Bicentennial year

January 1 1976, the dreadful day, has dawned and it takes me back to a memorable remark of the late Max Beerbohm. It was made more than 30 years ago but, I hasten to assure any students, sociologists or other swingers in the audience, that the remark is, nonetheless, relevant.

There came a day during the Second World War, as there comes a day during every long war, when it's necessary to tell the people at home and sometimes, even, to tell the fighting men what they're fighting for. In the early days of the Second War, somebody coined the phrase, 'Civilisation as we know it' and, for a while, that did very well as something to fight for, until it occurred to the very young men of the air force who saved us during the Battle of Britain that they hadn't lived long enough to know what 'civilisation as we know it' was like. Worse still, the poor young men from the Clydeside and the Rhondda Valley and such dark places, who also saved us in the skies over Britain, they couldn't expect to get excited about civilisation as they'd known it since it included mainly mean streets and scraping poverty. 

So the hunt went on for new phrases to dramatise our war aims. When the Americans came in, some advertising man – it must have been an advertising man because there always will be an advertising man – dreamed up the immortal phrase, 'You're fighting for Mom and blueberry pie!' Now that must have stirred into action many a man resting in a jungle foxhole. But, then again, it didn't stir at all many an American who normally lived far from those climates where the blueberry grows. To them it must have seemed like promising the French Underground that, once the Germans were beaten, they could all get back to Lancashire Hot Pot. 

Well, eventually, by 1943 a phrase was invented, in the first place, I believe, by an American politician known far and wide as a populist. A phrase that was both stirring and sensible. A lot more sensible, anyway, than what had gone before. Once the war was over, we were told, the rewards would go to the common people who had fought and endured. It would be, indeed, 'the century of the common man' – that was the phrase. But, in spite of its good intentions, it, too, became a pest. 

Well, Max Beerbohm in 1943 was in his 72nd year and as an upper middle-class man about town, way back in the Nineties, he could not have been expected to let off volleys of cheers at the promise of this ideal. Anyway, in his lecture at Cambridge in 1943, he took note of the new phrase and he said, 'We're told on high authority from both sides of the Atlantic that the present century is to be the "century of the common man". We're, all of us, to go down on our knees and clasp our hands and raise our eyes and worship the common man. Well, I'm an old man and old men are not ready converts to new religions. I take some comfort from the fact that the propagators of this new religion do not seek to bind us to it forever. This, they say is to be the century of the common man. I like to think that on the morning of January 1 in the year 2000, mankind will be free to unclasp its hands and rise from its knees and look about it for some other form of faith.' 

That's the way I feel about the prospect of January 1 1977 because when the New Year came in the other midnight and the undulating saxophones of Guy Lombardo's band began to swoop and dive through Auld Lang Syne – for nearly 50 years, the New Year has not been official here until Mr Lombardo raised his baton for those wailing saxophones – when the hour struck, it also brought in the bicentennial year, the 200th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. And now we must clench our teeth and freeze our jaws and see it through. 

Long before the dawn of last Thursday, patriotism began to stir in the breasts of countless museum directors, historical societies, city councils and the like, and patriotism – stimulated by the itch for ten per cent – started to leap and bound in the breasts of the manufacturers of medals, spoons, Toby jugs, pistols, toys, jewelleries, coffee-table picture books, calendars and T-shirts. The citizens of the United States have already been drenched through television, magazine, newspaper and mail-order advertising, with invitations to celebrate the proclamation of the republic with everything from $7,000 sets of reproduced colonial silver to a miniature branding iron that will stamp USA on the family steaks. 

When I had the honour to address the United States House of Representatives over a year ago and hint at this coming downpour of commercialism, when it was all over and we were moving out of the chamber, a congressman from Massachusetts came up to me and said, 'Mr Cooke, be of good cheer, all is not lost!' He then told me what one imaginative man of Massachusetts proposed to do about the bicentennial. 

