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Celebrating America Shouldn’t Be Such a Partisan Task

How did anniversary events become so politically charged?

An American flag flies during a rally.

By 1973, three years before the United States was set to celebrate its 200th birthday, the American Revolution Bicentennial Commission (ARBC), an official government body tasked with organizing the country’s anniversary events, was already making headlines for nakedly pro-Nixon partisanship and brazenly corrupt self-dealing. William Randell, a literature professor, wrote about the scandals in The Nation, warning that the Bicentennial could be used for nefarious ends: “The patriotic impulse, if we aren’t on our guard, is likely to be exploited for partisan advantage and commercial profit.”

Shortly thereafter, the ARBC was dismantled and replaced with federal funding for local and state commemorative projects. But just as in this semiquincentennial year, when there have been semi-official religious revivals on the National Mall and UFC fighting on the White House lawn, back in 1976 the crude and corporatized official Bicentennial celebrations were not the only Washington spectacle to see.

A year after exposing the chicanery of the ARBC, The Nation profiled the People’s Bicentennial Commission (PBC), an initiative headed by antiwar activist Jeremy Rifkin to highlight more relevant aspects of the Revolutionary legacy. The PBC began in 1973 with a “Boston Oil Party” that Rifkin organized at the height of the oil-supply crisis; activists threw empty oil barrels into Boston Harbor to protest the petroleum industry’s stranglehold on American life.

The PBC had been able to “capitalize masterfully on the spiritual vacuum at the heart of the Bicentennial,” writer Robert Karen observed in The Nation in 1974. “[I]t feeds off the bicentennial blahs. It views the upcoming celebrations as the greatest single opportunity to snatch the flag for the American Left.”

The PBC skewered mainstream celebrations and ridiculed the Nixon administration’s attempts to co-opt the national celebration for conservative ends. But it also refused to discount the radical legacy of the Revolution. “We were not pleased with the fact that people on the left were saying that America’s terrible,” Rifkin, who has spent the........

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