The history of semicentennial American presidential oratory is limited, but Donald Trump’s Saturday semiquincentennial remarks are destined to mark a low point in the canon.
He is slated to speak in the late evening during the “Salute to America Celebration & Fireworks” on the National Mall, which Trump has advertised as “the most spectacular TRUMP RALLY of them all.” Earlier this week, he previewed, “It’s going to be approximately 107 degrees out, and I’m going to go, and I’m going to make a really long speech just to show that I can do anything.” We can safely predict it will be the most self-referential of any presidential speech delivered on July 4.
Only two other presidents have delivered speeches on a semicentennial anniversary: Gerald Ford and Calvin Coolidge. America’s 50th birthday was not marked by any organized national celebration but by the incredibly coincidental passings of the Founding Father frenemies John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. The president at the time was Adams’s son, John Quincy Adams. His office issued an executive order a week later that served as a national eulogy, but it was signed by the Army’s Adjutant General Roger Jones. The President didn’t offer personal reflections until December as part of his annual message to Congress.
America’s 100th anniversary was most prominently marked by the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, which ran from May to November, and about 20 percent of the nation’s population visited. But President Ulysses S. Grant made only cursory remarks at the opening and had no further public remarks on July 4th.
Philadelphia hosted another (far less successful) exhibition for the nation’s sesquicentennial. Calvin Coolidge opened the fair on July 5 (the 4th fell on a Sunday in 1926) and offered a deep reflection on the Declaration of Independence and the success of America’s democratic experiment. (Full disclosure: I am the chair of the committee that supervises the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Library & Museum in Northampton, Massachusetts. Please visit!)“Silent Cal”m, stylistically the antithesis of Trump, did not place himself at the center of the American story. Moreover, as The New York Times contemporaneously reported, Coolidge “avoided for the most part current topics and dealt entirely with the spirit of the day and its lesson for this generation.”
But Coolidge did have his nods to the politics of the day, which were more fractious than often remembered. The low-key New England Republican with a nasal voice (heard widely thanks to the invention of radio) became president upon the death of Warren Harding in 1923, fumigated the White House of Harding’s scandal-ridden cronies, and won a landslide victory in 1924, expanding Republican control of Congress in the process.
But beneath that unity were regional and ideological fissures. The economy was strong for most but not for the country’s many farmers. Fears of socialists and anarchists fed bigotry toward Jews and Eastern European immigrants, leading to the 1924 law severely restricting immigration. The South remained firmly Democratic, as well as racially segregated under Jim Crow. The nation’s progressives, feeling unserved by both major parties, reconstituted the Progressive Party that once backed Theodore Roosevelt to support Wisconsin Senator Robert La Follette’s presidential bid, scoring an impressive 17 percent of the popular vote (and keeping the Democrats to a mere 29 percent). The Socialist Party of America also endorsed La Follette and successfully re-elected two members to the House that year: Fiorello La Guardia of New York (who had temporarily fled the Republicans) and Victor Berger of Milwaukee.
In his sesquicentennial address, Coolidge sought not to inflame those divisions but to identify common purpose:
Amid all the clash of conflicting interests, amid all the welter of partisan politics, every American can turn for solace and consolation to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States with the assurance and confidence that those two great charters of freedom and justice remain firm and unshaken. Whatever perils appear, whatever dangers threaten, the Nation remains secure in the knowledge that the ultimate application of the law of the land will provide an adequate defense and protection.
Never one to claim extraconstitutional individual executive authority, Coolidge praised the Declaration for rooting the government’s “just powers from the consent of the governed.” And he proclaimed that concept to be perfect, without the possibility of further improvement.
It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.
Coolidge may have had on his mind the rise of totalitarian states such as the Soviet Union, which formed in 1922, five years after the Russian Revolution ended its monarchy, or Italy, where Prime Minister Benito Mussolini asserted unchecked supreme power in 1925.
He subtly warned his fellow Americans that preventing the rise of totalitarianism at home required the people’s commitment and engagement. Sounding Kennedyesque when John F. Kennedy was still a child, Coolidge counseled:
Governments do not make ideals, but ideals make governments. This is both historically and logically true. Of course the government can help to sustain ideals and can create institutions through which they can be the better observed, but their source by their very nature is in the people. The people have to bear their own responsibilities…
Perhaps casting a wary eye toward La Follette’s Progressive Party, which had a platform that audaciously asserted that “federal courts are given no authority under the Constitution to veto acts of Congress,” Coolidge ended by warning against any “radical changes” to America’s governing structure:
Under a system of popular government there will always be those who will seek for political preferment by clamoring for reform. While there is very little of this which is not sincere, there is a large portion that is not well informed. . . .There is far more danger of harm than there is hope of good in any radical changes.
Fifty years later, Gerald Ford presided over the bicentennial. Like Coolidge, he spoke in Philadelphia. Like Coolidge, he was speaking to a nation recovering from a presidential scandal, in this case, Watergate. Unlike Coolidge, Ford pardoned the president involved, contributing to a shaken public faith in institutions. Harding’s dying spared Coolidge that dilemma.
Also unlike Coolidge, Ford acknowledged that more reforms were needed after the American Revolution to extend liberty to all. “For all but the black slaves—many of whom fought bravely beside their masters because they also heard the promise of the Declaration—freedom was won in 1783,” Ford observed. “Later, after a tragic, fraternal war, those guarantees were expanded to include all Americans. Later still, voting rights were assured for women and for younger citizens 18 to 21 years of age.”
And perhaps sensing a public clamor for more reform, Ford didn’t dismiss it. He openly encouraged it:
This union of corrected wrongs and expanded rights has brought the blessings of liberty to the 215 million Americans, but the struggle for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is never truly won. Each generation of Americans, indeed of all humanity, must strive to achieve these aspirations anew. Liberty is a living flame to be fed, not dead ashes to be revered, even in a Bicentennial Year.
Ford, in the thick of the Cold War, spoke more explicitly than Coolidge on the need for America to uphold the values of the Declaration on the world stage, recalling the words of Jefferson:
Jefferson wrote to Adams that “even should the cloud of barbarism and despotism again obscure the science and libraries of Europe, this country remains to preserve and restore light and liberty to them.” Over a century later, in 1936, Jefferson’s dire prophesy seemed about to come true. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, speaking for a mighty nation, reinforced by millions and millions of immigrants who had joined the American adventure, was able to warn the new despotisms: “We too, born to freedom, and believing in freedom, are willing to fight to maintain freedom. We, and all others who believe as deeply as we do, would rather die on our feet than live on our knees.” The world knows where we stand. The world is ever conscious of what Americans are doing for better or for worse, because the United States today remains the most successful realization of humanity’s universal hope.
Fifty years hence, we are on the verge of a presidential commemoration of America’s birthday that will likely violate every democratic ideal laid down by America’s founders and cherished by Trump’s fellow but very different Republicans, Coolidge and Ford. But Trump will not trample the Constitution on Saturday. He cannot. Days after the Supreme Court rejected his attempt to unilaterally rip the heart of the 14th Amendment, by upholding, however narrowly, his effort to repeal birthright citizenship, his feeble rantings will be a reminder that our Constitution was built to prevent a Trump from gaining unchecked power.