I ought to fill you in with the information, or I might say the reminder, that the most famous man of Massachusetts to attend the first continental Congress, which in 1774 heralded the coming break with Britain, this famous man was John Adams. He rode down in a coach with other Massachusetts delegates from Boston the 300-odd miles to Philadelphia. The legendary story is of a band of gallant and learned Yankees racing over the bare or muddy roads, hardly pausing to change the horses, and arriving in a patriotic glow in Philadelphia. 

The truth is that their journey was very well publicised and celebrated so that they were, when they were given a four-course dinner in Providence, Rhode Island, they had to have a five-course dinner in Newhaven, Connecticut, God knows how many courses in New York and Trenton, Princeton and so on. Anyway, they arrived in Philadelphia, no doubt swollen with patriotism but also bloated with acidosis. 

Well, it seems there's an enterprising man in Boston who is going to commemorate this famous ride in the most memorable way. He's instituting – and they may already be in business – a chain of diners or little restaurants along the towns, the route, where the Adams party stopped. It is to be called Bicentennial Burgers. 

If my implied attitude sounds a little superior, let me elaborate on some of the bicentennial goodies that are in store for us. There is a coffee firm which with every tin of coffee gives you a copy of the Declaration of Independence. An ice-cream maker now offers red, white and blueberry ice-cream cones. There are telephones you can buy whose holders are all stripes and ear pieces all stars. There's an alarm clock that sets off not a bell, but two toy drummers from the revolutionary army. An insecticide puts into each package free flags and a folder on the bicentennial with the greeting, 'Get a dose of American freedom from the people who can free you from bugs!' There are patriotic yo-yos, Frisbees, egg timers, wrist watches, footballs, of course. There is, in Boston, a massage parlour that offers a ‘bicentennial special' and I leave you and your fantasy life to guess what that might be! Need I go on? 

Well, in this haystack of quick bucks, there are shining needles of some value. A famous New York bank has put up a quarter of a million dollars to subsidise an exhibition of 200 years of American sculpture. The splendid society known as the National Trust for Historic Preservation has rifled through the records of hundreds of towns and old villages and started begging for funds to restore or save eighteenth-century buildings, from state houses to post offices, inns and the like, that are in imminent danger of rot or destruction. The National Trust also has persuaded an old Massachusetts textile firm to sponsor a competition run by architects, craftsmen, historians, to supervise over a hundred restoration projects in the state of Massachusetts alone. 

One county in Virginia has passed a law which, henceforth, restricts all advertising signs to town limits. I'm afraid there is not in sight any federal law that begins to approach the British Town and Country Planning Act. The billboard lobby in Washington is strong and very heavily financed. But there remains the very beautiful state of Vermont to provide the noble and, alas, the sole example of a legislature that has passed a law banishing all billboards from the roads, the highways and the motorways of the state. 

I hope I've said enough to make you already impatient with the coming patriotic nightmare. The advertising men who have contrived it expect it 'to peak', as they say, on 4 July but if the T-shirts and the branded hot dogs are still selling like hot cakes, I'm sure it will go on. 

Now all this may sound very parochial, especially, in view of a couple of scientific pamphlets that have just floated on to my bicentennial calendar. One says that the earth is slowing down and at midnight on New Year's Eve, the scientists added a second to make up for the slow down in the earth's rotation. And worse yet, Los Angeles is drifting north towards San Francisco at the rate of an inch every ten years. And, while we're at it, I think we should face, without flinching, an even more alarming trend that was reported some time ago but has since been ignored. A famous eye specialist now repeats the warning that the human eyes are growing closer together. It will be some time before they fuse into one eye, maybe aeons. 

But in the wake of our New Year's merrymaking, I think we ought to face up to the warning of the late Dr Robert Benchley who said, 'Before the actual change from two eyes to one occurs, there will have to be all that disagreeable period of preliminary narrowing of the bridge of the nose with the eyes getting closer and closer together and that might very well come within our day. My eyes are so close together as they are that I bet I win. I bet I'm the first one-eyed man in the world.'

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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