Fourth of July

Next door to my apartment house – or if it helps, block of flats – is a small, three-storey house in a French style, what used to be called a 'carriage' house. Thirty years ago or more it was owned and lived in by a wealthy New York eccentric. His most endearing habit was that of dressing up, as men did in those days, dressing up in white tie and tails for the first night of the Metropolitan opera season, going down there and standing on his head on the sidewalk outside the Opera House. This feat was always received with applause by the passers-by and was always photographed and printed in the newspapers.

Well, he died years ago and the Met openings have never been quite the same since. His house was sold and turned into a school. It was the first private school in Manhattan that truly integrated whites and blacks. Throughout the 1950s and Sixties, there'd been several so-called 'progressive' schools, disciples of the theories of John Dewey, which boasted a few token blacks who were there if their parents could afford the fees. This massaged the social conscience of the whites and presented the black children with the unenviable task of pretending to belong to the upper middle-class white WASP culture without emotional strain.

But the young couple who, 20 years ago, set up this mixed school next door, started with something like 30 per cent black children and now the races are about equally divided – I mean integrated. The blacks come from, I was going to say, all sorts of background but the social range of blacks anywhere in this country is pretty narrow, I don't want to seem to be making a snide comment. We should still not forget that at the last count I'm aware of, about ten years ago, more black children went to college in this country than white children in the British Isles.

However, whereas the first lot of black children next door were nearly all from poor Harlem families, by now there's more than a sprinkling of the new black middle-class whose parents work in offices, banks, the professions, all the places where 30 years ago the workforce was uniformly white. How do the majority of these poorish blacks, these children, get to the school? They're there on financial support, scholarships and the like, raised by the school itself.

Well, I was coming along the block to my entrance the other morning and could barely thread my way through a pile-up of duffel bags and kit bags and battered little suitcases and string bags. Sitting on them were the tots holding hands or sulkily refusing to hold hands with their mothers but most of them were hopping around as merry as crickets. They were waiting for a bus, a bus half the size of a city block which eventually glided up. It looked like an air-conditioned mausoleum with its dark brown tinted windows.

It had printed on the side, 'Adirondacks Bus Tours Inc.' I knew then what the children were doing with their duffel bags. They were off, like a vast army of young New Yorkers between the ages of, say, seven and 12, to summer camp and this lot was off to the Adirondacks, a lush mountainous region of upstate New York, much of it protected by state law, where four, five-thousand-foot mountains are carpeted, or 'bristle' would be better, with forests of spruce, pine and hemlock and tower over a couple of hundred lakes. Naturally, a summer Mecca for tourists and campers and school camps. A winter Mecca, by the way, for such things as Olympic skiing.

Well, the sight of all these small fry bundling themselves and their bags into the bus was a gladsome sight and a sharp reminder that school was out everywhere and that this is the weekend of 'the Fourth' – Independence Day, 4 July, falling this year on a Sunday and therefore requiring, according to recent custom and union insistence, on making Monday a holiday too.

The Fourth is understandably the oldest of American national holidays since it celebrates the adoption by the original 13 colonies of the declaration, signed two days earlier, that proclaimed their independence of England. Of the specially American national holidays, there are only three which are truly national – the Fourth, George Washington's birthday and Thanksgiving.

Columbus Day, hailing the discovery of the New World itself, is celebrated everywhere but Alaska. Certainly the word has got there by now but at five or six thousand miles from old Christopher's landfall, I imagine it must seem unreal. Lincoln's birthday, a stranger might assume, is a cause for national celebration, but to this day it is firmly and politely ignored in the South.

But the Fourth of July is for everybody. Within a year of the signing of the declaration, the main cities of the 13 emancipated states got busy with parades, the firing of guns, ringing of bells, the explosion of fireworks. Boston started the custom of getting things going with a prayer. Charleston, South Carolina, was, I believe, the first city enlightened enough to require the drinking of 13 toasts by way of saluting the independence of the 13 colonies.

