That question occurred to me on a recent visit to Independence, California, a settlement of 600 people on U.S. 395, south of Bishop and north of Lone Pine in the windswept Owens Valley.

Spending the day on the streets of Independence, in the shadows of Mt. Williamson and other Eastern Sierra peaks, got me thinking about how much we talk about independence, and how little we cherish independence as a value.

While Independence is the sort of rural, out-of-the-way place that in the American and Californian imagination should embody our ideals of independence, there is very little that’s independent about Independence. Or about us.

Independence isn’t even its own municipality. It’s an unincorporated town—officially, a U.S. Census-designated place. Unincorporated towns don’t have their own city governments, and their people live at the whims of higher levels of government, which may or may not provide basic services. Independence neighborhoods, for example, don’t have sidewalks.

There also isn’t much business. When I visited, local cafes were closed, and the hotel-restaurant across the street from the courthouse was for sale. When I asked what was new in town, I kept getting the same answer: The Subway sandwich shop next to a gas station had been replaced by a smaller, Nevada-based chain, Port of Subs.

Independence is the seat of Inyo County, which helps keep the place alive. The county is a vital employer—between the county courthouse, the county administration, and the county jail on the south edge of town. Like so many rural communities, Independence is also dependent to a great degree on the federal and state governments. The feds manage or own more than one-third of the land in the area, via the Bureau of Land Management, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the National Forest Service, and the National Park Service. The state of California controls another 15 percent of the land. Independence depends very much on the protection of Cal Fire, with a summer of wildfires already underway.

But the biggest outside landowner in the area, with nearly half of the managed land, is the L.A. Department of Water and Power. L.A., in an unforgettable act of deception and treachery, bought up much of the Owens Valley to obtain water for the city in the early 20th century. Today, LADWP manages state-owned lands to control for dust in the Owens Lake, now mostly dry since L.A. took much of its water. DWP trucks are visible around town, and their facilities occupy multiple blocks west of 395. All this means Independence is peculiarly dependent on a city government over 200 miles away from it.

Around the corner from the LADWP buildings is Independence’s greatest public attraction, the Eastern California Museum. But inside this marvel of local history is an origin story rooted in dependence.

The name Independence was imposed by the U.S. military, which established Camp Independence in this valley back on July 4, 1862. In that period, the U.S. Army was not protecting anyone’s independence in California; it was making sure the new state stayed in the Union, while fighting and killing local Indigenous people in campaigns that, according to recent scholarship, amounted to genocide.

That history sat with me when I drove six miles south of town to visit another example of the American government’s approach to this part of California: Manzanar, the World War II incarceration camp for people of Japanese ancestry. The wind never stopped howling as I completed the three-mile loop through the camp, peering at old barracks and reflecting on the insatiable hunger of the United States to imprison its own people and—again in recent years—those who try to migrate here.

Did we stop believing in independence? Or did we ever really believe in it to begin with?

Perhaps we’d be better off giving up on glorifying independence as an American value. The 21st century is all about interdependence instead. We’ve needed one another to survive the pandemic, as our governments proved unable to prevent mass deaths. It seems certain that we’ll need to do the same to save ourselves from climate change. In a country as rough as ours, to be independent is to risk isolation and worse.

“Go as far as you dare in the heart of a lonely land,” wrote the Independence-based writer Mary Austin in her 1903 book about the region, The Land of Little Rain, “you cannot go so far that life and death are not before you.”

Today, a large plaque hangs from Austin’s former house on Market Street. As I read it, I wondered: why not call the 4th Solidarity Day? After all, it’s a holiday where we don’t behave independently. Instead, we act collectively, performing the same rituals of barbecues, parades, and fireworks all across the country.

Would we even miss Independence Day if we redefined it? After all, independence is dangerous these days. Americans spend considerable energy pressuring one another to be loyal team members—and not stray from our political, cultural, or corporate tribes. Independent thought, expression or action is likely to get you fired, sued, or severely ostracized.

Meanwhile, our elected representatives, our social movements, and our non-profits spend much of their time cozying up to the wealthy people and institutions that fund them. Talk of revolution and rebellion has been relegated to the fringes.

All that said, Independence Day hasn’t been canceled, at least not yet. The unincorporated town of Independence is organizing a fabulous Fourth of July, including closing down 395 to hold a big parade. There will be fun and games and food. You could call it a celebration of our country’s birthday. Or you could call it a celebration of the birthday of Independence, California.

