorative kitsch. A tall-ship parade circumnavigated lower Manhattan, while a “freedom train” sponsored by Prudential, Pepsi and General Motors crisscrossed the continental United States loaded with artifacts of Americana: Martin Luther King’s clerical robes set alongside the gingham dress Judy Garland wore as Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz.
Frederick Douglass and the Fourth of July
“What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” asked the formerly enslaved Frederick Douglass on 4 July 1852, in a moment of similar contention and uncertainty. At that time, the recently passed Fugitive Slave Act meant that free states could no longer offer Douglass sanctuary against capture, rendition and return to slavery: “What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us?” In 1857, just before the civil war, the US supreme court’s Dred Scott decision answered him, attempting to resolve any doubts about the constitutional meaning of slavery: Africans and their descendants could never be citizens, as they held no rights “which the white man was bound to respect”.
It took a bloody civil war to achieve a resoundingly affirmative answer to Douglass’s question, for slavery’s descendants. That it took another century for Black Americans to achieve substantive political and civil rights indicates ambivalence and backsliding that persist to this day.
Trump and the Frontier-Expansionist Myth
With Trump in the White House, it is easy to see that the big anniversary ahead will pass over the fact that the US’s revolutionaries instituted one of the world’s richest, most powerful slave societies, which their descendants overthrew. Showcased instead will be paeans to the pioneer spirit, military power and business civilization as the embodiment of the country’s perfect, flawless revolution, perhaps with a little plantation nostalgia on the side. Andrew Jackson’s plantation, the Hermitage in Tennessee, has planned a sweeping celebration featuring 1,776 US flags, while a newly restored Reconciliation Monument (formerly known as the Confederate Memorial) at Arlington national cemetery will provide a backdrop to official celebrations in Washington DC.
On day one of his second administration, Trump canceled, by executive order, the principle of birthright citizenship, enshrined by the 14th amendment and affirmed by late 19th-century legal precedents, for the children of unauthorized immigrants born in the United States. This was followed by other provocations: surging military-style immigration policing into US cities, and ramping up coercive diplomacy and targeted military action across the hemisphere, including threats to annex Canada and Greenland.
King’s Alternative Vision
The most convincing democratic alternative to this view was given to us by the US figure most closely associated with the idea of a “second founding” finally freed from the taint of both slavery and imperialism: Martin Luther King Jr. Even before he was taken by an assassin’s bullet, King had lost favor with the establishment for arguing that freedom as self-determination was not the exclusive property of Americans, and that the Vietnamese too had a righteous claim. Indeed, King was precise: “It is a sad fact that because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch anti-revolutionaries.”
King observed something else that has since been mostly forgotten. American universalism was weak because it had been purchased “at bargain rates” – and often at someone else’s expense. The Black freedom struggle, in this sense, was about “more than the rights of Negroes”, as it revealed “systemic rather than superficial flaws” in US society. “Today, Black Americans have not life, liberty nor the privilege of pursuing happiness, and millions of poor white Americans are in economic bondage that is scarcely less oppressive,” King said.
The End of the Myth
Published during Trump’s first administration, Greg Grandin’s recent Pulitzer prize-winning history, The End of the Myth, noted that what might be most distinctive about the current moment is the exhaustion of forward movement – not “the end of history”, but its foreclosure. Rather than finding new sources for expansion – moral or material – our American age is one of attrition and low expectations, small yards, high fences, new trade barriers, rising mid-life mortality, border walls and prison bars.
The violence and corruption of the current era, however, lacks any legitimating or moralizing framework, and is unlikely to be laundered as easily as it was in 2008 if and when the Democrats return to power. In the eyes of the world, the US is no longer “the cause of all mankind”, but its scourge. Reanimating stalled pretensions to racial progress, or other such bargain basement promises, will not absolve the empire this time. The town capitalists and plantation patriarchs are in the saddle – while our revolutionary inheritance, Paine’s “universal struggle for liberty”, awaits its next reinvention.
