American gratitude

As we approach America’s semiquincentennial, I have been thinking back to the joyful celebrations for the bicentennial, and wondering why our 250th birthday party is such a dud.

Credit: Unsplash

Then I thought that perhaps my recollections of the “Spirit of (19)76” were a bit tinted by rosy retrospection. But everyone I spoke with who was around then and everything I read about that time made clear that Americans understood that they had something glorious to celebrate.

It certainly was not recent military success or the state of the economy or our politics. The Vietnam War – which cost more than 58,000 American lives and tore the country apart – had just ended in humiliation. The biggest recession since the Great Depression was still lingering with unemployment almost 8% and inflation around 6%. Two years earlier, Richard Nixon had become the first American president to resign. He was replaced by Gerald Ford who Nixon (and not the voters) had chosen as vice-president when Spiro Agnew had to resign in disgrace in 1973.

So what did we have to celebrate about America? Something fundamental rather than ephemeral.

President Calvin Coolidge professed it in his Independence Day speech for the Sesquicentennial:

At the end of 150 years, the