Just don’t call it a celebration of independence. Because neither you nor anyone else believe in that anymore.

The post Is Independence Still Worth Celebrating? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In the early history of our republic, Independence Day was often the biggest community festival of the year. Barbecue, which developed as a new, fusion cuisine well-suited for festive occasions by the late 1600s and early 1700s, became the ultimate party food during the period when Fourth of July celebrations gained civic and social momentum. The two have been linked up ever since.

Barbecue, of course, was a thing long before the British colonists ever thought about declaring independence from their sovereign. I’m not talking about hamburgers and hot dogs on a kettle grill. I’m talking about “old school” barbecue, where a whole animal carcass was skewered with wooden poles and cooked over a trench filled with burning coals from hardwood trees. Pre-20th century, African Americans typically did the labor-intensive cooking. They used the piercing poles to flip the carcasses periodically and seasoned the meat by basting it with a sauce primarily made of vinegar and red pepper. Today, we tend to fall into stereotypes about which meat authentically represents the barbecue of a region, but back then, anything could go over the pit regardless of geography. Cows, pigs, sheep, and even opossum were the most common.

In the American South, the ideal setting for a barbecue was a rural open space with beautiful trees and a spring nearby. In between plates of food, people would play games, get their drink on, and shoot guns. Barbecues were originally social get-togethers for family and friends, but eventually any life event, like a funeral or a wedding, was an excuse for a barbecue. By the late 1700s, barbecue was already a cooking process (verb), a descriptor for a kind of cooked meat (adjective), and a form of entertainment (noun). All three were very much a part of social life in the American South, especially in Virginia.

Barbecue’s backstory is rooted in the culinary traditions of the Indigenous people who lived in what would later be called “North America” after European contact. Historian Joseph Haynes shows in his well-researched book Virginia Barbecue that British settlers in the Virginia colony melded their meat-cooking techniques with the meat-smoking techniques of the Powhatans who lived in that area. Barbecue, as we understand it today, was born. As Virginians migrated to, and settled in, other parts of the American South, they took barbecue with them.

In the Northern colonies, British cooks didn’t quickly embrace the barbecue their counterparts developed in Virginia. Northern cooks often stuck to what they knew: the “ox roast.” This festive tradition in England dates to the Middle Ages. With this method, the ox carcass was pierced with a metal rod and cooked evenly before a fire, with a team of cooks slowly rotating the spit from each side. It was also a good way to feed a good-sized crowd, so the Northern colonists’ attitude was, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

Though some July 4th celebrations featured an ox roast, southern-style barbecue became the favorite meal. Thousands of Philadelphians ate thousands of pounds of barbecued beef and lamb after a July 4, 1788, procession through the city. Thomas Jefferson hosted a barbecue dinner in Paris for expatriate Americans on July 4, 1789, shortly before the French Revolution. On July 4, 1791, Joseph Ingraham, captain of the Hope, a fur trading vessel, barbecued a 70-pound hog for his crew on the beach of Washington Island in the Pacific Northwest.

On the mainland, Independence Day celebrations shared common elements: a military procession, a reading of the Declaration of Independence in its entirety, speeches by local politicians, toasts to local and federal dignitaries, music, fireworks, and a free meal for the masses—which was usually barbecue. These celebrations drew several thousand spectators, and barbecue was well-suited to meet their needs because it was scalable.

These events were usually hosted by prominent white men who covered all of the costs. These men secured the land where the event was held, procured all of the meat used (often this was donated), bought other supplies, and hired the workers. In many cases though, enslaved African Americans did the work of clearing the land, preparing the food and serving it to guests. These large and scalable barbecues could happen anywhere. It was a moveable feast that fed not just thousands of people, but tens of thousands of people. Typically, whites ate first, and the African Americans present ate afterward.

There were some key reasons why hosts might have preferred barbecue to an ox roast. Given the lack of refrigeration, the animals meant for a barbecue were kept alive until shortly before the event. Thus, smaller animals like pigs and sheep were easier to transport, butcher, and cook than a large ox. Also, the ox roast relied on heavy equipment that included metal and bricks. It’s a lot easier to just dig a really long trench for barbecue than it is to lug around and assemble what’s needed for an ox roast.

