In the months leading up to the USA’s 250th birthday party, some debris from its 200th is making headlines.
The New York Times‘s Jennifer Schuessler finds conspicuously “much less investment and enthusiasm overall” for this year’s semiquincentennial anniversary of the Declaration of Independence than the 1976 bicentennial, itself diminished by jaded jeers charging that “‘Buy-centennial’ huckersterism had sold out the true radical spirit of ’76” (“How a Historian Saved the Schlock of ’76,” May 5).
Schuessler chronicles plenty of “hats, mugs, playing cards and pickleball paddles” currently being hawked under the aegis of Donald Trump, but compared to such bicentennial-branded excrescences of “unapologetic 1976-style schlock” as toilet paper, diapers and condoms, even the output of a coauthor of Think Big and Kick Ass in Business and Life can be described on the pages of the Gray Lady as “tasteful.”
Yale University’s library includes a permanent panorama of such effluent ephemera thanks to State University of New York academic Jesse Lemisch, who preserved what he predicted would become “a deeply embarrassing heritage for 2076.” Schuessler explains how Lemisch drew a stark contrast between the actually existing capitalism of ’76 and “the ‘arrogant nationalism and elitism’ of the 1950s that historians, like the nation itself, were already leaving behind.”
Lemisch confronted “the historical profession’s complacent, complicit relationship with American power” as early as a 1967 analysis of the American Revolution, “a genuinely democratic uprising driven by the aspirations of the artisan and working classes, which were ultimately thwarted by wealthy elites.” That viewpoint was “particularly recommended” in the newsletter The Libertarian, whose “Washington Editor,” Karl Hess, was on the path that led to his interview in the July 1976 issue of Playboy (which highlighted his observation that “The Declaration of Independence is so lucid we’re afraid of it today … because it tells us there comes a time when he must stop taking orders”).
Yet even back then, Lemisch suspected that efforts at “replacing elite history with a history with a history of ‘average people'” had, in shifting emphasis from the halls of power to the market square, “merely traded in the heroes of politics for the heroes of business.” So it was not completely out of character for him to see the spirit of 1976 as one that “floated down from above, and responded to no popular longing to celebrate the Bicentennial,” despite Schuessler noting that voting with dollars for “Patriotic Dixie cups and cereal boxes might seem to epitomize the kind of populist ‘history from below’ that Lemisch championed” (less than a month after Mekado Murphy has written in the Times that relics of Rocky‘s bicentennial bout “are as essential to Philadelphia tourism as the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall”).
One replica of the Declaration from the Me Decade, a freebie for Fourth of July grocery shopper Michael Hart, might have made the perfect bit of decorative detritus for Lemisch — if Hart hadn’t instead typed up the text, immortalizing it as the first entry of his Project Gutenberg collection (he would oversee it growing into an online library tens of thousands strong). In 1971, one of the few files starting to spread as widely on nascent computer networks was a popular Star Trek game by Mike Mayfield.
The utopian universe whose tricky traders rarely “wear red, white and blue, or look anything like Uncle Sam” (as surmised in the 1987 episode “The Last Outpost”) ironically also provided inspiration to the patriotic Objectivist Hart. Times obituary author William Grimes described Hart’s eBook giveaways as aiming to prefigure a Trek-like “age of universal abundance,” one which would upend “all established power structures” and “challenge the entire social and economic system of the United States.”
New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.
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