Torn on the Fourth of July

One of the things I like about Substack is I actually get to write my own headlines. This title is what I wanted to call this piece I did for Washington Post a while back, but I was tragically overruled.

In that piece, I talk briefly about Nixon’s campaign to blunt the massive criticism he’d received after the invasion of Cambodia and the shooting of protesters at Kent State and Jackson State by staging a patriotic pro-administration “Honor America Day” on the Fourth of July in 1970.

I discuss this at length in One Nation Under God, detailing the partisan planning and then the morning rally held by Billy Graham at the Lincoln Memorial, with hippies smoking pot in the reflecting pool as he preached.

That evening, a night of entertainment at the Washington Monument, led by Bob Hope, turned increasingly ugly:

Despite a late afternoon thunderstorm that soaked the lawn and drove the humidity even higher, the crowd only continued to swell.  American Legionnaires, unmistakable with their caps displaying their names and post numbers, turned up in clusters across the crowd.  A group of short-haired high-school kids in hard hats loudly sang patriotic songs; empty beer cans piled up beside them.  Teams of Boy Scouts rushed around providing first aid to those suffering in the heat, while roughly 500 members of the conservative Young Americans for Freedom sported armbands that identified them as official “information aides” for the event.  By nightfall, park police estimated that over 350,000 had gathered for the evening’s entertainment, forming a thick carpet of people, picnic baskets and blankets that stretched out from the spotlighted monument a half-mile in all directions.

The few thousand antiwar protestors, now badly outnumbered, had been pushed to the fringes.  Nevertheless, they had grown bolder over the afternoon, “liberating” a concession stand, raiding two Pepsi trucks and, most improbably, flipping a giant spotlight into the reflecting pool.  “The police are under orders to play it cool, to lean over backwards to avoid violence,” a Time reporter explained in a wire to his office.  Policemen tried to preserve the “DMZ” between the Honor America Day crowd and the radicals taunting them, but when a small group of protestors started throwing rocks, bottles and cherry bombs, they moved in.  As the U.S. Navy Band began the Star Spangled Banner, parks police launched tear gas into the thicket of protesters.  They misjudged the wind, however, and the smoke swept over the celebration’s attendees.  “To the final strains of the anthem,” a reporter wrote, “there was a mad stampede of weeping hippies and Middle Americans away from the fumes.”  

When the evening’s entertainment began, the crowd tuned out the protesters at the perimeter.  As promised, master of ceremonies Bob Hope kept the program largely apolitical, though partisanship occasionally crept in.  A prerecorded message from Nixon drew applause and a scattering of boos from the back, and when Hope set up a joke about a possible monument to Agnew, the crowd interrupted him, cheering the premise more than the punch line.  On a few occasions, however, the political emphasis was quite overt.  Country singer Jeannie C. Riley, best known for her hit “Harper Valley PTA,” a send-up of small-town hypocrisy, performed Merle Haggard’s Silent Majority anthem “The Fightin’ Side of Me” instead. “If you don’t love it, leave it: Let this song that I'm singin’ be a warnin’,” she sang to sustained cheers. “If you're runnin’ down my country, man, you’re walkin’ on the fightin’ side of me.”  Later, comedian Red Skelton recited the Pledge of Allegiance, defining each word at length as he went. “Since I was a small boy,” Skelton observed at the very end, “two words have been added to the Pledge of Allegiance: ‘Under God.’  Wouldn’t it be a pity if someone said that is a prayer and that be eliminated from our schools, too?”  At this, the crowd came alive, whistling and hooting.

For the most part, though, the performers stuck to traditional patriotic routines.Dinah Shore, who had been picked up from the Washington airport and whisked to the vice president’s mansion the day before, played it straight with a standard rendition of “America the Beautiful.” The Centurymen Choir, participants in the morning program, returned with the sentimental “We’ll Find America.” Occasionally these anthems served as an ironic score for the chaos unfolding in front of the performers. While the earnest New Christy Minstrels performed a sanitized version of “This Land is Your Land,” the crowd watched parks police handcuff a black teen and usher him into a paddy wagon. In the end, only the magnificent final fireworks display brought all the crowd together, however briefly, in a shared moment of awe. And as soon as it was over, the two sides went their separate ways.

Whatever happens this Fourth of July, I hope you’re spared the ordeal of tear gas.

Or, at the very least, Red Skelton.