Philadelphia twisted the knife in the wound of the British lion by forcing a German band to provide the music. They were Hessians and the Hessians, unlike the French and, at the last minute, the Spanish, had betted on the wrong winner. The Hessians had been hired by England to fight the colonial rebels and the Philadelphia band was made up of musical prisoners of war.

After the new nation got its second and its permanent form of government, with the adoption of the Constitution of the United States, the custom of high jinx on the Fourth spread to smaller towns and, by the time, during the next 60-odd years, that pioneers had pushed through the Appalachians, across the prairie and the Rockies and the High Sierra, the annual festival had reached California.

Once the festivities spread to country towns, the celebrations became less formal and less grand, but no less fervent. The bawling politician who made a heyday of the Fourth came in and only gradually faded away, but there were, everywhere, picnics, potato races, contests in eating the most watermelons or catching the greasiest pig. Most of this has gone now and been supplanted by rock concerts, jazz festivals. In the western states, by rodeos and in California, by giant barbecues, log-rolling contests, Hollywood Bowl super recitals and supermarket specials of two jumbo burgers for the price of one.

An early piece I dug up from an historical dictionary says, 'Throughout the two centuries, however, fireworks great and small, have held a foremost place'. So they have, but not without much hand-wringing from the city and state fathers. Fireworks, including even crackers and sparklers, are illegal in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and in many more states but this is a fact of life which most people consider, as they considered the prohibition law, more of a nuisance than a prohibition.

There's something grave and dotty and typically American, it seems to me, about a government commission, the Federal Consumer Product Safety Commission and the statement it put out this weekend. Fireworks are illegal, right? Right! So, the commissioner says, 'Fireworks sometimes do things they are not supposed to. People should be extremely careful'.

It is a fact that, last year, around the country, more than 11,000 people were treated in hospitals for injuries from fireworks that did things they're not supposed to. The commission, acting responsibly in the knowledge that fireworks are illegal, has then put out seven rules or precautions to help people set off fireworks safely, such as: make sure the fuses are attached, don't use leaky fireworks, have adults on hand to supervise fire-cracking children, ignite fireworks always outdoors AND – my favourite – call the local police or fire department if you're unsure about the laws. The laws, that is, that you're going to break.

Of course, the big deal on the Fourth of July weekend for most Americans is neither a watermelon contest, nor a rodeo, nor a rock concert. It's flocking to the stadiums to watch baseball or, and I should guess many more millions are doing it, sitting in the living room with two or three buddies, getting out the six-pack of beer, pulling down the shades against the intrusion of the noonday sun and watching baseball on the box. A big minority will be watching the Wimbledon finals on the box and a smaller minority will be watching golf. A smaller minority still, say, no more than 15 millions, will be banging a tennis ball or scuffing a golf ball and wishing they'd stayed with tossing horseshoes.

An odd minority – showbiz stars, agents and such, at the end of a winter run – will be off again to open up their houses at the end of Long Island. They used to trek, like homing pigeons to the Adirondacks, which reminds me of a story involving the great musical comedy, rather operetta, composer Sigmund Romberg.

He had a summer house up there in the Adirondacks, he was a bridge addict and he had a favourite partner. And one time they played through the night and, as the final hand was dealt, Romberg and his pal gambled all or nothing on the last hand. They were about to make a killing. The partner picked up his hand, saw he had one heart, leaned back and as airily as possible started to hum the tune of Romberg's great hit, 'Dee dee dee, dee dee, dee dee...', 'One Alone.' No visible recognition from Romberg. They lost.

The furious pal took Romberg in a corner afterwards and said, 'Rommy, what's the matter with you? I gave you the sign!' 'What sign?' he said. 'I started to hum, "One Alone, My heart was yours", for Pete's sake!!'

Romberg, a vain man, said, 'Huh, who knows from lyrics!'

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.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.