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Think Trump Is Ruining the Fourth of July? The Founders Couldn’t Even Agree on How to Celebrate It.


The fireworks began going off the moment President Donald Trump announced plans to address the nation from the Lincoln Memorial on the Fourth of July. A holiday on which three presidents have died will not survive Trump, say critics convinced he will turn the ceremony into a divisive “political rally” that his predecessors would not have recognized.

Only time will reveal whether giving such a speech is a wise a political move or whether Trump will regret not listening to Ronald Reagan, who once quipped that a president “trying to compete with a fireworks display” was sure to be as eclipsed as an actor “doing a scene” with a baby. But looking to the holiday’s history can ease the fears that Trump is breaking some sort of hallowed precedent: The acrimony and vanity he brings have long been part of the celebration. The presidents who actually lived through July 4, 1776, had their own tiffs over how to commemorate it.

Yes, there is the beloved letter quoted every year from John Adams predicting that “succeeding generations” would celebrate America’s birthday with “pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires and illuminations from one end of this continent to the other.” But Adams had in mind July 2, the day his fellow delegates at the Continental Congress had voted to break free from Britain, not July 4, the day they had approved the Declaration of Independence,
whose drafting he recalled having assigned to Thomas Jefferson, a more junior delegate known for wielding a “masterly pen.”

Nonetheless, July 4 was the date that stuck, and every member of the Adams family would have to celebrate accordingly.

On the first Fourth of July after Adams succeeded George Washington as president in 1797, First Lady Abigail Adams lamented having to maintain the lavish tradition of serving alcoholic beverages and copious amounts of cake to “all the gentlemen” in the then-capital city of Philadelphia. “I have been informed the day used to cost the late president 500 dollars,” she wrote. “You will not wonder that I dread it, or think President Washington to blame for introducing the custom, if he could have avoided it.”

The first lady had no complaints the next Fourth of July, however, when senators paid their respects to her husband during an otherwise busy day spent enacting a sedition bill, which would give the administration a tool for punishing journalists supportive of the Declaration of Independence’s drafter and her husband’s friend-turned-rival, Jefferson.

Upon supplanting Adams as president, Jefferson basked in bringing the celebration of America’s birthday to the new capital city of Washington and to the residence that later generations would call the White House. When he was once asked about his own birthday, Jefferson apparently said, “The only birthday I ever commemorate is that of our independence, the Fourth of July.”

Selfless as that sentiment sounds, people at the time would have recognized it as a rebuke of the elaborate balls that Americans had staged during and even after Washington’s presidency around his birthday on February 22.

In a sense, the Fourth of July gave Washington’s critics a way to celebrate their country without paying homage to his legacy. While serving as American minister to France, for example, future president James Monroe found himself at one Fourth of July celebration at which some of his compatriots jeered rather than raise their glasses to Washington’s name.

It is true that Adams’ and Jefferson’s deaths on July 4, 1826, (Monroe became the third president to die on the holiday five years later) united Americans in amazement that the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence would claim the lives of two such men. But it is also true that the two men themselves, despite having mended their friendship by the end of their lives, had still not reached accord on the significance of the day.

For Adams, there was bitterness that celebrating the anniversary of the Declaration had let Jefferson prop up his own reputation at the expense of more deserving founders such as Adams himself. “The Declaration of Independence I always considered as a theatrical show,” Adams wrote during his long post-presidency. “Jefferson ran away with all the stage effect of that, i.e., all the glory of it.”

As for Jefferson, he hoped that the directions he drafted for engraving “author of the Declaration of Independence” on his tombstone would ensure he would “be remembered” for the words Americans all these years later celebrate as their birthright.

That a “nation so conceived” has endured is thanks, in no small part, to President Abraham Lincoln, whose memorial will provide the backdrop for Trump’s speech. Those who resent Trump’s standing there this Fourth of July would find themselves on firmer footing if they admitted that their objection is not so much about precedent as it is about the present occupant of the White House himself.

As to what to make of that objection, one need only look to the special message Lincoln delivered on July 4, 1861. “When ballots have fairly and constitutionally decided,” the sixteenth president wrote, “there can be no successful appeal except to ballots themselves at succeeding elections.” That is one precedent for which all Americans should be grateful this Fourth of July.


Article originally published on POLITICO Magazine

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