The final key factor that tied barbecue to Independence Day celebrations in the South was the key role of enslaved African Americans in preparation and cooking. For some whites, what distinguished a barbecue from a bunch of adequately cooked meat seemed to be the involvement of African Americans. In 1919, John Bell Keeble, while serving as the dean of Vanderbilt Law School, validated this sentiment when he addressed a national convention of architects who had gathered in Nashville, Tennessee: “Some things have always been typical of a Tennessee welcome. Some you will get, and some you will not get. A barbecue was one of them. I do not know whether altogether we have lost the art or not. So many of the old negro barbecue cooks are dead that a barbecue is a rather difficult matter to bring up to the old-fashioned standard.”

After the Civil War, Southern whites who supported the Confederacy harbored sore feelings about being on the losing side. Independence Day celebrations in the South dropped off because they reminded white rebels of their defeat. Some commentators feared that the holiday would disappear altogether in the American South. In 1874, the Louisiana Democrat editorialized, “[T]he glorious Fourth of July has come again and gone again, unhonored, unsung.”

But African Americans in the region continued to vigorously celebrate Independence Day with barbecue and fried chicken. In 1901, the Atlanta Constitution newspaper reported, “[T]he [Fourth of July] is here, as in most places in the south, given over to the negroes, who celebrate [it] in truly royal fashion.” By the 1920s, Southern whites were back to hosting civic celebrations of Independence Day.

The traditional gargantuan Independence Day festivities downsized in the 20th century in two significant ways. First, as Adam Criblez points out in his book Parading Patriotism, after the Civil War, people lost their appetite for huge gatherings and many opted to attend smaller gatherings or family events. Due to higher meat prices and having to pay actual wages for labor, as well as the logistics of pulling off such huge events, more and more communities shifted to smaller events—and they started charging people to attend in order to recoup their costs. These events still got a sizable number of attendees, sometimes numbering in the thousands, but they just weren’t on the scale of the massive feeds that had frequently taken place a century before.

Second, barbecue changed in the 20th century as well. The trench method fell out of fashion as cooks shifted to using brick-lined pits and cooking smaller cuts of meat. The brick pits allowed barbecuers to control more variables during the cooking process. And in urban environments, digging a hole would have been impractical or against health codes. Cooking smaller cuts of meat is also easier and less labor-intensive than cooking a whole animal. By the 1920s, more people were eating barbecue in restaurants or building barbecue pits in their back yards, paving the way for the kettle grills that would explode in popularity during the 1950s. Over the century, the connection between barbecue and Independence Day stayed in our national consciousness, but the meal itself moved from civic spaces to public parks and private homes.

There’s a lot more to the story of barbecue, much of it hotly contested: African methods of cooking meat outdoors and whether they did or didn’t influence American cooks, the various types of sauce, regional differences in the American South, and much more. Thanks to technological innovation, barbecue can now happen almost anywhere, and cooks feel free to throw anything on the grill. Yes, this includes hamburgers and hot dogs. That’s all right. Though I have my purist tendencies, I’m fine with barbecue reflecting a “melting pit” of food traditions. My own Fourth of July plate is usually piled high with pork spareribs, hot link sausages, chicken, baked beans, coleslaw, an ear of grilled corn, potato salad, and a nice, ripe wedge of watermelon for dessert.

For me, it’s about celebrating with friends, family, and loved ones. It’s also a chance to pause and reflect on what it means to “celebrate” a nation that still falls short of its promise, but one that I call home. I live in the country that I love, and I want it to be better. Perhaps having diverse people sitting at a table and enjoying barbecue in all of its glorious forms, even kosher and “vegan,” and respectfully discussing the issues of the day can be a first step to a more perfect union. When it comes to barbecue and the Fourth of July, what pitmasters and politicians have beautifully joined together, let no one pull asunder!

The post Why Americans Still Eat Barbecue on July Fourth appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

I don’t say this to act as a “myth-buster”; rather, to put that moment in a more accurate context so that we might understand it better. In the years just before 1776, Americans did not consider themselves “American” in any substantive way. They regarded themselves as Britons living in America. The difference is crucial for understanding both the events that would usher in American independence and the ways we remember it.

While researching my latest book, I sought to recover this lost world on the eve of 1776. One way to recreate it was through the eyes of two brothers who played formative parts in shaping that era.

