by Joe Courter
The nation’s 250th birthday, Trump style, is not over, even as we’ve passed his July 4th ego tripping events such as the major motorsports spectacle on the streets of our nation’s capital.
So here’s a local angle looking back on the Bicentennial celebration of 1976 that you might appreciate, and I was glad to learn.
I had just arrived in Gainesville in 1976, and there was this community project going on to build a downtown plaza, using a lot of community labor and the bricks from the recently torn-down courthouse building. I and many others participated in creating what we now know and love as Bo Diddley Plaza. I took for granted this was simply a cool local idea. I did not know this back history until I heard this report on NPR, citing the original report by Louis Jacobson in Politico from June 15. Looking back on the Bicentennial in 1976, he reported:
Planning began a decade ahead of time in 1966, with President Lyndon B. Johnson creating a bipartisan commission to organize the commemoration. Johnson wanted a World’s Fair, an echo of the 1876 centennial in Philadelphia. But within two years, Johnson was out of office.
When Nixon became president, he appointed “political cronies and longtime supporters” to the commission, wrote M.J. Rymsza-Pawlowska, an American University historian and author, in an essay on the bicentennial.
Before long, she wrote, critics said Nixon was framing the bicentennial in ways that centered himself and his 1972 campaign. Some said the committee was “corrupt and unwieldy.” Others, including the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement, said the effort was paying scant attention to the history of racial and ethnic minorities. Alternative bicentennial organizing committees emerged.
Eventually, the Nixon administration responded to the criticism by shifting gears, initiating a more hands-off process of handing out money to local groups without strict federal mandates. The idea was to empower local communities to undertake historical projects meaningful to their own communities.
While some activities were national in scope — including a parade of tall ships, a reverse wagon train from west to east, and a July 4th fireworks show — the majority were hyperlocal. They ranged from the restoration of a railroad station in Ogden, Utah, to preservation of a historic one-room schoolhouse at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, and a Seafood Heritage Trail in Biloxi, Mississippi.
So, it seems we were part of that effort! Gerald Ford had assumed the presidency in 1974; a more sensible Congress doubtless helped. The powers that were in Gainesville took advantage of the opportunity to do a really great community project we still enjoy today. Jacobson continued:
Trump’s approach is decidedly different, historians said.
“Today, the carnival atmosphere of cage fights on the White House lawn and a concert that everyone seems to be backing out of tells you all you need to know,” said James Robenalt, a lawyer and scholar of the Watergate period. “There is no serious look at the nation or its complicated history.”
Indeed, and there is a serious effort on so many fronts to whitewash our very real, problematic, and profoundly affecting past. I am glad to share this information with you Iguana readers.