the stakes of soft power in the 1976 united states bicentennial celebration.
Talk delivered at Circulaçõs Culturais e Dynamicâs Imperial No Espaço Atlântico, Séculos XIX-XXI (Cultural Circulations & Dynamics of Empire Across the Atlantic, 19th-21st Centuries), Universidade de São Paulo. Revised from Michael J. Kramer, “How the World Celebrated America’s 200th Birthday,” New Lines Magazine, 3 July 2026.
Celebrating its 250th anniversary this year, the United States Declaration of Independence staked its anticolonial claims to break away from the British empire on “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind.” The justification is easy to dismiss in our own times of brute-force US American unilateralism, when the Trump administration seems like it could hardly care less about what the rest of the world thinks (or even what a good number of US Americans think). Nonetheless, this year’s semiquincentennial anniversary of the Declaration of Independence suggests we could perhaps turn back to other moments of national American celebration that were more concerned with international inclusion.
One such moment was the bicentennial celebration of the United States in 1976. The international dimensions of this national commemoration are often forgotten, but they remind us of a time when dynamics of center and periphery gave way to a decentralized global event in which the world visited the United States and the United States appeared around the globe. To be sure, this was a thoroughly US American event, and the archives I have found so far help us mostly see into American policy and perspectives, yet they also suggest something else more than just the exercising of American empire. They mark an early example of what would become “globalization.” In the bicentennial’s international dimensions, we glimpse the stakes of what the political scientist Joseph Nye called “soft power,” or forms of cultural circulation that do not work by coercion or military domination or straightforward control, but rather by more ambiguous processes of participatory incorporation—or we might say by nothing less than “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind.”
Officially known as “Operation Sail,” the Tall Ships parade featured over 200 ships flying over 30 different flags. When it sailed into New York Harbor and up the Hudson River on July 4, 1976, something like 6 million people, by some estimates, lined the shore to take in the sight. It was a moment when many Americans had lost faith in their government and perhaps even each other. In the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, the defeat in the Vietnam War, the OPEC oil embargo, rising inflation, growing deindustrialization and other ills, many Americans were doubtful that the U.S. should celebrate the bicentennial at all. As the political theorist Sheldon Wolin wrote, America had been “forced to enter history a second time, in this our bicentennial year. The first time we entered proclaiming our independence and liberty, the second time frantically trying to conceal our dependence and servitude.”
What is largely overlooked, however, is that the event was more than merely a local or national triumph in the face of growing American self-doubt. It was, in fact, an international venture. It had been organized by a private, nonprofit group led by retired U.S. Navy and Coast Guard officers, maritime businesspeople, yachters, ship historians and hobbyists. It was funded to the tune of $70 million, mostly by foreign governments that participated in the event. What looked local and national was, in fact, profoundly global.
The international dimensions of the bicentennial are often forgotten today, overshadowed by memories of local events and a torrent of commercial kitsch in the U.S. itself. One could find Revolutionary War commemorations organized in almost every municipality in the United States as well as on television, Broadway theater, and products of American mass consumer culture such as fast-food burger wrappers, beer cans and much else. Yet there was also a strong effort by the American government to foster a worldwide awareness and celebration of the 200th anniversary of the United States. The story of an international U.S. bicentennial celebration can be told, broadly and chronologically, in three parts. First came the early, centralized aspirations of the initial proposal for an event, broached in 1963 at the height of the Cold War and made official by President Lyndon Johnson in 1966, just as he was escalating U.S. involvement in Vietnam. There was to be one international exposition. Then came the attempt by the Richard Nixon administration to use the bicentennial in service of a more right-wing approach to international politics, particularly as the U.S. withdrew its combat troops from Vietnam in 1973. Finally, there was an embrace of a decentralized bicentennial under Ford, which featured myriad local celebrations and commercialized, privatized consumer products that were coordinated from on high but with a light touch, and which included worldwide participation on these new terms.
The concept of a national bicentennial celebration first appeared in 1963. Right away, it possessed international dimensions as a fundamentally Cold War project. Rep. John O. Marsh Jr., a conservative Democrat from Virginia, entered a House joint resolution to establish a bicentennial commission to commemorate the American Revolution. “The point I am trying to emphasize,” he explained in a document officially entered into the Congressional Record, “is that perhaps through this reexamination of the American past, we can better appreciate the values of our Republic and better understand the stakes involved in the present world struggle.” “After all,” Marsh continued, “the words, ‘liberty,’ ‘freedom,’ and ‘justice,’ that are crudely painted on the posters carried by those who riot today through southeast Asia, Latin America and Africa do not have their origins in the Communist Manifesto but rather have their inspiration in the American Declaration of Independence.”
