Independence Day celebrations, 1986 - 4 July 1986

For me, it used to be an automatic annual chore pretending to be a duty, like writing to your old aunt on her birthday. I mean the annual letter, done on or close to the fourth, Independence Day.

I haven’t looked back to any of the ones I did in the '40s or '50s, I am a well-known none keeper of files, but I can recall very easily the sort of thing I talked about, not, I ought to say, not done mechanically or wearily.

July 4 was the most rousting, the cheeriest, of American festivals, and well on into the 1950s and '60s the ways in which it was celebrated were predictable. Or as we said, traditional, forgetting then that especially in a nation always bringing in fugitives from other nations and many cultures, tradition is never the same for long.

Before the first lot of Germans came in in the 1830s – the Lutheran merchants and in exile scholars and liberals from the 1848 revolution – before them, I don’t suppose the fourth was celebrated with wiener roasts for the hotdog was a German contribution to America. But the clam bake by the seashore had been an institution in New England since the English discovered clam beds and down in New Orleans, Creole chicken gumbo was a standard party dish since first the Spanish then the French had combined their cooking, and, mixing in the fish of the Gulf, had produced a native cuisine which is still unique and indigenous to Louisiana.

July the fourth was a time when anybody who could get away from the sweltering cities did so, to the beach, to the mountains, to a lake, everybody went rural for a day or two. And the fourth, since the United States had been a continent of small towns and vast landscapes, the fourth was a particularly rural occasion, small-town picnic vans, march-past of the veterans of the Revolutionary War, the war of 1812. When I was first here, at the head of the survivors of the '14-'18 war, there still were a few tottering veterans of the civil war, then in their 90s, or approaching them.

Then there’d be a bawling patriotic speech – the man had to bawl to ride over the fussing gossips, the frisking children, not to mention the men ambling around, as they said, visiting, and of course there were lots of flags. The speeches seem to have gone with the wind or turned into television spectaculars, the flags are out on poles in front gardens or hanging from bedroom windows and, since Ronald Reagan came in as you may have noticed, there has been more flag-waving than ever.

And this year, the 100th year since France bequeathed to America the Statue of Liberty, the fourth has turned into a combination jamboree, national circus and trade fair.

The celebration of the famous statue, it was decided – and this, at least, was predictable in the Reagan era – was not going to be a public celebration in the sense of being paid for by the tax payer, it was turned over to what we have come to call the private sector which, in this performance anyway, is about as private as a world’s fair.

The best thing about it is the passage of the tall ships from many nations which the whole country could see on television. For the rest, as you have heard, there were cannonades of gunfire, cascades of fireworks, a parade of women who claim to look like Miss Liberty, which is a formidable claim. Two hundred Elvis Presley lookalikes – why? – and a lovingly frantic acquisition of a couple of billion dollars in sales, to the untaxed tax payer, of miniatures of the Statue of Liberty in the form of medals, ice cream cones, paperweights, goose liver, earrings, pizzas, styrofoam and her image, printed on T-shirts, balloons, footballs, menus, bank notes, and on and on.

Before I recoil, as millions of Americans are recoiling, from what one magazine calls the most revolting display of glitz in this country’s history, I have to remind myself that as a boy I saw, without emotion because it was there and therefore normal, the likeness of the royal family on cushions, chocolate boxes, tea caddies, the lot.

I do recall though, without much pleasure, my first visit to Athens, when I went by night treading reverently up the steps of the Parthenon and finding, at the foot of the steps, scores of tatty little stalls whose owners were shouting out their wares like bookies before the great race. Their wares were even tattier reproductions of the Parthenon in tin, plastic, wood, cardboard, nylon, in hats, caps, shirts, skirts, bottles.

Well, I will shake off this old fogeysm and say that since the invention of advertising the pervading of national symbols as a marketing device was bound to happen. And, come to think of it, in all the cities of Christendom, there must be millions of young people – maybe several generations by now – who, confronted every December with blazing electronic trees, and bursting department stores, must have only the haziest notion of what Christmas is meant to be about.

The time is coming when the word will require a little historical footnote, like the word "cynic", to explain that it originally referred to a peculiar cult. Well, as they say in this town, this too will pass.

At the peak of this commercial hullabaloo a federal district judge – as such he is among the second ranking judges of the land – announced that he was stepping out of this spectacular and so, inevitably were 150 foreigners who were about to acquire citizenship under his auspices.

