(Bloomberg Opinion) -- President Donald Trump is politicizing the Fourth of July — so say the president’s critics in tones of frank outrage over his plans for a presidential speech accompanied by fighter jet flyovers. It’s not only, they say, that Trump is promoting militarism by parading some tanks through Washington. Rather, Trump is taking the wholesome, politically neutral, family fun of the holiday and using it to advance his own partisan interests. In place of hot dogs and fireworks, Trump is bringing us Republican elephants.
There’s just one problem with this line of criticism: The Fourth of July was a partisan holiday from the time it was first celebrated in the 1790s. It became popular as a self-conscious endorsement of Thomas Jefferson, his Declaration of Independence and the first Republican Party — over George Washington, Washington’s Birthday and the Federalist Party.
To set the stage for the history of Independence Day, you have to begin with the debate about the proper day for celebrating it. The Continental Congress actually declared independence from Great Britain on July 2, 1776. John Adams, the great patriot who would go on to become the second president, said at the time and repeated for many years that July 2 should be commemorated.
On July 4, 1776, the Continental Congress officially adopted Jefferson’s declaration. Jefferson and his followers never doubted that July 4 should therefore be the celebrated day.
In the early years of Washington’s presidency, and into Adams’s, Washington’s Birthday came to be a holiday. To Washington’s supporters, this was a natural outgrowth of their reverence for the father of his country. Any resemblance to the British celebration of the king’s birthday was purely coincidental. As Alexander Hamilton and Adams gradually organized the Federalist Party in Washington’s name, the celebration suddenly took on a partisan cast.
In response, Jefferson and James Madison began to organize the Republican Party, sometimes referred to as the Democratic-Republican Party. The central plank in its platform was to condemn the Federalists as closet supporters of monarchy who wanted to treat Washington as a king. They condemned the celebration of his birthday.
As an alternative, the Republicans pushed the Fourth of July. They characterized Independence Day as a holiday for the people. It was especially convenient for the party that the day was closely associated with the Declaration of Independence, which was the greatest accomplishment of the Republicans’ presidential candidate in 1796 and 1800: Jefferson.
Independence Day didn’t begin to lose its partisan association until after the War of 1812, when the Federalist Party itself began to melt away. Yet even after that, competing political parties tended to celebrate July Fourth in separate partisan commemorations, a practice that continued through Andrew Jackson’s neo-Jeffersonian presidency and beyond.
All this is to say nothing about the South, which stopped celebrating the Fourth in the run-up to its own declaration of independence from the Union. It was more than a quarter-century after the Civil War before Independence Day began to be celebrated again in the South, after the Spanish-American War.
I’m also not going to say much here about July Fourth and the tradition of militarism — although you might ask yourself, what are all those fireworks imitating? Bombs bursting in air, anyone?
Instead, the point that I want to make is that in politicizing Independence Day, Trump is drawing on a tradition, as old as, well, Independence Day. Our collective mythology of a nonpartisan Fourth of July is of a piece with our mythology of a nonpartisan 1950s America.
That kind of mythology can be pleasant and sometimes useful. But it also has a tendency to cloak our complicated past in a false fabric of neutrality.
The last word here should belong to Frederick Douglass, who in an Independence Day address in 1852 explained to his mostly white, abolitionist audience that independence brought no favors to African-Americans, and that the blessings of freedom for white Americans had come at the expense of the oppression of black Americans.
We should celebrate the Fourth with our eyes wide open to our history, with all its glory, failure, and yes, partisanship. Donald Trump can’t rewrite our history so long as we remember it.
For this history see the wonderful book by Pauline Maier,“American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence.”
See Peter De Bolla’s “The Fourth of July: and the Founding of America.”
For a rousing rendition of Douglass’s speech as well as a thoughtful discussion of its context listen to the podcast “BackStory” from July 3, 2015.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Stacey Shick at sshick@bloomberg.net
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is a professor of law at Harvard University and was a clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice David Souter. His books include “The Three Lives of James Madison: Genius, Partisan, President.”
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