the united states bicentennial celebrations & the future of america.
From Plymouth Rock to acid-rock
From 13 states to Watergate
The blues is grown, but not the home
The blues is grown, but the country has not
The blues remembers everything the country forgot
It’s a bicentennial year, and the blues is celebrating a birthday
And it’s a Bicentennial Blues.
— Gil Scott-Heron
We’re all confused, what’s to lose?
You can call this song the United States Blues.
Wave that flag, wave it wide and high.
Summertime done, come and gone, my, oh, my.
— Robert Hunter/Grateful Dead
The celebrations of the 1976 US Bicentennial marked a key transition in post-Vietnam War American life. This short book offers a history of the 1976 Bicentennial celebrations and a serious of provocations about its significance and meaning.
From the contested centralization of the celebrations in the American Revolution Bicentennial Commission/Administration to the Bicentennial’s presence in products of popular culture to dreams among some for a new New Deal in governmental cultural policy to the vast vernacular material culture of both consumer and homemade artifacts to the surprising networked computerization of the Bicentennial to international dimensions of the event, the Bicentennial reveals serious cultural and political business conducted in seemingly nostalgic and sentimentalized commemorative fun, helping us glimpse how the 1970s were, in the words of historian Judith Stein, a “pivotal decade.”
A moment of strange combinations of culture and politics, tacky kitsch and high-minded seriousness, pop and policy, the Bicentennial reminds us that history happens both in the halls of power and in the streets. So too, it occurs both through intense mediation and by people’s direct actions. Ceremony matters, and the ceremonies of the 1976 US Bicentennial reshaped the political and social landscape of the nation in ways that continue to reverberate today: centralization gave way to new forms of power exercised through decentralized, networked means; culture became a battlefield for politics, a harbinger of the “culture wars” to come in the 1980s and 1990s; and globalized “soft power” took on new forms in the aftermath of the Vietnam War.
Seeming to be a celebration of the past, the Bicentennial has much to tell us about the future of the US after 1976. A new—and in many respects far more fraught and tattered United States—comes into view.
Chapter Outline
- Introduction: Tall Ships—Looking out at New York Harbor, July 4th, 1976
- Chapter 1: Political Shocks—The Bicentennial Commission, the People’s Bicentennial Commission, and the Coming of the Culture Wars
- Chapter 2: Lost Seeds—The Hopes for a New New Deal and the Centralization of the Bicentennial
- Chapter 3: Serious Schlock—The “Buy-centennial” and the Commercialization of Patriotism
- Chapter 4: Shouts and Murmurs—Waving the Flag in Popular Culture and the Arts
- Chapter 5: Cybernetics—BINET’s Decentralized Electronic Network and the Computerization of the Bicentennial
- Chapter 6: The Shot Heard Round the World—International Responses to the US Bicentennial
- Epilogue: From Bicentennial to Semiquincentennial and Beyond, 1976 in 2026 and After