As we approach America’s semiquincentennial, I have been thinking back to the joyful celebrations for the bicentennial, and wondering why our 250th birthday party is such a dud.
Then I thought that perhaps my recollections of the “Spirit of (19)76” were a bit tinted by rosy retrospection. But everyone I spoke with who was around then and everything I read about that time made clear that Americans understood that they had something glorious to celebrate.
It certainly was not recent military success or the state of the economy or our politics. The Vietnam War – which cost more than 58,000 American lives and tore the country apart – had just ended in humiliation. The biggest recession since the Great Depression was still lingering with unemployment almost 8% and inflation around 6%. Two years earlier, Richard Nixon had become the first American president to resign. He was replaced by Gerald Ford who Nixon (and not the voters) had chosen as vice-president when Spiro Agnew had to resign in disgrace in 1973.
So what did we have to celebrate about America? Something fundamental rather than ephemeral.
President Calvin Coolidge professed it in his Independence Day speech for the Sesquicentennial:
At the end of 150 years, the four corners of the earth unite in coming to Philadelphia as to a holy shrine, in grateful acknowledgement of a service so great, which a few inspired men here rendered to humanity, that it is still the preeminent support of free government throughout the world.
Coolidge explained that the great service of these men – to which they pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor – was the founding of the first nation based on “equality, liberty, popular sovereignty, [and] the rights of man.” These ideals were proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence which Coolidge labeled “a great spiritual document.”
We still had this gratitude in 1976. Have we now lost it?
The best proxy for gratitude that I could find in public polling is “pride in being an American.” There has been a large drop in this pride over the past 25 years. In 2001, even before the 9-11 attacks, 87 percent of respondents to a Gallup poll said that they were “extremely” or “very” proud to be American. A poll released this week shows this is now down to 53%.
With the overall drop in gratitude it should be no surprise that America’s 250th birthday lacks the feel of a real celebration. After all, gratitude produces joy and joy invokes celebration.
What is particularly telling are what the poll tells us about younger respondents. Sixty-nine percent of Americans 55 and over are extremely or very proud, while only 53% of those between 35 and 54 are, and only a measly 30% of 18 to 34 year olds are.
What explains this?