On the island of Nantucket, about a hundred miles from where John Hancock and Paul Revere are buried in Boston, it’s a tradition for the local Unitarian Universalist church to host a reading of the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights every Fourth of July.
That won’t take place this year, on the most momentous American Independence Day in five decades.
The pastor has announced that the congregation is foregoing the celebration this year because of unhappiness with a recent Supreme Court decision and because, in her words, the foundational documents of the United States “have, for centuries, been tragically, often violently, and unequally applied to fellow citizens who are not white.”
“Our cancelling the 4th of July celebration this year reflects the deep concern we are feeling since the Supreme Court decision as well as an on-going process within the congregation to better understand our own whiteness and how we can be part of changing an inherently unfair system which has been in place for 250 years,” the Rev. Erin Splaine wrote.
That decision was controversial, even on Nantucket, and as such, got nationwide publicity. But it’s an example of how even a momentous event like the nation’s semiquincentennial can be a point of contention in a politically polarized society.
Elsewhere, there will be parades, parties, concerts and fireworks in honor of the foundational documents that gave birth to the nation.
“With a single sheet of parchment and 56 signatures, America began the greatest political journey in human history,” President Donald Trump says on the White House website that promotes the Great American State Fair on the National Mall and a year’s worth of events to mark the nation’s birthday.
And yet there are American citizens who believe this celebration is for others, not for them. “They’re going to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the country July 4, but that’s not our celebration,” the Rev. Al Sharpton, an MS NOW host, said earlier this year.
Some are planning a more muted observance, careful not to get caught up in the acrimony of politics.
The city of Boston, a key site in the American Revolution, has a “Boston 250″ webpage that displays a colonial-era map of the city but no typical emblems of patriotism such as the American flag. And a writer for The Progressive magazine last year asked readers outright: “Are we celebrating America’s 250th?”
It’s hard to imagine anyone in 1976 asking “Are we celebrating America’s 200th?”
We were, and we did, in a big way. And a hundred years earlier, in 1876, the Macon Weekly Telegraph proclaimed on the occasion of America’s 100th birthday, “Everybody is Centennializing.”
Is the difference in tone this year really all about President Trump, as some think? And can this birthday be saved?
No stars and stripes?
The first sign that America 250 would be different from previous celebrations came in 2021, when an advertising campaign was made public after two years of planning.
The campaign for the nation’s 250th anniversary would be “recognizably American,” the executive creative director of the project told me at the time. But the logo featured shades of blue and white, with barely discernible lines of red.
That was intentional. As Design Week reported in 2020, the agency originally tasked with branding the big birthday “created an identity which celebrates America’s 250th birthday by eschewing stars and stripes imagery in favor of messaging which aims to bring citizens together and inspire them.”
That branding is nowhere to be seen now that a president who loves the stars and stripes is in charge.
But it’s also hard to find the degree of patriotic fervor that united Americans across the country in 1976 and 1876.
During the Bicentennial celebration, for example, fire hydrants across the country were painted with patriotic themes. As Denyse Allen wrote for her Substack, the Bicentennial Memory Project, the art project swept across the nation organically.
“There was no national program. There was no committee. The American Revolution Bicentennial Administration in Washington was busy approving wagon trains and tall ships and commemorative coins. The fire hydrants were not their idea. The fire hydrants were everybody else’s idea, all at once, in thousands of towns at the same time, and that is somehow the most American thing about the whole story."
The fire hydrants, like the nationwide ringing of bells that commenced at noon Mountain Time on July 4, 1976, were the kind of small touches that helped Americans feel united and proud that year.
Although there was a focal point of the bicentennial celebration — New York City, with its fleet of tall ships from around the world — most Americans experienced the Bicentennial on a local level with a strong sense of patriotism and community, Allen told me.
Eight years old at the time, Allen remembers climbing into one of the wagons that was part of a cross-country reenactment in reverse, going from California to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.