George Townshend, a high-ranking soldier and politician, and Charles Townshend, a key member of Britain’s Board of Trade, took on important roles in the British empire in the years just before the Revolution. George, a year older than his sibling, worked to create an empire of imperial might. Charles imagined an empire of commerce. In the process, the two brothers helped create an Atlantic world of migration and commerce that made American colonists the most proudly British people and autonomous in the world. Later, both would initiate reform of that Atlantic world. George would attempt to tie Ireland more closely to Britain. Charles would do exactly the same thing for the American colonies.

In the wake of the Seven Years’ War, a global conflict spanning five continents, the brothers came to believe that they were living during one of history’s critical moments. The British victory over the hated French, they thought, made this a time when institutions could be shaped to sustain British liberty and bind the empire together.

Charles Townshend, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, tried to come up with a vision of empire that could manage, and profit, from this moment. In 1767, he introduced duties on select goods to fund an American administration that could serve as the basis for a centralized empire.

Portrait of George Townshend. Art courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

It did not seem at the time to be a high-risk tax policy. Americans, after all, considered George III to be, in an expression of the period, “the best of all kings.” They reveled in their lives, liberty, and property, rights that were guaranteed to them as British subjects.

But in crafting his idea of empire, Townshend set off a backlash—not because the British subjects in America were somehow different, but because they were so similar in outlook.

Charles Townshend’s policies placed the British Americans in a bind, one that would lead to 1776. When Bostonians and others up and down America’s Atlantic coast contested Charles’ duties, they did not think they were declaring independence. Far from it. They pushed back in hopes of holding onto a loosely federated understanding of empire that would allow them to retain their traditional liberties while continuing to profit from the Atlantic trade.

In doing so, they embraced the same rationale that the Townshends employed to design empire: that only a people devoted to liberty could negotiate a world-changing moment of time. By contesting the empire Charles was championing, they would create revolution.

Empire and revolution, then, were made of the same British materials.

The leaders of this British American revolution did not reckon, at least at first, with the implications of their resistance. By contesting the measures of Charles Townshend in America (and also of his brother George to keep Ireland within the British empire), the British Americans occasioned a battle over who would rule in each society.

Both Ireland and America were deeply politicized by the Townshend Moment. In Ireland, Roman Catholics found a political voice. The same was true for poorer people in America, and even for some enslaved persons. Most troublingly, for elites in each place, was that the backlash against the Townshends had driven members of the lower social orders to violence that seemed to be increasing.

The violence was a political challenge to rulers not only in Britain, but in America. And so the British-American elites—the merchants, planters, and lawyers who were pressing for their British rights against Townshend—had to fight two conflicts: one in Parliament, and another against the people they ruled over in America.

This created a series of what I call “provincial dilemmas.” In Ireland, Protestants carefully addressed their dilemma by pushing for as much autonomy within the British system as they dared, without further infuriating Catholics who made up more than 70 percent of the population. The Irish would not make a claim for real national independence, however much they resisted what Parliament was doing.

British-American elites had more confidence. They figured that the only way they could contain the political challenges from below was to make a bid for independence. To enjoy autonomy, their liberties, and the promise of Atlantic commerce—and to remain masters of their own societies—meant that they would have to become “American.”

That transformation took a long time, and it didn’t happen in 1776. For years afterward, Americans did not quite know what it meant to be “American.” It took the actual fighting of the war against Britain for them to see each other as compatriots and to become, in some sense, a people.

The date of July 4, and the Declaration it commemorated, did not mean much until the decades following independence, when it would be resurrected as a birthday of a nation, in order to address political tensions and the uncertainties that a period of revolutionary uncertainty had unleashed.

In time, all Americans could look to the country’s Founders as the reasonably minded midwives to a new republic dedicated not to the memory of violence but to a set of ideals. These ideals—“life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”—would then become the sum total of who we are as Americans.

But, placed in the proper context, our nation’s tangled tale actually began with British statesmen like the Townshends and with a group of colonists who proudly considered themselves to be the most proper British people in the world.

The post How the Townshend Brothers Accidentally Sparked the American Revolution appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Dear America,

I suppose I should wish you happy birthday. But I’m just not feeling it.

