Off-Color Thoughts on Watching Fireworks on the Fourth of July
by Eric Lane
On the Fourth of July, we celebrate our independence from England. Most Americans know this. We also celebrate our national commitment to the autonomy and equality of all men and women -- though the adopting Continental Congress thought only about the equality of white men. Through the Declaration of Independence we pledged to each other “our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.” It is this sharing, “that sense of shared sacrifice and responsibility-for ourselves and one another,” in President Obama’s words, that makes us Americans.
Polls show most of us share these values, at least in the abstract. But history suggests our shared commitment to these values has thinned considerably since at least the 1950s and, is currently, near non-existent. “Politics is more polarized than ever” David Brooks recently wrote. “The two parties have drifted further to the extremes. The center is drained and depressed.” Worse, writes journalist Clive Crooks: “there is no discussion. Opponents’ views are not worth examining; bad faith goes without saying, in effect, each side questions the other’s right to participate.”
On the Fourth of July, however, we are all expected to participate. (Most of us are even eager to do so.) Since John Adams wrote to Abigail that July 4th "ought to be celebrated by pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations from one end of this continent to the other ...," we have embraced his vision of barbecues across the nation and, more symbolically, with fireworks.
In truth, watching the July 4th fireworks really does connect us to our founding and first citizens. As Independence was declared and war commenced, most Americans simply watched it unfold. Only a small percentage of eligible men signed up for the national army. The state’s commitment of troops and resources was notoriously short and erratic. “I wish I could say I was not born in America . . . .” wrote a protesting revolutionary war soldier, Colonel Ebenezer Huntington, who became a general, and later, a member of Congress from Connecticut. As we praise the fortitude and courage of General Washington and his men, we know or care little of the unnecessary deprivation they suffered as a result of our watching. “The army was not only starved but naked. . . . We were now absolutely in danger of perishing . . . in the midst of a plentiful country,” wrote Joseph Plumb Martin, a private in the continental army who remained a soldier throughout the war.
Fortunately we won the war through the steadfastness of men like Huntington and Martin, the loss of British resolve, and the victory by the French over the British at Yorktown. And, then, only after a post war national implosion that nearly destroyed the new nation, and, a constitutional convention committed to its empowerment, did we abandon our watching and join in the difficult task of building a real America. Through this can-do attitude and effort we realized, often through great struggle, the commitment of our Declaration to equality and our Constitution to broad representation. Along the way we created an ethic of consensus building and working together that enabled us to overcome numerous domestic and foreign challenges and give meaning to our national motto, E Pluribus Unum, one from many.
“That,” goes an ABC song, “was then, but this is now.” Since the massive anxiety attack of the 1950’s, caused by the bomb, atheist communists, atheist communists with the bomb, Dr. Kinsey, Brown v. Board of Education, Elvis Presley, and more, (see David Halberstam’s The Fifties) Americans in droves have retreated to the sidelines, drained, as Immanuel Kant would describe it, of “the courage to use [their] own mind[‘s] without another’s guidance.” From the side lines we have asked “others”, including God, to solve our problems. In fact, in 1956 we changed our national motto to “In God We Trust” to reflect this attitude.
This has not worked well. Our sense of helplessness has fueled a politics of anger and derision through which many of us unite with others possessed by similar angers. “Common hatred,” wrote the philosopher Eric Hoffer “unites the most heterogeneous elements,” and increasingly the imprints of this type of tribalism characterize America’s political landscape. The Tea Party movement is one current example.
Onto this recast field of American politics have stepped “leaders,” in Madison’s words, “ambitiously contending, for pre-eminence and power.” In our frustration, fear and anger, we have often followed them. From this many of us gained a form of freedom, a “freedom,” in President Eisenhower’s words, “from the necessity of informing themselves and making up their own minds concerning these tremendous complex and difficult questions.” Of course, this form of freedom is pernicious.
The net result of all of this is our current rampant factionalism and winner-take-all ethic. Lost is any sense of the demands of our citizenship, our Americanism, our sense that we are responsible to one another. This July 4th, as I viewed the fireworks, I not only celebrated how wonderful it has been to be an American but how much hard work it takes to maintain this gift -- how urgent is this task.
Eric Lane is senior fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School, Professor of Law at Hofstra School of Law, and co author of The Genius of America: How the Constitution Saved Our Country and Why It Can Again.