Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Two hundred and fifty years ago, European colonists mostly from Britain were conspiring to chase the elements of the British monarchy from the shores of what we now call the United States. Many of those in the conspiracy were mostly interested in personal financial gain, whether it was measured in stolen land, enslaved humans or actual coinage. Freedom for all was not on the agenda for most of the men involved. However, freedom to keep their profits was. Over the years, the struggle by the humans left out of the founding fathers’ intentions has waxed and waned, occasionally winning those freedoms only to see them become weakened over time, mostly via the courts but almost as often through legislation and white supremacists in the White House.

Fifty years ago—1976—the year began with Washington and its media machine hyping the two hundredth birthday of the United States. The resignation of President Richard Nixon some seventeen months earlier was celebrated as proof of the superiority of the US way of governance. You know, no one was above the law and all that stuff. To top it all off, the year 1976 was also a presidential election year; another example of the durability of the “experiment in democracy” being touted by the mainstream media no matter what its political leaning. The then liberal Washington Post and New York Times shouted the same misleading malarkey about the land of the free and the home of the brave as New Hampshire’s right-wing Manchester Union Leader (now New Hampshire Union Leader) and William F. Buckley, Jr.’s National Review. Tributes to the nation’s history never seemed to mention the genocide of the indigenous that paved the highways and laid the rails across the amber waves of grain, while the fate of the millions forced to take the........

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