You and I, the United States and California, used to be pretty darn close—“indivisible” was your word and “inseparable” was mine. Sure, we had our differences—I’ve always been a little out there—but the differences were what made us a successful partnership.

America wouldn’t be America without California, and California was proudly part of America, which tolerated our excesses for our mutual glory. President Clinton, in a speech at UCLA during the early ‘90s, reminded us: “Don’t ever forget that California is still America’s America, the cutting edge for a nation still a symbol of hope and optimism throughout the world.”

But you and I have been drifting apart in a thousand small ways and some pretty big ones since then. Today, I look at you and feel like I’m an entirely different place, with different values, mindsets, even different realities.

I never used to think this, but now I find myself wondering about our future: Do you and I even have one together?

When I think of the problems in the relationship, it’s really not me. It’s you. While I’m the almond-producing state with a well-deserved reputation for flights of fancy, you’re the one that has gone nuts.

Now, everyone is entitled to a mid-life crisis, even 18th-century republics. But you are having an especially nasty one. Sometimes I feel like you’ve turned against everything you used to love: immigrants, trade, international alliances, voting rights, women’s rights, science, national parks, building infrastructure, and a certain stoic and respectful demeanor.

These days, you’re constantly freaking out. And the government you installed in Washington—a government my voters opposed by historic margins—is trying to take away people’s health care, make it harder to vote, roll back environmental and climate regulations, restart the failed drug war, defund Planned Parenthood, and pick fights with my best foreign friends and trading partners, perfectly friendly countries like Mexico, Canada, Germany, Sweden, and South Korea.

Couldn’t you have just bought an irresponsibly expensive sports car instead? I mean, you’ve got the global reserve currency to afford one.

Now, all of this crazy nonsense is pretty bad. But here’s what’s even worse, and maybe unforgivable: Your people, your media, and your elected officials keep trying to justify your crack-up as just a natural reaction to what you say is my awfulness. In your narrative, I’m too coastal, too elite, too rich, too educated, too Hollywood, too tech, too globalist, too uninterested in the pain of the rest of the country, and thus too out of touch with you. And so you’ve had to go stone-cold nuts to get my attention, to wake me up.

That thesis is—how do I put this?—exactly what the cows drop in Tulare County pastures after a good feed.

I shouldn’t have to say this, but my people and I know the pain of poverty (we’re tops in the nation in it), economic dislocation (just look back at the carnage of our 1990s recession and our late 2000s housing crisis), and drug abuse. There is no American malady I don’t suffer, with the exception of bad winter weather.

So the fact that you keep projecting your outrageous behavior onto me—while supporting a federal government that believes all these problems will be solved by cutting the taxes of my many millionaires and billionaires—tells me that you’ve taken leave of your senses.

I’m also starting to worry that your insanity and your lack of a coherent foreign policy in East Asia is going to end up getting me nuked by North Korea.

So, going forward, our relationship can’t be the same.

Now, I’m not going to march out the door and become my own country, like the crazy, Russia-compromised #Calexit movement proposed. You are still my country, and I’m not surrendering you. Plus, if I did become independent, I don’t think I could ever sleep at night with a nation as violent and volatile as you on my northern and eastern borders.

But I do need to put some distance between you and me. Let me put it this way: I need some boundaries, but I don’t mean a wall. I need to stand up for myself, and think about my own needs and protection first.

A few weeks ago, a small group of Californians filed a ballot initiative that will give me some space. The initiative, called “California’s Future: A Path to Independence,” does have a separatist bent—it takes “inseparable” out of the California constitution’s line about California being part of the United States. But it’s agnostic on the idea of California leaving the Union. The initiative takes the position that it doesn’t much matter whether California is in the United States or out of it, only that California is able to pursue its own interests, and not have them frustrated by you.

“America, whatever” is its attitude; “California first,” is its policy. The initiative sets up a structure with the express purpose of “buffering Californians” and their values (respect for diversity, science, and democracy) “against chaos, dysfunction, and uncertainty at the federal level.”

In the meantime, it sets up a structure so that California behaves more like its own nation, and looks out for its own interests. Your and my relationship should be, it argues, less about any lingering feelings of love and loyalty, and more about business.

