- Michigan spent $2 million in community grants to honor the nation’s 250th birthday, less than it did 50 years ago.
- State also sending employees to the ‘Great American State Fair’ that some other states and artists are sitting out amid politicization.
- Some worry that divisive politics will put a damper on the party. ‘There’s a lot of negativity out there now,’ said one organizer.
By all accounts, it was a festive time in Chelsea in the weeks surrounding the nation’s bicentennial on July 4, 1976.
There was a barn dance and tricycle races. The American Legion hosted a chicken broil. And at the town library, residents wrote notes to be read 50 years later. Town officials buried a time capsule filled with letters and voice recordings for future residents.
In a full circle moment, that time capsule was opened Friday evening as part of a celebration of the country’s 250th birthday. Doing the honors: Jayma Ayn Bollinger, who the city designated as “keeper of the key” near her birth 50 years ago.
But across the state and country, semiquincentennial events are shaping up to be markedly more muted than in 1976, a reality organizers attribute at least partially to the political dynamics of a time when what divides us threatens to overshadow what unites us.
“There’s a lot of negativity out there now,” Robert Doran-Brockway, project director of America 250MI, told Bridge Michigan. “The country is in a tough position as far as bipartisanship.”
The state’s America 250MI committee distributed $2 million to local museums and historical societies ahead of the nation’s anniversary. There will be coordinating readings of the Declaration of Independence in about 60 communities around the state, in at least seven languages.
Michigan did send representatives to the “Great American State Fair” that several musical artists and at least seven states, including neighboring Illinois, backed out of amid complaints it had been politicized by President Donald Trump.
A recent Pew poll found that 62% of Americans were dissatisfied with the way democracy is working, and 83% said elected officials do not care what people like them think.
Another survey found the partisan divide even affects how we dress for the holiday, 52% of Republicans saying they’d wear red, white and blue clothing for the Fourth, compared to 20% of Democrats.
Three-quarters of Democrats and half of Republicans said events celebrating the country’s 250th anniversary had grown too political.
Musical acts like The Commodores, Bret Michaels and Martina McBride canceled appearances at the festivities in Washington, citing that what had been billed as a nonpartisan celebration had become politically divisive.
The president has called his planned Independence Day speech on the National Mall a “Trump rally,” and is selling “Trump 250” merchandise on his online store.
Michigan is sending 11 employees from the Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development to the nation’s capital for the fair, which runs through July 10.
They’ll operate a roughly 600-square-foot Michigan display that MDARD spokesperson Lynsey Mukomel described as a cross between a “trade show booth” and a “strip mall.” It includes a mechanical milking cow, a robotic arm like those used in auto assembly plants, and an interactive map of the state.
“The goal is, once they experience it, they’ll be motivated to visit Michigan,” Mukomel said of attendees.
State-sponsored history
The $2 million distributed through the America 250MI included grants to 88 communities, but most of the funds are not being used specifically for 250th anniversary celebrations.
Among them: a 100th anniversary commemoration of a mine collapse that killed 51 people near Ishpeming in 1926; a one-act play celebrating Norwegian immigration in Kalamazoo and renovations of the Museum of Ojibwe in St. Ignace.
Most of the funds went to support local historical efforts, such as digitizing records and “brick and mortar projects” that will outlast the semiquincentennial, said Doran-Brockway, who headed the grant process.
That’s similar to the strategy Michigan used in 1976, when $1 million in grants went to projects around the state. That’s the equivalent of $5.8 million today, or almost three times the spending power Michigan allocated for the nation’s 250th birthday.
Doran-Brockway told Bridge he recalls the fanfare around the bicentennial when he was a boy in New York. “I stood with my grandmother and grandfather at the Verrazzano Bridge and watched the tall ships,” which were part of the national celebration, he said.
In Michigan, Rachel Clark, now on the reference staff of the Archives of Michigan, grew up in a home festooned for the bicentennial. “There was a switch plate in our family room with a bicentennial logo,” she said. “My dad had cuff links and a tie tack. There were images of Paul Revere on plates. There was a candy dish that was a giant version of the logo.”
Clark had no choice in the matter: her father, Howard Lancour, was the executive director of the Michigan American Revolution Bicentennial Commission, and spent five years working on the state’s effort to celebrate the nation’s 200th birthday in style.
“It was a lot,” she said.
CBS ran Bicentennial minutes each night in prime time for two years leading up to the celebration, and because there were only a handful of TV channels, almost everyone saw at least some of them.
“The entire country was united,” Doran-Brockway said. “The nation was ready to get past” President Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974 and the Vietnam War, which ended in 1975, “and ready to come together. I remember there was red, white and blue everywhere.”
Fifty years later, he lamented, “I do not see that happen everywhere.”
A collective moment
There appear to be fewer “250” logos on red, white and blue merchandise this year than bicentennial logos 50 years ago, partly because there are two competing organizations and logos, one created by Congress a decade ago (America250) and another by a Trump executive order last year (Freedom250).
Some Michigan communities, including Grand Rapids and Bay City, will have bigger-than-usual fireworks displays to help celebrate the 250th birthday, but that is not with the aid of state dollars.
Mackinac Bridge officials aren’t installing the kind of huge “76” light display that could be seen from as far away as Cheboygan in 1976. The bridge’s 30-foot-by-60-foot flag will be unfurled on the Fourth of July, if the weather cooperates, as it is on six holidays a year.
Doran-Brockway remains hopeful that the semiquincentennial will be special. He is spearheading an effort to read the Declaration of Independence in locations across Michigan at the same time on July 8, which is the 250th anniversary of when the document was first read to the public.
So far, more than 60 groups have signed up to read the document, from the gravesite of a revolutionary war veteran in Farmington Hills, to Fort Mackinac on Mackinac Island, to the state Capitol to the Paw Paw Lake Yacht Club. In Grand Rapids, it will be read in seven languages.
Michigan’s readings will be among more than 600 across the country and the globe, all beginning at 6 p.m., the time when the document was first read.
“We’re bringing back the spirit of America through this simple act of reading the Declaration of Independence, that all men are created equal, with life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” he said.
It’s OK if some Americans don’t feel like celebrating this year, Doran-Brockway said. “This country is not perfect — Thomas Jefferson owned 600 people,” he said. “And the Declaration of Independence is an imperfect document.”
Yet that document and the country it founded have been around for 250 years, through good times and bad. That’s a lesson for all of us, he said.
No matter the “great turmoil,” Doran-Brockway said, “I believe we will get through.”
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