A “George Washington Slept Here” float marks the U.S. bicentennial in Brattleboro on July 4, 1976. Family photo courtesy of Kevin O’Connor On July 4, 1976, a gaggle of Brattleboro grade-schoolers celebrated the nation’s 200th anniversary by tying a pair of bedposts to a Jeep, blanketing the hood with a sheet and turning a beach ball into the head of the first president. “George Washington Slept Here,” read the sign my friends and I crafted for our attempt at a parade float. Fifty years ago, the “Spirit of ’76” took hold of not only my eighth-grade U.S. history class, but also seemingly everyone, everything and everywhere. Turn on a television, for example, and you saw celebrities such as Charlton Heston and Lucille Ball sum up what happened two centuries earlier in a “Bicentennial Minute.” “And that’s the way it was,” each segment ended, in a play on CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite’s “and that’s the way it is” sign-off. Today, I’m struck by the comparative silence around the 250th. Some say it’s because “semiquincentennial” appears impossible to pronounce. (It’s actually as simple as semi/quin/centennial, which means half of 500.) Others don’t want to take sides amid separate commemorations by a bipartisan congressional America250 commission and President Donald Trump’s Freedom 250 organization. What’s changed in the past half century? Surprisingly not much, I realize upon revisiting 50-year-old newspapers and magazines from an unplugged era before cellphones and personal computers. Children in a pony cart join a parade in the Stowe village of Moscow on July 4, 1976. Photo by Peter Miller, courtesy of the Vermont Community Newspaper Group “I must say to you that the state of the Union is not good,” then-President Gerald Ford told the nation at the time. Americans were distrustful of the federal government. The country relived the Watergate scandal and President Richard Nixon’s subsequent 1974 resignation through the movie “All the President’s Men,” which opened in Burlington at the beginning of April 1976 and played three straight months until the end of June. “This film must close due to contractual obligation,” an ad in the Burlington Free Press apologized. Many people were disillusioned after the just-concluded Vietnam War and continuing conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. “If the tales of gallantry have been legion among Vermont soldiers, so has the toll of human wreckage,” then-Rutland Herald reporter Howard Coffin wrote in a July 4, 1976, story that noted 222 residents of the state had died in Southeast Asia, “where many thought the U.S. should never have been.” Most everyone dreaded the economy, which topped concerns in a congressional survey of nearly 10,000 Vermonters. “Curbing inflation appeared to be the most important priority,” the Barre-Montpelier Times Argus reported. And seemingly all were divided. Vermont, which ratified a federal Equal Rights Amendment for women in 1973, watched other states wrestle over the initiative before it stalled. Residents with ties to Boston saw a photographer there win that year’s Pulitzer Prize for capturing a white teenager charging a Black lawyer with an American flag pole. “No matter how excellent the Declaration of Independence and Constitution are written, this democratic society will not be able to survive unless the people and their officials are committed to public virtue,” one rabbi said in a Brattleboro Reformer article headlined “America at 200 Years: Moral Decay or Rebirth?” The Rutland Herald front page of July 5, 1976, reports on Vermont’s observance of the U.S. bicentennial. In Montpelier, state lawmakers wrestled for months to balance a $115 million general fund budget — a sum just 5% of the current $2.5 billion annual figure. “The 1976 Legislature adjourned Saturday evening after one of the longest, most bitter stretch runs in years,” Vermont Press Bureau reporter Mavis Doyle began her closing-day story. I was there as a student page recruited by my father, Timothy. As the state’s first Democratic House speaker, he thought (mistakenly) I’d want to witness all the wrangling. Only through recent research was I reminded that the Legislature ended that year on March 27 — a sprint compared with later sessions that have extended into June. Delivering paper notes in the days before emails and texts, I met then-Gov. Thomas Salmon. And the Republican House leader, Richard Snelling. And the Democratic House whip, Madeleine Kunin. And the youngest representative at the time, 24-year-old James Douglas. None of us knew I’d go on to report on all three legislators when each was subsequently elected governor. Recently retired U.S. Sen. George Aiken rides in Brattleboro’s Independence Day parade on July 4, 1976. Photo courtesy of the Brattleboro Historical Society In the small town of Putney, George Aiken had recently retired from a 44-year Vermont political career that saw him choose green for the color of the state’s license plates, coin the term “Northeast Kingdom” and call for an end to the Vietnam War in a speech the press paraphrased as “declare victory and get out.” He marked the bicentennial by publishing his U.S. Senate diary from 1972 to 1975. “The refreshment of reading about the scandal of Watergate, the horror of Vietnam, the fear of Russia, and the political maneuverings of Washington’s cast of characters through the eyes of a Vermont senator who was never either unmoved or spoiled by power, is delicious,” book reviewer Ruth Page wrote in the Burlington Free Press. The Free Press also reported on an unsuccessful “perennial candidate” who arrived for a 1976 Boys State appearance “out of his element.” “Lecturing in his rolling Brooklyn accent, he tells the crowd how Vermont has been subject to ‘corporate blackmail,’” the story went on to say. Bernie Sanders, who lost again that year, would have to wait until 1981 to score election as mayor of Burlington and 1990 to start his career in Congress. The bicentennial, in contrast, was a big winner. “The United States, feeling sufficiently buoyant despite persistent prophesies of gloom, has organized for itself an extended birthday blowout to note the nation’s survival through two uncanny and contradictory centuries,” Vermont Life magazine wrote in its summer issue. An 18-member Vermont Bicentennial Commission saw 5,000 volunteers spearhead 700 projects. Meetings centered on whether to allocate $350,000 in grant money to preserve the past — the town of Granby requested $57.50 for historic markers and received a rounded-up $58 — or seed the future by supporting individuals and institutions working for social change. “I do think a resuscitation is needed in the country and we need to reflect accurately on where we’ve been and where we are going,” commission Executive Director James Hormel told Vermont Life. But the state only had money to look back rather than forward — although it gave then-aspiring artist Sabra Field her big break when it selected one of her posters for exhibit in Washington, D.C. Ships sail between New York’s Statue of Liberty and the recently opened World Trade Center on July 4, 1976. Photo by AP/Eddie Adams On July 4, 1976, Americans tuned into all-day network television coverage of historic tall ships in New York Harbor sailing past the 110-story twin towers of the recently opened World Trade Center. “The ships were not only gorgeous, but were a reminder to everyone that this country was founded by heroic men and women, not computers or machines,” the Brattleboro Reformer editorialized the next day. In Vermont, people could ride a steam train on a 262-mile run from Bellows Falls to Rutland to Burlington and back. Dozens of communities held parades, including Bristol and Wardsboro, both of which claim the state’s oldest Independence Day celebrations. (Bristol can’t pinpoint a starting date, while Wardsboro began in 1949.) The Stowe village of Moscow, for its part, asked a nearby radio station to play band music for 15 minutes as residents marched with boomboxes or rode bicycles, a pony cart and lawn tractors. “It is hoped that by understanding our past heritage we can forge a better nation and state for the future,” the Sunday Rutland Herald and Times Argus editorialized. Fifty years later, my grade-school gaggle will again join our hometown parade — this time as grown-up volunteers. “It ought to be solemnized,” Founding Father John Adams wrote of history 250 years ago, “with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.” My family and friends instead are set to line up a 14-foot-tall Statue of Liberty puppet, the high school band and Brattleboro’s new compost collection truck. Amid the constant churn of change, we march on. Read the story on VTDigger here: Can Vermont celebrate a big national birthday amid turbulent times? We did in 1976.. ...read more read less