America celebrated together at 200. We won't at 250. | Opinion

America turns 250 on July 4. In 1976, it reached 200. The bicentennial took place in tumultuous times, the country divided over politics. At the semiquincentennial, we are divided again.

The vibe at 250, however, is completely different from the feeling at 200. We still had a sense of oneness then. We no longer do.

In 1976, I was a student at Colby High School in Kansas, a rising senior.

Gerald Ford was president. He took office in 1974, succeeding the only man ever to quit it, Richard Nixon. I had come home from exhibiting at the county fair to watch the resignation speech. We were Republicans. I remember sitting with my dad, a farmer, watching the Watergate hearings. He didn’t say a word.

Ford was running for reelection to an office he’d not been elected to – or to the office that put him in line for the presidency. A year after he started the job, two women tried to assassinate him. In 1976, Ronald Reagan won a string of late victories and nearly snatched the GOP nomination from him.

The Vietnam War was over. The POWs had come home. We held a school assembly to welcome back one of them, Capt. Ramon Horinek, an Air Force F-105 pilot who spent 1,967 days in North Vietnamese prisons. He was from Atwood, 30 miles north.

Saigon had fallen and the South Vietnamese had taken to the seas to escape communism. A refugee girl from Vietnam appeared in my high school class. We called her Caroline and never knew her Vietnamese name. A local church had sponsored her family.

In 1976, celebrating the bicentennial was a moment of pride and unity

Despite the turmoil and division of the times leading up to it, though, I remember the bicentennial as a moment of pride and purpose, unity and thanksgiving.

I read James Michener’s book "Centennial," set in a fictional town in Colorado, geographically and culturally next door. Coloradans were celebrating their state centennial, too.

I remember the July 4th parade in Colby, not even a place at the time America turned 100. Bigger than ever, the procession ended in Fike Park, beside our pint-sized replica of the Statue of Liberty.

I recall watching the festivities in New York Harbor on television, seeing the tall ships and the bombs bursting in air above the Statue of Liberty enlightening the world. About 6 million people were lucky to see it in person.

Jimmy Carter won the presidential election that fall. Our high school band marched in the inauguration parade. I didn’t play an instrument so didn’t get to go. It was the first time most of my friends had been to Washington. The new president and first lady walked ahead of them the whole way to the White House. Ford attended, too.

Everybody was proud of taking part in marking the transference of power to a man that our Thomas County didn’t want to be president.

We were a nation badly shaken in 1976, but we stood together and celebrated together. 

Not this year.

In 2026, marking America's 250th anniversary feels different

Maybe a different president might have brought us together, just for this event, setting aside our conflicts to recall our commonality. But this one hasn’t even tried. He’s using it for his own purposes, to score points for his side, to exalt himself.

I’m now a college professor. I teach political science. As the semiquincentennial approaches, I’ve thought back to that other anniversary, 50 years ago.

Why did our nation celebrate together then, after the trauma of political assassinations and attempts, the racial conflicts of the Civil Rights Movement, the controversy over the war in Southeast Asia, the resignation of a president in disgrace and the plummet of our trust in government?

Maybe it’s because we still had leaders who were true democrats and true republicans, lower-case. Push come to shove, they put honor and American principles above partisanship:

• Republicans demanded accountability from President Nixon as surely as Democrats did. A unanimous Supreme Court cut off his last attempt to shield himself, affirming that no person is above the law.
• Congressional Democrats opened the inquiry into the Vietnam War, which Democratic presidents had led us into.
• In the '70s, the Democratic Congress and the Ford Justice Department curbed abuses that occurred in Democratic and Republican administrations alike.

We the people sustained our values, too. The Watergate revelations dropped Nixon’s approval rating among Republicans from 91% to 53% in a year. Americans honored those who sacrificed for our country, never inquiring into their politics. Communities welcomed strangers seeking refuge from tyranny and want, even those who didn’t look like us or speak our language (yet).

As Americans, we recognized the president as our leader, even if we didn’t vote for him. And our president looked after all of us, even if he didn’t get our votes.

Alas, what has become of us?

What a terrible waste of an occasion, this 250th anniversary of our independence. We need to celebrate our country together, to remember that we are all Americans, to rediscover our common purpose. But we won’t.

It will be all I can do to muster the faith to fly the flag on Independence Day this July, 250 years after the delegates in Philadelphia, “with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence ... pledge(d) to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor,” that “these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States.” 

John Mark Hansen is a professor of political science at the University of Chicago.