One need not agree with Marsh’s assessment of anticolonial struggle’s reference points to see that the national bicentennial celebration of the United States was framed, at its inception, as an international project. Yet by the time the bicentennial arrived in 1976, the United States was in a very different place than in 1963, having lost the Vietnam War, gone through Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal and resignation of the US presidency, and mired in an era of economic crisis. The bicentennial shifted from a glorious celebration of American empire to a decentralized affair domestically. No large federal government effort other than to encourage and coordinate myriad local, municipal, and private celebrations.
Yet even as the federal government stepped back domestically, members of the State Department, the United States Information Agency (USIA), foreign missions and other parts of the American foreign policy apparatus pressed on with plans for participation by other nations. Crucially, however, their plans were now tinged by the shift toward democratization back at home. No longer was the bicentennial a key part of Marsh’s vision for a centralized “strategy for freedom” in the fight against communism; instead, it was to emphasize a more generalized and participatory exploration of “quality of life” globally. “The Bicentennial Era provides a unique opportunity to promote cooperative relationships between the United States and other countries of the world,” a USIA background report put it in 1970. “The foreign affairs agencies should encourage dialogue among opinion leaders,” it explained, “on those questions to which our own ancestors two centuries ago sought answers: the purposes of human communities, the nature of political authority, reason and justice.” These discussions would, the USIA report proposed, emphasize an “enhanced ‘quality of life.’” This now “the central theme of the commemoration in the US” itself. The focus on what the USIA called “an understanding of the concepts from which the American Revolution was derived” could therefore be “made universal in interest,” the USIA officials believed. Here is just such a celebration, maybe ironic in our own moment, of a pre-Islamic Revolution Iranian celebration.
The USIA even sponsored a student film contest, which led to this amazing period-piece film by Vince Collins. Brace yourself for this official piece of rather psychedelicized US propaganda.
The State Department, USIA, the Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs, the Smithsonian Institution and other U.S. agencies would collaborate with foreign national, municipal and local governments as well as private institutions and citizens to create programming, publications and more about the nature of the American Revolution and its connections to events in other lands. There would be broadcasts, lectures, tours by famous American performers, radio and film documentaries, the promotion of American studies programs at universities and many other forms of dissemination, but just as crucially, the USIA report explained, the U.S. would dedicate itself to “encouraging and facilitating local initiatives, official and unofficial.” For USIA and other institutions of U.S. foreign policy, “the Bicentennial should be presented … as an American program … in which others are invited to take part if they desire to do so.” Perhaps the most famous bicentennial export was “The World of Franklin and Jefferson,” an exhibition designed by Charles and Ray Eames and funded by IBM. The show traveled to London, Paris, Warsaw, and Mexico City before touring cities in the U.S. itself. The Eameses created a multimedia evocation of Franklin and Thomas Jefferson as international figures. A U.S. newspaper reported that the 7,500-foot exhibition “will not be a flag-waving propaganda display” but instead an effort to present a wealth of artifacts and information. When it opened in Paris, a critic for the French newspaper Le Figaro wrote that it presented a strong case for the “globalism” of the American Revolution.
There was even a bicentennial exhibition in the USSR. Organized by USIA in exchange for a Los Angeles show to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, “USA 200 Years” appeared at Moscow’s Sokolniki Park in 1976. It took place in the very location where Nixon and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev had squared off at the famous “Kitchen Debates” in front of an appliance-filled model of a U.S. kitchen in 1959. This time, there was less direct political confrontation and more range to the show. The exhibition presented, among other features, a “circlorama” movie tour of the U.S., created by Walt Disney Productions and appearing on nine screens simultaneously to surround audiences. It was, one American diplomat remarked to a nearby Russian, meant to be “psychologically, not ideologically, disorienting.” The exhibition proved enormously popular, attracting 270,000 visitors, with still more turned away at the door after waiting in long lines. In some sense, Marsh’s original quest of using the bicentennial to combat communism persisted, but now it took the form of an art show exhibiting diverse stories and seeking “engagement” more than asserting American superiority directly.
