Forgettable Anniversary
Lexington and Concord at 250
This is an installment of “Sestercenntenial Moments,” marking the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution and its memory in our national life. For more on the background of the series, see here.
April 19—a.k.a. Patriot’s Day in Massachusetts, a state holiday—will be a big day in Concord. There will be a dawn salute at the National Park Service site there, followed by a parade that begins at 8:30 a.m. A block party will start at 1 p.m., and admission to the town’s history museum—truly a cutting-edge facility in the art of exhibition—will offer free admission. The NPS will be offering demonstrations open to the public, and at dusk a light and drone show will get underway. Promises to be a good time for all.
It’s not surprising that Concord would throw a big party for itself. After all, April 19 marks the 250th anniversary of a battle that became “the shot heard round the world” marking the start of the American Revolution. Actually, there was a smaller battle in the early morning hours of April 19 in the adjacent town of Lexington, which will also be commemorating the occasion with a re-enactment of Paul Revere’s famous midnight ride, and a 5:15 a.m. re-enactment of the battle (really more like a skirmish) on the town’s green. New England has a pretty strong sense of its history, and I imagine this will be a first-class event.
What surprises—actually, what troubles—me is that this appears to be as far as the anniversary of the event will go. As holidays go, Patriots Day ranks about where Memorial Day (or, for that matter, Good Friday) does: a day off to sleep in for reasons no one is much inclined to question.
I can imagine an alternative universe where the president of the United States makes a journey to Lexington and Concord and gives an inspirational speech about the remarkable string of events that marked a decisive American victory and the creation of a nation. Maybe there would be an exhibition at the Smithsonian; maybe a documentary—or even a feature film—on the secret machinations of Samuel Adams and John Hancock (played by a slightly seedy Leonardo DiCaprio) who conducted covert operations based at Buckman’s Tavern on Lexington Green and whose capture was part of the planned British operation. Schoolchildren would roll their eyes at assemblies; there would be an array of athletic gear with a LexCon logo. Commentators would note a surge in patriotic spirit in the country, while comedians would mock it. By the summer of 2026 everybody would long since be sick and tired of the nation’s Sestercentennial.
I can imagine such a scenario because I more or less lived it as a child a half-century ago, when the nation’s bicentennial really was a thing. The run-up started well before the Tall Ships celebration in New York Harbor in 1976. One indication was the daily “Bicentennial Minute” broadcasts that began in 1974 and ran for the next two years and are the inspiration for this particular series of Substack posts. This was interesting because the mood of the country on the eve of the Bicentennial was dark: Vietnam, Watergate, stagflation. But the rising mood surrounding the nation’s 200th birthday seemed to influence the national mood, so that movies like Rocky and TV shows like Happy Days seemed to be part of a rising tide of good feeling. I don’t want to exaggerate this, but the cultural current was there.
We don’t live in such a country now. Our mood, like that of the early seventies, is dark. If the president of the United States were to come to Lexington, he would likely be booed by some and aggressively cheered by others; altercations could well break out. (This may be a moot point because the Trump administration has placed 80% of staff for the National Endowment for the Humanities on leave and cut funding for state organizations.) But even if he hadn’t, we’ve now had a full half-century where students have been regularly schooled on the nation’s very real shortcomings in ways that breed skepticism and cynicism. Celebration might well seem unseemly. Caring about things like battles and leaders marks you as a little musty at best.
Is anything happening to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the United States? Yes, there’s a website with a nice logo, where you can find a calendar of local events around the nation. Maybe, by July 4, 2026, the vibe I’m describing here will prove to be premature and/or misplaced. I hope so. In the meantime, I remain a melancholy patriot.