“I can still remember the smell of the canvas and the feel of the wooden seats under my hands. And I got to dress up in colonial dress and my mom braided my hair and we waved flags as the wagons rolled down the street. The fire hydrant on our street was painted with red and white stripes on the bottom and blue with stars on the top,” Allen remembers. The stores were also full of patriotic merchandise, she said.
That said, the Bicentennial was not without protests.
In the lead-up to the 1976 celebration, the People’s Bicentennial Commission, led by Jeremy Rifkin, organized to offer a “counter-cultural counterpart” to official observances. The group held a protest in Washington, D.C. on Independence Day, featuring Jane Fonda and the Rev. Jesse Jackson among others. About 5,000 people attended, accorded to a report in the New York Daily News.
The group’s complaints are not unfamiliar today. A flyer promoting the protest said “Declare your independence from Big Business,” and the group accused the Nixon administration of exploiting the Bicentennial “for its own political interests and the commercial interests with which it is closely aligned.”
That’s part of the criticism directed at the Trump administration today, as the president has injected himself into the events, to the point of even declaring the marquee celebration on the National Mall a “Trump rally.”
Moreover, there are two distinct celebrations in the works: the events orchestrated by the Trump administration are under the banner “Freedom 250″ while those called “America 250″ are the work of a bipartisan commission established by Congress a decade ago.
In other words, the United States of America is celebrating its 250th birthday in a way that is not united at all.
What the Bicentennial birthday was like
Syndicated columnist George Will remembers the Bicentennial as an “occasion (for the country) to feel better” after a troubling period of time. He doesn’t have that sense today.
“Fifty years ago, the country was still reeling from the resignation of a president in August of ‘74 and the spectacle of the last helicopters lifting off from the embassy roof in Saigon, so we’d lost a president, we’d lost a war. And America was much dispirited, and had a soothing president in Gerald Ford but he’d done something I think excellent but costly to him politically in pardoning Nixon to cauterize the wound of Watergate,” Will told me when I talked to him by phone last week.
“So the country was ready for an occasion to feel better, and the tall ships in New York Harbor helped, but it really was four years before someone came along, with Reagan’s sunny disposition, to put the spring back in the step of the nation,” he said.
“But, although the nation was kind of melancholy and somewhat depressed in 1976, it’s nothing like today. The enveloping vitriol of today’s civic discourse is so much worse than it was back then, and we sort of look ahead with trepidation.”
Looking further back, to America’s Centennial celebration, the young nation was enthusiastic about the future, while today, “artificial intelligence is eliciting dread.” And while America would still have political division if Trump weren’t president, the president has “changed the tone of our civic life,” Will said, adding, “We’ve never had anything quite like this.”
Allen, with the Bicentennial Memory Project, said it feels like the World Cup, which the United States is currently co-hosting with Canada and Mexico, is taking some attention away from the 250th anniversary celebration.
“Philadelphia would have been the natural home for celebrations, but it is all soccer all the time right now,” she said.
Still, the World Cup may be just what is needed to stir patriotism on the eve of America’s birthday, as social media is filled with videos of visitors from Scotland, England and other countries praising the United States and saying how welcome they feel here.
Maybe we need visitors to remind us that America is, after all, an amazing place with 50 distinct states, each with different landscapes, personalities and flavors, from sea to shining sea.
What the Centennial celebration was like
One hundred and fifty years ago, America celebrated its 100th anniversary with a massive world’s fair called the Centennial International Exhibition, held in Philadelphia over six months.
It was, according to Fergus Bordewich, author of the new book “Centennial,” an event that was “spectacular, by any measure” and “saturated with cultural triumphalism.”
The event celebrated America and its birthday, but also exposed Americans to a wider world they rarely saw, with pavilions from all over the world. Visitors also got to see new inventions like the telephone, the typewriter and the sewing machine, and discover new things to eat, like bananas and Heinz ketchup.