You must have heard that on the great day, at Ellis Island, for so long the gateway for the poor and oppressed, the chief justice of the United States, Justice Burger, presided over a ceremony televised across the land, at which he administered the oath of citizenship to thousands of the foreign-born, in scores of big cities.

Now, Judge Gerhard Gesell of Washington DC said he would refuse to gather his flock for this ceremony, he would conduct his own initiation ceremony, in his own court because he had noticed the Ellis Island ceremony would be enclosed on television by commercials. Judge Gazelle said it was in poor taste and he would have none of it. He was followed by a federal judge in St Louis who felt the same way, and then, last weekend, the federal judges of one whole city, or big country, backed out for the same reason. And which city would you suppose would that be? Proper Boston? Historic Philadelphia? No, sprawling, glitzy Los Angeles, that's who, checked out of televising the national ceremony, which was thereupon accepted, by cultured San Francisco.

Amid the soaring, trumpeting newspaper editorials about freedom and the huddled masses struggling to be free, there was one that hit a more thoughtful note, for the consumption of the Polish- American potato farmers and wine growers, at our eastern end of Long Island. Not many people would see it because it was in the lowly local paper, the Long Island Traveler-Mattituck Watchman.

Into a few paragraphs it tucked in these sensible thoughts, "July the fourth is not the anniversary of American independence, it is the anniversary of America’s declaration of independence. Our observance is for the celebration of a hope, for the ambitions of colonial Americans, were not absolutely pure. They were alloyed with much that was selfish, unjust, ignoble and worldly. But the spiritual element persisted. It was the English who wrested from their governing classes the essentials of freedom and from whom all the peoples now aspiring to independence derive practical criteria and spiritual encouragement. The fourth of July is a good day upon which to declare ourselves independent of the invisible but powerful tyrannies of suspicion and fear, superstition and prejudice, race, hatred and class bigotry. But, our patriotism is noblest when it refuses to boast of the excellence of our institutions and achievements, and turns to a serious enquiry into the ways and means of remedying defects in American life."

Well, when the big show is all over and no later than next week, the immigration service, and many big cities across the land, will have ample opportunity to inquire into the ways and means of remedying, a raging problem of American life that arises from the very idea, and the policy of regarding America as a sanctuary for the poor and oppressed, and the masses, struggling to be free.

What the Statue of Liberty celebrates is the millions who poured into this country, first from northern and then from central and eastern Europe, into New York, nine millions of them between 1900 and 1910. Last year, only 5% of the immigrants came from Europe, 95% did not come into New York or Boston, they came into Los Angeles from Vietnam, Korea, the Philippines, Cambodia. And they came into the border towns of Texas, Arizona, Nevada, California, from Mexico mostly. And they came into Miami, from Haiti and Colombia, and the Dominican Republic.

Four millions, three million, nations of one sort or another came here in the 1970s, the 1980s expect six million more. By the year 2000 Anglos will be a minority in California. The 50%-plus will be Asians and Mexicans and other Hispanics.

In Florida there are so many tight-swarming compounds of Hispanics that already a second generation speaks no English and the state is considering an amendment to its own constitution to require all state business to be done in English. And there is a powerful move in Congress from members of both parties, who represent Florida and Texas, and California especially, to draft an amendment to the federal, the American Constitution, to declare what is in many places no longer taken for granted – that English is the first language of this nation.

A New York Times man in Los Angeles, which is where, I think, the Statue of Liberty ought to be relocated, put the gist of the problem in a couple of sentences, "As it celebrates the 100th birthday of the statue that stands as a beacon of welcome to the oppressed, the nation is immersed in a great debate over just how welcoming to be. The debate reflects a central contradiction of America, a land that at once welcomes the downtrodden, if only because sometimes their labour is needed, but often recoils from the cultural baggage they bring with them."

This reporter, a man named Robert Reinhold, had just finished an enormous, exhaustive survey of the state of immigration throughout the United States. And at the end of his piece, he consoled himself on a philosophical note by recalling the lament in 1847, one year before the United States collared, or annexed, California. The lament of the last Mexican governor of California who said, "We find ourselves suddenly threatened by hoards of Yankee immigrants whose progress we cannot arrest."

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