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Chapter 1: What is the significance of America's 250th birthday celebration?
I heard there are going to be a record number of fireworks. Oh, okay. Everybody's excited about America 250 in Washington, D.C. Like a Guinness World Record number of fireworks. Producer Kelly Wessinger is excited. Lee Greenwood is excited.
Because there ain't no doubt I love this land. Are you going to stick around for any of the events? We're only here till Thursday.
Leaving on Thursday is excited. Admittedly, it's gotten a little messy. The concert's a flop. A judge might stop the UFC fight. The fireworks should be good.
Which I'm excited about because I love fireworks. Good for you. Like a lot. Yeah.
The country's divided. The protests are planned. The locals are anxious. The president fell asleep at a Knicks game. It's summer in America. We are 250. And some years back, we were 200. And you know what? That one was a mess, too. Today on Today Explained from Vox, happy birthday, dear America.
I didn't realize they had closed it totally off.
I thought the mall would still be open, but yes. Support for today explained comes from BetterHelp. BetterHelp wants you to enjoy the summer, not just slip into survival mode with those kids at home and those vacation plans coming at you fast and that routine stressing you out. Then summer is over and you're wishing you enjoyed the sunny days a little more. Wow, BetterHelp.com.
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Chapter 2: How has the political landscape influenced America's birthday celebrations?
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It's been 250 years.
You're listening to Today Explained.
Ben Smith, I'm the editor-in-chief of Semaphore.
Okay, President Trump has all kinds of plans for the 250th anniversary of America. Before we get to what the plans are specifically, you have read into and talked to a lot of people. What do you think President Trump is trying to say with this celebration?
I think President Trump is trying to celebrate America as he sees it, which is not totally separate from celebrating himself.
UFC is coming, as you know, in front of the White House with a building, literally a stadium. We will host the great American State Fair on the National Mall. As far as birthday, as far as wishes, I want us to just, you know, we have a phrase. I think it goes down, I would think, in the history of our country, maybe the history of the world, as the greatest slogan or phrase ever heard.
Make America great again. That's all I want. The history of these big anniversaries in the United States, I would imagine that in the past we've made a big deal out of these. In talking to people who are involved with these celebrations and with the planning, have they made a case to you that the spectacle is warranted? Do you believe that what President Trump is up to is justified?
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Chapter 3: What are President Trump's plans for the 250th anniversary?
I think some Democrats, like, are mildly worried that the party will be somehow cast as unpatriotic. But I think as this thing continues to spiral, I think most Americans likely will just see it as the latest, you know, Washington hyper-partisan antics.
This could have been fun. Let's be honest.
I mean, it could still be fun. It could still be fun.
We don't know until we go. Are you going to go?
If I can, yeah. I live up in New York, so I'll have to make the trip down.
I'm in D.C. I'm going to go. But I'm already predicting, I could be wrong, that the partisan nature of it will make it less fun than it could have been if we had all agreed to get along.
Well, maybe less fun for you, more fun for others. I mean, it's actually one of the features of Trump rallies that I think his opponents miss is that they're very fun for the people who go. That's...
A very good point. Trump rallies are fun for people who really like Donald Trump. Yeah, OK. So I was going to ask whether Donald Trump actually cares a ton about the people attending. And I think what I'm hearing you say is if they're his supporters, yeah, he does care that they have a good time.
Yeah, I think he wants to throw a big party for his supporters and not for the haters and losers.
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Chapter 4: What controversies have arisen around the planned celebrations?
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Mr. President, can you sing for us? MJ Rimcha-Pavlovska teaches history at American University, wrote a book about the Bicentennial. Let us dip back into the mists of time. It is 1976. America is a different country than it is today. What is the mood leading up to the 200-year Bicentennial celebration of USA?
You know, it is not dissimilar as the mood now, and it's actually also not dissimilar as the mood in 1876. So we never have a uncomplicated national commemoration, it turns out. So in 1976... The president has just resigned under a cloud of scandal.
All of this adds up to a totally unprecedented situation, a grave and profound crisis in which the president has set himself against his own attorney general and the Department of Justice. Nothing like this has ever happened before. To leave office before my term is completed is abhorrent to every instinct in my body.
A president who many people really, really disliked, who was accused of having an imperial presidency.
I think the people are sick and tired of a war that never ends, which President Nixon has not ended. I think they're tired of a leadership that tells us one thing in public, while following a different course in private.
We are coming out of a deeply unpopular war that had launched a lot of criticism and social movements.
Stop the war!
And also Americans have just been protesting for 10, 20 years. So we live in a world where there have been kind of very active social movements, but where things have also changed a great deal in a short period of time. So bicentennial planning started in 1966 when Lyndon Johnson was president.
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Chapter 5: How do past anniversaries, like the bicentennial, compare to the current celebration?
But the Nixon administration basically realizes that their vision for this kind of patriotic, celebratory, straightforward bicentennial is not flying. And so they totally change course. The mission totally changes. So Nixon gives this speech in early 1974 when he's announcing this new direction.
And what he says is the bicentennial is not going to be invented in Washington, printed in triplicate by the government printing office, mailed to you by the U.S. Postal Service and filed away in your public library. Instead, we shall seek to trigger a chain reaction of tens of thousands of individual celebrations, large and small, planned in and carried out by citizens in every part of America.
Wow. What does this tell us? So this is the bicentennial that we got, that you had all of this grassroots energy of people really advocating for and planning their own commemorative activity that was more reflective of their experience. And what they ended up doing is...
creating this new American Revolutionary Bicentennial Administration whose sole purpose was to disperse funding through the states to like really hyper local groups and even individuals who were planning bicentennial events and then to publicize those events.
So the actual experience that most people had of the Bicentennial were kind of really sort of local, community-based, grassroots, a very 70s take on commemoration. This is very wholesome, what you've just described. But it started out as a similar kind of politicized fury as what we're seeing now. Absolutely. You and I are speaking on June 8th. We got less than a month.
Do you think there is any chance that this heavily politicized celebration that President Trump has planned could morph into something perhaps a bit more hands across the water? I think that in some ways it already is. As a public historian, as a fairly community engaged person, I live in a world of kind of structures created for me by the Bicentennial, you know?
So one thing that happened when the Bicentennial switched to kind of funding these small local projects is that a lot of small local projects and organizations were funded, and that capacity is still there. Your local museum probably got a new exhibit. Your library probably videotaped a bunch of people talking about what the commemoration means to them. the ethos is still there.
And when I look at the kind of stuff that's happening here in Washington, D.C., for example, and, you know, in other cities where people that I work with in the public history community are involved, I see a lot of, you know, really kind of great local projects. So here in D.C., the public library is doing an exhibit about Washingtonians' contributions to America.
There's a great organization called Made By Us that do these kind of talkback walls for Gen Z people to write about what, you know, to write down what they want to see for the next 250 years. So there's stuff. You just have to look for it. MJ Rimcha-Pavlovska of American University. Her book is History Comes Alive. Kelly Wessinger and Hadi Mouagdi produced. Jolie Myers edited today's show.
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