In addition to exported exhibitions and programs, the goal for the U.S. overseas was to coordinate participation rather than insist upon it. With a new emphasis on self-expression and participation rather than ideological rigidity, the U.S. would seek “involvement” from people around the world in shaping, designing, and enjoying events. They would, the USIA background document explained, pursue a focus on “the present and the future” and not merely celebrate the American past. Eventually, over 100 nations participated, and the list of activities was quite wide-ranging. The American bicentennial really did become a dispersed international celebration. More than 4,000 bicentennial-related events took place in West Germany alone in 1976. Similar events occurred all around the world.
Within the US itself, domestically, America welcomed international stories, exhibitions, and participation. The Netherlands contributed rare art to “The Dutch Republic in the Days of John Adams, 1775-1795.” Argentina sent “175 ecclesiastical and secular silver objects typical of Argentine life during the 18th and 19th centuries.” Australia included rare artifacts in an exhibition titled “The Fourth Part of the World.” Belgium sent over rare artworks and even some guns. Canada toured “Pitseolak: A Retrospective,” featuring drawings by Indigenous graphic artists and 100 watercolors, drawings and prints from the 18th and 19th centuries. There were exhibitions from Cyprus, Denmark, Yugoslavia and elsewhere. Finland toured a collection of mostly 18th-century Eastern Orthodox icons.
France sent over the Marquis de Lafayette’s own copy of George Washington’s “Farewell Address,” rare paintings as part of a Louvre exhibition that toured the U.S. and even a light and sound spectacle, “The Father of Liberty,” presented at Washington’s former home, Mount Vernon. Not to be outdone, Britain sent over the “best collection of British silver ever to visit the U.S.” in one exhibition; a $60,000 reproduction of the Liberty Bell, cast at the Whitechapel Bell Foundry in East London by “master founder” William Hughes, delivered to Philadelphia; a gold-embossed copy of the Magna Carta (still on display to this day at the Library of Congress) — and even the queen herself, Elizabeth II, who made a royal visit and participated in bicentennial ceremonies on the actual day of July 4, 1976.
Where does this leave us? Many historians characterize the bicentennial moment as setting the stage for the rise of Reagan and the New Right in the 1980s. That teleology is not wrong. The bicentennial foreshadowed Reagan’s hyper-nostalgized, hyper-patriotic fantasy of America. But it did not quite fit with his re-escalation of Cold War confrontation. Instead, we might see how the bicentennial pointed beyond Reagan: to the coming era of “globalization,” in which under the influence of American culture, national boundaries would blur, populations would be on the move, and questions of center and periphery would grow increasingly complicated: turbulent, troubled waters, to be sure, but also ones with new routes, cross currents, and ports of entry.
Yes, soft power was at work. After all, the US has always been good at hiding its empire within an international sense of spreading liberty and global fellowship. And we could even say that during the bicentennial, other nations simply paid tribute and gave the spoils of empire (sometimes quite literally) to the imperial center. Yet, alongside both clever subterfuge and outright imperial command, the decentralized quality of the bicentennial celebrations in 1976 reminds us of the odd US need to seek approval for its national project from the rest of mankind, to see its national project as an international one. That urge to make the American nation transnational complicates simplistic portrayals of center and periphery, asking us instead to notice circulations that were at once domineering and, with their call for participation beyond the United States, also something else: an opportunity for other peoples to explore the meanings of the Declaration of Independence on their own terms, for themselves. Perhaps within the dream of an empire of liberty is always the idea of a liberation from empire. Freedom, equality, self-determination, independence—these ideas, like sails, unfurled from an imperial United States ship of state to traverse far more decentralized currents of global investigation.
Like the sight of the Tall Ships entering New York Harbor on July 4, 1976, this unfurling of soft power and its circulatory implications took place on murkier waters during the bicentennial. The tides were shifted in uncertain directions both within and beyond the United States as the turn back to the Declaration of Independence and the founding of the nation produced new potential ways forward. A complex, global procession of many national flags floated under the Verrazzano Bridge that day, past the soaring presence of the recently built World Trade Center’s twin towers at the foot of Manhattan Island. The international brigade of Tall Ships pointed their bows upriver, toward America itself, before heading back out to international seas.
Revised from Michael J. Kramer, “How the World Celebrated America’s 200th Birthday,” New Lines Magazine, 3 July 2026, https://newlinesmag.com/essays/how-the-world-celebrated-americas-200th-birthday/
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