We are about a month out from marking the 250th birthday of these United States. And it seems to me that things are strangely quiet. Maybe people would be more excited if it were billed as America’s Semiquincentennial. That is what the interwebs tells me is the proper term for a 250th birthday. Or maybe calling it a semiquincentennial will not help. Anyway, I have random thoughts on this subject and because I need a blog post for today, this is as good a place as any to put them down.

I am old enough to have a decent memory of America’s Bicentennial in 1976. There was a lot of hype to the Bicentennial. I remember quite clearly that I resisted the thing. This was probably because of the intersection of my tendency to resist popular fads and my being a teenager (which amped up many of my tendencies). But I was quite alone, because the entire United States wallowed in a Bicentennial fever.

I remember that the entire American corporate establishment went all-in on Bicentennial-themed merchandise. Beyond the “official” Bicentennial coins and stamps from the government, there was almost nothing you could buy that didn’t come with some kind of Bicentennial tie-in. Whether it was a place mat from Carl’s Jr. . . .

Or a Conrail locomotive, the “Spirit of ’76” slogan and red, white & blue color schemes were everywhere.

Did you know that Buick gave bicentennial names to every single paint color on its 1976 models? How more American could you get than a lineup that included Revere Red, Liberty White and Continental Blue? Fifty years later I see none of this enthusiasm. Scratch that – I just bought what used to be a 5 pound bag of sugar that is only 4 pounds, but which brags about its processer being a proud supporter of America 250. Is this the best we can do now? I wonder why this is.

It was not in celebration of 1776-to-2026, but by pure coincidence that I began a project of reading biographies of each American President. (1) A month out from the Big 250, I have now completed bios on Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison and just a couple of days ago, James Monroe (who left office in 1825, just shy of the country’s 50th anniversary). I don’t remember this era being extensively covered when I was in school and I suspect that it is covered even less now, but I came across some interesting things.

At the time of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, Great Britain was the world’s superpower and virtually everywhere in the world was under the control of one monarch or another. The history of democracies and republics had largely been one of failure when this confederation of colonies declared independence. All of the world powers were monarchies and most of them looked on the fledgling United States as either a curiosity or as something to be stamped out lest republican fever overtake their own populations.

We had no real allies. France gave some assistance during the Revolutionary War, but only because we were causing problems for their arch-nemesis, England. After that war, the fledgling United States tried a program of neutrality with the major powers. The result was that Britain seized our ships and stole their cargo because we were trading with France. Then Napoleon’s France seized our ships and stole our cargo because we were trading with England. Britain was worse because it also impressed American maritime crews to service on British ships. This led to the War of 1812, when the British actually set fire to our Capitol Building and The White House.

But somehow, we survived as a free nation and, following a new 1787 Constitution, began electing Presidents. George Washington was the glue that held everything together at the beginning. John Adams, a leading voice in adopting independence, tried to emulate Washington, but met with stiff partisan resistance. Thomas Jefferson had written the Declaration of Independence and James Madison had written the Constitution, but believed that Adams and the other Federalists were too sympathetic to a system akin to monarchy. James Monroe, the last of the “founding fathers” who was President, had fought in the Continental Army and finished a 50-year job of pushing European colonial powers out of the North American continent – at least that part that was south of the Canadian border.

During that entire gestational period, “we the people” proved ourselves to be an acrimonious, antagonistic and argumentative lot. The election of 1800 between John Adams (who lost) and Thomas Jefferson (who won) was one of the nastiest and most bitter, right up to the present day. Partisan rancor took hold even during Washington’s administration (to his great sorrow), with “Republicans” seeing the threat of a new monarchy everywhere and “Federalists” fearing a French-style mobocracy of the guillotine.

The arguments went beyond party and were also geographical. Virginia was the 800 pound gorilla of the early American republic, being the home of four of the first five Presidents. Each of those Virginia Presidents owned slaves, with Washington being the only one who freed those he could at his death. (2) But the disputes were about more than slavery. The north (then called the east) lived a simple, life of small farms, seafaring and manufacturing while the south was a cash-poor economy of large plantations and export of raw materials, whose (free) citizens were often in bondage themselves to massive indebtedness. Then there was the opening of the west (then consisting of places like Ohio, Kentucky and what is today West Virginia), whose citizens resented being pushed around by the growing economic power of “the east” and the political power of “the south”.

Among the conclusions I have drawn is that the present existence of the United States is something close to a miracle. Despite the near constant failures from human weaknesses like greed, jealousy, lust for power and plain old incompetence, the form of government created by a singularly gifted collection of men persists. This despite constant tugs of war by groups on various sides of multiple issues riven by deep divisions.

We are deeply divided today, as we all know. But after my reading tour of the first five decades of our American experiment, I do not believe that we are more deeply divided now than we were then. The things that divided early Americans were just as real as the things that divided us now, with real or perceived threats of secession of one part of the country or another being an almost constant fact of life in those early years. The difference now is our ability to receive constant real-time floods of information about the many things we disagree over.

As we approach the 50th anniversary of the American Bicentennial and the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, I have recovered from my case of teenage truculence (and even my dislike of the graphic art that celebrated things then) and am ready to celebrate this achievement. Even if my local fast food purveyors will not provide me with the place mats. Probably because they cannot fit “America’s Semiquincentennial” on them.

(1) The following is the list of Presidential biographies I have read (or listened to in audiobook form) and which cover the first five decades of our country’s history:

• Washington: A Life, Ron Chernow (2010), Penguin Press
• John Adams, David McCollough (2001), Simon & Shuster
• Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power, Jon Meacham (2012), Random House
• James Madison, A Biography, James Ketcham (1970), University of Virginia Press
• James Monroe, A Life, Tim McGrath, (2020), Penguin Press

(2) About half of the slaves owned by the Washington household were legally under the control of an estate from Martha Custis Washington’s ancestors. At his death, George Washington freed the slaves he had owned himself, but could not free those under the control of the Custis Estate, who remained in bondage.