While you slide toward republican authoritarianism, the initiative proposes that California—a place where the people who get the most votes actually win the elections—will stick up for democracy. We will fight for the universal right of all adult citizens to vote, even if you continue policies that make it harder for people to vote. We will challenge attacks on our immigrants, our world-class cities, and our highly effective anti-smog policies.

“As Californians, we have much to gain and little to lose by pursuing autonomy,” the measure says, adding: “The path to both autonomy and full independence is largely the same; for California to take stock of the leverage it has over the United States, and to use this leverage to negotiate for ever greater autonomy.” For example, my people should seek changes to tax and budgeting policy so that I’m not paying more in taxes than I’m getting back in services. And I’m not interested in subsidizing your irresponsible debt or your constant wars, which my people don’t support. And while I’m at it, I’ll be demanding the representation I deserve—starting with more than two senators.

The initiative’s proposed commission—which is modeled on one of California’s most enduring governing entities, the reform body known as the Little Hoover Commission—would pursue both federal and state policy changes and demand progress from elected leaders on ever-greater California autonomy.

It’s not a perfect idea. For one thing, the initiative would name the commission after Juan Bautista Alvarado, an obscure 1840s governor who supported greater California autonomy under Mexican rule. But he also had a colorful personal life, including a drinking problem so bad that he didn’t make it to his own Santa Clara wedding (his half-brother had to stand in for him). It would be better to name the commission for General William Tecumseh Sherman, who is both a major California figure (as an Army officer during the Gold Rush and a leading banker of 1850s San Francisco) and an American military hero who famously marched through some red states with voter registration issues.

Yes, I’m going my own way. But my people are just as American as yours, and so on July 4, I’ll still host many millions of barbecues, and enough patriotic parades and fireworks displays for 39.5 million of your citizens. Back east of the Sierra, I hope your celebrations are bigger and louder than ever, and that your people will stand extra close to the fireworks.

Maybe all the explosions will wake you the hell up.

Independently yours,

California

The post California, Let’s Celebrate July 4 by Declaring Independence appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In the cooling evening air, Charleston, South Carolina’s notable citizens filed into Hibernian Hall on Meeting Street for the traditional banquet to close their July 4th festivities. The year was 1860, and the host, as always, was the ’76 Association, a society formed by elite Charlestonians in 1810 to pay homage to the Declaration of Independence.

The guest of honor was one of the city’s most beloved figures, William Porcher Miles, Charleston’s representative in the U.S. Congress in Washington. A former professor of mathematics at the College of Charleston, Miles had won his city’s heart with his heroic efforts as a volunteer nurse to combat an epidemic of yellow fever on the coast of Virginia. He was not a planter, and not even a slaveholder, but he believed in the Constitution and in the slave master’s rights sealed by that compact—and he had come to believe that America was best split into two.

Miles wasn’t happy when, amid the clinking of glasses, a poem approved by the ’76 Association was read out loud in the hall:

The day, when dissevered from Union we be,
In darkness will break, o’er the land and the sea;
The Genius of Liberty, mantled with gloom,
Will despairingly weep o’er America’s doom …

It was just a poem, mere words, sounded with a muted note of elegy. But there was no such thing as “mere words” in the blistering heat of this Charleston summer, with war about to erupt. Words, in 1860, were weapons. And these particular words struck a blow at an equation that secessionists like Miles had labored to forge between their cause and the broader American cause of freedom. This verse presented a quite different idea—the notion, heretical to the secessionist, that the sacred principle of liberty was bound up with Union, with the bonds linking together all of the states, and all of the people of the nation, from Maine to Texas.

So it went for Charleston in this year, beset with a complicated, even excruciating welter of emotions on the question of secession. As determined as so many in Charleston were to defend their way of life, based on slavery, under sharp challenge from the North, still there was room for nostalgic feeling for the Union and for the ideals set forth in the Declaration.

Independence Day in Charleston had begun as customary, with a blast of cannon fire from the Citadel Green at three o’clock in the morning. Roused from their slumber, Charlestonians made ready for a day of parades by militia units in colorful uniform. In the 102-degree heat, the men of the German Artillery, sweltering in their brass-mounted helmets, could only be pitied.

