There’s a sense across the country that we have made a dog’s breakfast of the two-hundred-fiftieth anniversary of American independence. I don’t wish to sugar-coat past developments, but I remember 1976 pretty well—perhaps because although my education at a certain land grant university had taught me a thoughtful appreciation for sour mash whiskey, my head was happily not muddled by more destructive indulgences.
1976, despite tumultuous political and cultural disruption over the previous two decades, carried off a celebration that incorporated a certain amount of critical self-awareness. Think about the enthusiasm the following year for the TV miniseries Roots, and the general emergence of interest in ethnic heritage it stirred. It would be too much to call this a new birth of freedom, but there was a certain efflorescence.
At the national level this year we have managed—and the hijacking of the America 250 celebration by a rival entity calling itself Freedom 250 had something to do with this—we have managed to produce neither affirmation nor reflection on the heritage and current state of our democratic republic.
For instance, since 1967 the annual Smithsonian Folklife Festival has spilled onto the National Mall to celebrate what it is to be American at the grassroots. It has been festive, fabulous, and informative. Except this year, as it was cancelled and replaced by a politically oriented event that flopped.
Although I lit not a single firecracker this Fourth of July, we did not neglect America 250 in our household. We churned our homemade ice cream as usual, and we are in the midst of a self-conscious renewal of our property on Willow Creek; as a symbolic gesture, I planted an apple tree. Dr. Kelley and I made a ritual of viewing Ken Burns’s opus, The American Revolution, and I feel better for having done that. I don’t think it’s his best work, but he does achieve that admixture of celebration and self-consciousness that is worthy of a democratic republic. We’re even watching the video revival of Little House on the Prairie, which, although flawed, has something of that same amalgamous sense. Right now I’m reading appreciatively the new history of agriculture during the American Revolution kindly sent me by its author, the dean of American agricultural historians, R. Douglas Hurt.
As I have traveled to speaking engagements during the summer, I have found myself warming to the American experience in evangelical tones. Each of these addresses is composed, handwritten, in my Moleskine journal, and read therefrom on the occasion. I like the vibe of pulling it from my pocket and reading it like this week’s epistle. Now I savor the review of the texts in my bison chair.
At the Agricultural History Society conference in Atlanta, I held forth to a full house in a sweltering room on the history of the range cattle industry on the Great Plains; which address partakes of that blend of respectful celebration of the iconic with critical revision of the narrative I’ve been talking about here; all in the interest of crafting a sound story of keenly symbolic American experience. Flying home from there, I addressed a gala gathering at the Welk Homestead in Emmons County on that consummately American experience, homesteading. After that I visited with a wonderfully mixed and solid gathering of folk in Grafton, market gardeners mixed with history buffs, on the vital American heritage of raising things from the soil.
May we all find America 250 in our hearts and in our communities and let that spirit percolate to every corner and level of the republic.
