Two Hundred and Fifty Years of Complicated Commemorations

“Donald Trump’s aversion to admitting fault suggests that we will not likely see events that grapple with the nuanced nature of the nation’s history this July 4th.

By Jelani Cobb

Commemorations often tell us as much about the times in which they are being held as they do about the events they are commemorating. The two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, this July 4th, falls at a moment when the nation is being led by a twice-impeached President amid a widely recognized crisis of democracy—last Wednesday, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Louisiana v. Callais further weakened an already enfeebled Voting Rights Act—and in a social climate whose volatility might be measured by acts of political violence. The most dramatic recent example came with the frantic apprehension of an armed man in the hotel where the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner was being held. The alleged gunman fortunately did not reach the ballroom where the President and the other attendees were gathered, but he has been charged with an assassination attempt—the third made against Donald Trump in two years. This is the backdrop against which our recollections of the nation’s origins are taking place.

Commemoration has been a complicated undertaking in this country from the start. On July 4, 1826, President John Quincy Adams decided to forgo making a major speech and instead rode by carriage in a parade to the Capitol, where he listened to celebratory remarks and a reading of the Declaration. He would later find out that two of his predecessors—his father, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson—had died that day. Once fierce rivals, the two men were responsible for the country’s first peaceful transfer of power between parties, after Jefferson and his Democratic-Republican Party defeated Adams and the Federalists in the election of 1800.“