Soon, America will celebrate its 250th birthday. As the day approaches, we can look back at the commemorations of four milestone anniversaries to provide context for our celebrations to come.
We start with July 4, 1826, the 50th celebration of American independence. At the time, the nation had 24 states and about 11 million people. To mark the occasion, businesses closed, cannons fired, parades rolled and fireworks lit the sky. In small towns and growing cities, dignitaries mounted hastily built platforms to hold forth on the young nation’s short history.
In New Orleans, Independence Day festivities were nearly nonexistent in 1826. Only one man was reported celebrating. He had “procured a venison ham, two bottles of ‘Newark cider’ and thirteen peaches” for the occasion. He read the Declaration, offered 13 toasts and chased each one with a slice of peach.
Invited to attend the July 4 jubilee in the nation’s capital were old friends and rivals John Adams, the second president and signer of the Declaration, and Thomas Jefferson, the third president and author of the Declaration. Aged, slowed and ill – Adams was 90, Jefferson 83 – neither could make the trip. The only other surviving signer, Charles Carrollton, couldn’t make it either; he would live six more years, dying at 95.
Jefferson’s graceful letter declining the invitation was sent to Washington’s Mayor, Roger C. Weightman. Using his artful pen to express delight, the former president and principal author of the Declaration pointed out that the “small band” of those who signed the document had done so in “the bold and doubtful election we were to make, for our country, between submission and the sword.” He added that it was a comfort to know that their fellow citizens, after half a century of experience, still approved of the choice they had made.
The letter became Jefferson’s last testament to his country.
John Quincy Adams was president in 1826 and would preside over the nation’s 50th birthday. He was the son of the second president, who 50 years earlier had championed American independence.
The National Intelligencer reported the capital city’s observance that year was “simple and dignified.” It began on the morning of the anniversary, when military companies assembled in Lafayette Square. Between an opening and closing prayer in the House chamber, the Declaration was read and an oration delivered by a local lawyer.
At the ceremony, a friend of Jefferson’s made “an eloquent appeal to the audience for contributions to the fund being raised to pay Mr. Jefferson’s debts.” The third president was always in hock. Drought and subsequent flooding had damaged his farm land, but Jefferson, a sophisticated connoisseur of fine foods and wine, was well known for spending more money than he had.
Two days after the Fourth, President Adams was informed that Jefferson had died at Monticello on July 4. “A strange and very striking coincidence,” the younger Adams wrote in his diary.
Three days later, letters written on the morning of the Fourth arrived at the White House notifying the president that his father’s “death was fast approaching.” The president immediately left for the family home in Quincy, Massachusetts. But before he reached Baltimore, he was told that his father, too, had died on July 4 – just a few hours after Jefferson.
In a two-hour eulogy for Adams and Jefferson, then-Congressman Daniel Webster said the death of these founders on the 50th anniversary of the Declaration was “striking and extraordinary,” implying something higher was at work. “As their lives themselves were the gifts of Providence,” Webster continued, “who is not willing to recognize in their happy termination, as well as in their long continuance, proofs that our country and its benefactors are objects of His care?”
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By the time of its 100th anniversary, the nation had 37 states with a population of 45 million. It was only 11 years after the end of the Civil War and just days after Lt. Col. George Custer was defeated by Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse in the Battle of Little Bighorn. The president was Ulysses S. Grant. There was no vice president, for the man who held the job, Henry Wilson, died the previous year; in those days there was no provision to appoint a successor.
“The centennial anniversary of the day on which the people of the United States declared their right to a separate and equal station among the powers of the earth seems to demand an exceptional observance,” said Grant. “It seems fitting… a grateful acknowledgment should be made to Almighty God.”
On Independence Day in 1876, parades rolled through cities and small towns, and fireworks set alight jubilant skies. That year’s celebration coincided with the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the city where the Declaration was signed.
At the Exposition’s July 4 ceremony, Richard Henry Lee, grandson of the Revolutionary leader of the same name, read the Declaration to an assembled throng. A century earlier, the elder Lee had made the motion at the Second Continental Congress declaring independence from Great Britain.
The Philadelphia Exposition showcased new industrial, agricultural and technological innovations, including the steam engine, the Remington typewriter, Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone and Thomas Edison’s telegraph. What would become iconic American foods – Heinz Ketchup, Hires Root Beer and popcorn – were greeted with great cheer.
Susan B. Anthony led suffragists in crashing the official ceremony at Independence Hall with their own "Declaration of the Rights of Women.” A special pavilion celebrated numerous inventions pioneered by women.
Across the country, crowds gathered from New York’s Central Park to Galveston, Texas, where 100 white doves (one for each year) were released. In Peoria, Illinois, lawyer and orator Robert G. Ingersoll called the Declaration of Independence the "grandest, the bravest, and the profoundest political document that was ever signed."
Festivities traversed California, a state for only 25 years. More than 10,000 marchers and 400,000 spectators powered a grand parade in San Francisco. San Diego staged a full day of activities, from benedictions to parties and songs. In Los Angeles, the centennial committee produced a book on July 4 festivities, including a lengthy parade and lively civic pageantry.
