Feel the excitement.
Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Getty Images
America’s 250th birthday party is here at last. It’s a strange moment to be valorizing the United States, and the general mood of pessimism pervading the country seems reflected in the haphazard celebrations — at least those involving President Trump, who has inserted himself into many of the proceedings. America’s major birthdays weren’t always like this, of course. To get a sense of how the Semiquincentennial differs from celebrations past — specifically, the Bicentennial 50 years ago — and how someone who knows our country’s past is feeling about its present, I spoke with Douglas Brinkley. The renowned presidential historian and Rice University professor has written many popular histories, including The Great Deluge, Cronkite, and Silent Spring Generation.
The official celebrations in Washington are disjointed, weird, and sparsely attended. How are you feeling about them and the Semiquincentennial generally?
The America250 celebration is discombobulated. It’s been turned into America250 versus Freedom250. And instead of being a trigger point for uniting the country, it’s just furthering the divide. I say that because President Trump is determined to continue to divide and conquer the American people. It’s his style. He’s disrupting America250 to make people adhere to his vision of America’s triumphalist past. So on a national level, it’s a big disappointment. There’s low attendance on the National Mall, and his whole “state fair” thing never made much sense. The joy of state fairs, and I grew up in Ohio and love them — state fairs are fun because it’s local agriculture and 4-H clubs and community groups and talent contests. The idea that the National Mall was supposed to be a state fair doesn’t make much sense. Everything’s done in a lackluster way.
And last-minute.
Lackluster, last minute and ill-conceived in numerous ways. What’s the problem? Why did this happen? First off, Trump connected his 80th birthday to America 250 and decided to unite them as a MAGA fest. And he decided to politicize Independence Day. You saw that with the launch of UFC and the claw on the White House grounds for his birthday. He carried that over to North Dakota and claiming he’s Theodore Roosevelt and talking about how he wishes he should get a Medal of Honor, that he should be on Mount Rushmore. He’s using the Fourth as could be expected, as a branding opportunity for himself, but he doesn’t have high enough public-opinion polls. Not enough people like him to make it work.
There are high-water marks. I think the National Archives sending some foundational documents and artifacts to presidential libraries and sports arenas and other places is a good thing. I don’t even mind Trump’s trucks going around showing some items, even though he’s curating it. But it’s kind of been a shakedown. He’s demeaned the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress and all the preservation societies — he just mocks them, ridicules them. So the symbol of America 250 is a wrecking ball collapsing the East Wing and a claw on the White House lawn. That’s what the memory is going to be.
How does this compare to other, similar anniversaries in American history? You were around for the Bicentennial.
When I was young, in 1976, Gerald Ford did the exact opposite. He named his memoir A Time to Heal, and he meant it. He was trying to pull the country together on our bicentennial after all we had gone through Watergate. For better or worse, he pardoned Nixon, but he got it behind us. Then he ended the Vietnam War and said, “Look, it’s a new era. We’re all in it together.” And the Bicentennial actually succeeded because there was enough gas in the tank from the Apollo 11 moonshot that American exceptionalism was still alive. It seemed nobody could catch up with America’s technological prowess, but more importantly, the big message at the Bicentennial was that our Constitution had held through Watergate. Our founding documents were still about life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and the American dream.
There was still a belief that better days are yet to come. That was quite a trick for Ford to pull off with double-digit inflation and long gasoline lines. And 1976 was a presidential election year. Ford still had to go get kind of bruised some in Kansas City because Ronald Reagan was still pursuing the nomination or wanted to cut a deal to be VP or something.
And of course, Jimmy Carter came out of nowhere to be the leader of the Democrats, but Ford did not politicize the Bicentennial to get points and people felt pretty good about it. The Tall Ships of New York, Disney World Fireworks — if you go back and read Ford’s speech at Valley Forge and then he gave one in Philadelphia, they really were about the American Revolution — less about the founding documents, but our revolution, how we became a nation.
So even though Ford was an accidental president and didn’t have innate charisma galore and wasn’t particularly good on television, he pulled it together in a sane and sensible way. America 250 is Trump using the Fourth to club the Democrats with, or anybody who’s not a rubber-stamp Trumper. It’s feeding the disuniting of America, and it’s made everybody blase about at least the federal government celebration of July 4th. I think there’s still the spirit there in small towns where you’re having parades and the like. But from a U.S. federal government point of view, people are almost saying, “God, I can’t wait till it’s all over.”
I’ve seen it remarked that the World Cup is actually the real America 250, in that it’s making people feel good about the country, close to unanimously, for the first time in a while.
What a great point. I’m following it meticulously. People visiting America for the World Cup are seeing our small towns and sharing American values. I’m in Texas, in Austin. But in Dallas, people see Buc-ee’s truck stops, the biggest in the world. And in somebody from abroad’s eyes, that’s an Americana site they can’t believe. The World Cup watch parties are happening all over the country, and that’s heartwarming. I’m sure at the baseball games over the weekend, people will be putting their hands on their chests more firmly than usual when they’re singing the National Anthem.
I saw you in a CBS News segment where you made the point that America has been through worse than this — “much worse” as you put it — and has come out the other side. You have sounded pretty understandably pessimistic about where we are right now. But what did you mean when you said that? Obviously we’ve had slavery, we’ve had the Civil War, we’ve had the Great Depression. We’ve had situations where things were much worse than they are now for an average person in the country. But we’ve never had a president like this. So it’s a different kind of bad situation.
It is different. When you study the Civil War and you’re dealing with the 600,000 dead, the bleeding in our land and then all of the issues pertaining to slavery — we somehow got through it. And in the 20th century, there were all these traumas, like the Vietnam War. We lost 58,000 Americans in a war that was a mistake. But adding to the stresses now aren’t just the Trump presidency or Trump’s behaviors, but — are our foundational documents holding up?
For the young people I’m teaching, they’re thinking about how to deal with AI, and wondering why we were pouring money into climate change research, but now, under the Trump administration, wind and solar are demons. There’s a lot of American public being jerked around in a way that can frighten people in their 20s, who had to live through COVID and are saying, “How do I get traction?” And if the American dream, whatever that is, is about homeownership, it’s seeming out of reach. There are billionaires that control so much of America’s financial world. And so there’s a feeling of hopelessness out there.
But I’ve been teaching since 1989, and when you’re talking to a 20-year-old, you’ve got to tell them that you can fight and things will be better. It’s not good for anybody young to just be in a funk or depression or have anxiety overtake them. So don’t get sick worrying about Trump. It’s like Obama’s “don’t boo, vote.” It gets to be a cliché. But on the other hand, I got three kids in college right now, and you want the professors to let them feel they can be a winner. That they can get stuff done, push things forward and not fall into the stupor of a malaise. It’s like what Woody Guthrie used to say: “I’m a Hope machine” — even when he was writing songs that were about the Dust Bowl or fascism in America. You’ve just got to have humor. David Brower, the great activist of the Sierra Club used to say, “The Number one rule on environmental activism is humor. Have fun.” You’ve got to be able to also not self-destruct over the problems of our day.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.