“People loved it. When you read people’s letters home, their diaries, they are thrilled, they can’t find words to describe how much they saw and how awed they were,” Bordewich said, noting that an estimated 10 million Americans — about 20% of the population — traveled to the event.
“Americans in 1876 — and this is important — were immensely proud of the United States. They were immensely proud of American institutions — (there was) none of this contempt for government, contempt for Congress, contempt for journalism that is so obvious in today’s polls. Americans admired their institutions. They knew that what they had was something unique and great. It was like no republic in the world."
Americans felt this way even though they were emerging from a tumultuous time and lived in conditions more difficult than today.
“There was a terrible depression still under way, in its fourth year. Reconstruction was disintegrating in the South; Ku Klux Klan terror is being practiced against African Americans; labor strife is peaking and leading up to the first national railroad strike in 1877. There’s renewed Indian war in the West. Custer is killed with his command in June of 1876; everyone at the Centennial is talking about it. And there’s a presidential election under way, which will be the closest fought in American history until more or less our own time, in which the Republican candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes, will prevail by only a single electoral vote,” Bordewich said.
The Civil War was less than a dozen years in the past; visitors at the Centennial would have included veterans who lost limbs in that war. “Everybody in 1876 was touched or in some way wounded by the war — not always physically themselves, but the loss of family members. At the same time, Americans really are proud of their system. They’re not complaining," he said.
What America should celebrate
America’s struggle to come together for this year’s celebration is, according to Bordewich, due in part to a decline in civic education and a misunderstanding of how our government is supposed to work.
“I personally find it deeply disheartening that Americans today are so angry at these institutions. We’re paying the price for 50 years or more without civic education, and for the disappearance of newspapers. A lot of Americans just don’t know how government works anymore. It’s supposed to be contentious. ... Disagreement is built into the system. Partisanship is a standard operating procedure; it’s not some weird defect in the system,” he said.
Bordewich believes the country has missed an opportunity this year in making the celebration more like a carnival than a thoughtful assessment of what we have in America.
“There’s a poverty of imagination in the entire, dare I call it, celebration of the 250th, and a stunning dearth of appreciation of the values and the institutions that were created at the founding,” he said.
“It would have been a perfect moment for a grand renewal of commitment to civic education and a renewal of faith in American institutions. Look at Congress. Instead of condemning Congress for what it isn’t, let’s look at it as the fine piece of political and historical handiwork that it is.”
America should have also taken stock of its history this year in the way that it did in 1876, acknowledging the good and the bad," he said.
“We’re a mature country by now, for heaven’s sake – 250 years. ... We don’t need whitewashed or gilded history. We are, or should be, more mature as a people, able to look at the darker side of American history and include it in our national story without being afraid of it,” he said.
A new report from the American Enterprise Institute suggests that Bordewich is correct about the need for more civic education.
In a 2026 poll, just 29% of Americans said they have read the entirety of the Declaration of Independence, and 26% said they have not read it at all.
And, “In a pattern common to other questions in this survey, younger generations were less familiar with the Declaration than were older ones. Twenty-three percent of the Gen Z cohort had read the document in full, compared with 35 percent of baby boomers,” the report said.
Happy birthday, or not?
When asked if this will be a happy birthday for the United States or not, George Will, no fan of Donald Trump, said, “No, no, not.”
His Independence Day plans: “Light some sparklers. Play some patriotic music. And understand that this too shall pass away.”
“America has had worse,” he said. “And the antidote to fear and gloom is to read a few books about the 1850s. Things were much worse then.”
Bordewich, likewise, plans to observe the Fourth with patriotic music; he’ll attend an Independence Day concert in North Carolina. But unlike Will, he says it will be another good birthday, even if it doesn’t rise to the aspirations of the Centennial.
“Every birthday of America is a happy birthday. Every single one. Because we’re still here as a nation, our institutions are still intact. There have been plenty of people who have sought to harm them in the course of our history and they have failed,” he said. “James Madison and the other founders did a great job. They created a wonderful machine.”