Some White southerners, however, saw no reason to revel; they viewed Independence Day as a pro-union event celebrated mostly by Northerners. This underscored the raw emotions and economic hardships that still existed after four brutal years of civil war and a tense decade of Reconstruction in the South.
At 100 years, the nation had been torn apart and reunited. Much had changed, but the promise of the Declaration to grant Americans their unalienable rights remained.
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America’s 150th birthday came during a period of calm between two storms of history: not long after World War I and shortly before the Great Depression.
In 1926, the U.S. economy boomed and cities swelled. Auto travel, consumerism, technology and business expansion defined the era. Though the “Roaring Twenties” would crash three years later, Independence Day in 1926 was a day of celebration.
The main event on Independence Day was the Sesquicentennial Exposition in Philadelphia, where President Calvin Coolidge, the only U.S. president born on the Fourth of July, reaffirmed America’s founding principles in a notable speech.
“It was not because [the Declaration of Independence] was proposed to establish a new nation, but because it was proposed to establish a nation on new principles, that July 4, 1776, has come to be regarded as one of the greatest days in history,” said the normally reticent president. “We live in an age of science and of abounding accumulation of material things. These did not create our Declaration. Our Declaration created them. The things of the spirit come first.”
Coolidge firmly cast the American Revolution as a breakthrough based on fundamentally conservative precepts to secure God-given liberties. He contrasted it with the violent unrest of communism, Nazism and fascism abroad.
Beyond speeches, the Philadelphia exposition celebrated the Fourth in sundry ways: an 80-foot replica of the Liberty Bell with 26,000 lights, an amusement park, religious ceremonies, a “Freedom” pageant, baseball games and golf tournaments. A new bridge spanning the Delaware River between Philadelphia and Camden, New Jersey, helped moved the crowds.
The sail-powered USS Constellation, built in 1854, was anchored in the Schuylkill River for public viewing. A 300-acre military encampment showcased the nation’s latest weaponry, while veterans from the Civil War, the Spanish-American War and World War I held convivial reunions.
Humorist and writer Corey Ford captured New York’s Independence Day parade in Vanity Fair: “Hours before the parade is due, the crowds along the curb have swollen to truly gigantic proportions, lining the street on both sides for blocks, milling and shoving and indulging freely in fist-fights in the gutter. People are beside themselves with excitement, waving small American flags and blowing horns… a sight that they will never forget.”
Not every parade float was built to thrill, however, as some bore numbing titles like “Post-War Conditions in the Linoleum Business” and “The Sister Spirits of Osmosis and Capillary Attraction.” Mardi Gras, it was not.
Like other milestone birthdays, the nation’s sesquicentennial reflected the times, the progress that had been made and the challenges ahead.
As Satchel Page asked, "How old would you be if you didn't know how old you are?"
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Just a half-century ago, America celebrated its 200th birthday. President Gerald Ford, in office at the time, used the occasion to reflect on the meaning of milestones throughout history.
“The American settlers had many, many hardships, but they had more liberty than any other people on Earth,” Ford said. “The verse from Leviticus on the Liberty Bell refers to the ancient Jewish year of Jubilee. In every 50th year, the Jubilee restored the land and the equality of persons that… entered the land of promise.”
The population of the United States was 218 million in 1976. Today, it’s 342 million.
Bicentennial merriment included the customary festivities – parades, picnics and fireworks – as well as television specials and reenactments of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Operation Sail brought more than 200 tall ships and naval vessels into New York Harbor, where they paraded around the Statue of Liberty and drew six million spectators. Philadelphia, birthplace of the Declaration, staged numerous patriotic events, including a five-hour parade with floats from every state.
In New Orleans, a Bicentennial concert was held at the Superdome, quickly becoming a popular venue for major national events. Jimmy Buffet, Emmylou Harris, John Sebastian, Jerry Jeff Walker, the Charlie Daniels Band, George Carlin and Cheech and Chung performed.
That week in Washington, President Ford and First Lady Betty Ford hosted a glamorous state dinner for Queen Elizabeth II and her husband Prince Philip. Of course, it was the queen’s great-great-great-great-grandfather, King George III, who had been forcefully defied by the Declaration of Independence for having “plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt out towns, and destroyed the Lives of our people.”
But by 1976, that was ancient history.
“For the Queen's dinner,” recalled Mrs. Ford, “we had violinists stationed along the paths, and to be out in the gorgeous night air, with the moon shining down and the violins playing as you walked by, was unforgettable.”
Dinner guests included Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Chief Justice Warren Burger, Lady Bird Johnson, D.C. Mayor Walter Washington, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Cary Grant, Ella Fitzgerald, Willie Mays, Bob Hope and Telly Savalas, along with spouses and escorts. Musical duo The Captain and Tenille played their hits.
Just eight days after the Fourth, the Democratic Party nominated Jimmy Carter for president and Walter Mondale for vice president in New York. Later that summer in Kansas City, Ford won the Republican nomination for a full term by defeating former California Gov. Ronald Reagan in a close contest. Not long after, Hank Aaron hit his 755th home run, a major league baseball record that held for more than three decades.
That’s how it was a half century ago.
Over the past 250 years, the country has changed, and our celebrations have grown, but one thing remains: Americans have always been proud of the ideals set out by the Declaration of Independence. They are words worth celebrating.
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