Surely, the town’s secessionists thought, it would be a fine occasion to trumpet their ripening movement. They would celebrate Independence indeed—the coming liberation of the South from the clutches of the nefarious Union. As odd, even bizarre, as this might seem today, Charleston’s secessionists sincerely felt they were acting in a hallowed American tradition. They saw themselves as rebels against tyranny, just like their forefathers who had defeated the British to win America’s freedom some 80 years before. In this instance, the oppressor was the Yankee Abolitionist in league with the devious Washington politician, together plotting to snatch from the South the constitutional right of an American, any American, to hold property in slaves.

By the summer of 1860, these self-styled revolutionaries seemed to be winning their improbable campaign. Back in the spring, at the Democratic National Convention, held in Charleston that year, Charlestonians packed the galleries and cheered wildly when radical Southern Democrats walked out of Institute Hall in protest over the refusal of Northern Democrats to agree to a party plank giving the slaveholder an unimpeded right to operate in western territories like Kansas and Nebraska. The rebel delegates proceeded to establish their own separate “Seceding Convention,” as The Charleston Mercury called this rump group. In its comment hailing the uprising, The Mercury, a daily bugle call for secession, declared that, “The events of yesterday will probably be the most important which have taken place since the Revolution of 1776. The last party, pretending to be a National party, has broken up; and the antagonism of the two sections of the Union has nothing to arrest its fierce collisions.” A Northern reporter strolling the moonlit streets wrote of the occasion that “there was a Fourth of July feeling in Charleston last night—a jubilee … In all her history, Charleston had never enjoyed herself so hugely.”

In this electric atmosphere, public expressions in favor of the Union could scarcely, and maybe not safely, be heard. An abolitionist in Charleston risked being tarred and feathered. Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, America’s largest paper by circulation and a standard-bearer for abolition, was banned in the city.

It was all the more remarkable, then, that the poem confessing to despair over the Union’s impending collapse was read for all to hear at the banquet at Hibernian Hall on July 4. Rep. Miles could hardly let a handwringing cry for Union stand unchallenged. He held his tongue at the banquet, but five nights later, at a political meeting of town folk held at the Charleston Theatre, up the street from Hibernian Hall, he gave his constituents a tongue lashing. “I am sick at heart of the endless talk and bluster of the South. If we are in earnest, let us act,” he declared. “The question is with you. It is for you to decide—you, the descendants of the men of ’76.”

His words, and many more like them, would win the summer of 1860 for his camp. Charleston’s passion was for rebellion—and the banquet poem turned out to be a last spasm of sentiment for the Union. Repulsed by such feelings, the Charleston merchant Robert Newman Gourdin, a close friend of Miles, organized rich Charlestonians into a Society of Earnest Men for the purpose of promoting and financing the secession cause. When an Atlanta newspaper mocked Charleston’s insurgents as all talk, no action, a member of the group responded in The Mercury that the Earnest Men would “spot the traitors to the South, who may require some hemp ere long.” True to their identification of their undertaking with the American Revolution, the secessionists also formed a new crop of militia units known as Minute Men, after the bands that gathered renown in colonial Massachusetts for taking on the British redcoats. Recruits swore an oath, adapted from the last line of Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, to “solemnly pledge, OUR LIVES, OUR FORTUNES, and our sacred HONOR, to sustain Southern Constitutional equality in the Union, or failing that, to establish our independence out of it.”

In November, with the election to the presidency of Abraham Lincoln, the candidate of the antislavery Republican Party, Charleston went all in for secession. Federal officeholders in the city, including the federal district court judge, resigned their positions, spurring The Mercury to proclaim that “the tea has been thrown overboard—the revolution of 1860 has been initiated.”

Charleston’s “patriotic” uprising ended in ruin—ruin for the dream of secession; ruin for the owner of human chattel, with the Constitution amended to abolish slavery; ruin for the city itself, large parts of which were destroyed by federal shells during the Civil War. The triumph, won by blood, was for the idea expressed ever so faintly by the men of ‘76 at Charleston’s July 4th celebration of 1860, and made definitive by the war—the idea that liberty, and American-ness, too, were inextricably and forever tied to union.

The post How Charleston Celebrated Its Last July 4 Before the Civil War appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In saying this, I mean no offense to the patriotic pageantry of Petaluma or Paso Robles. Personally, it is hard for me to acknowledge San Diego’s supremacy in anything. In general, we Angelenos consider it bad form to ever give our baby sister to the south its due as a great city (especially since her international airport is actually in Tijuana). And with regard to the Fourth, I have long been convinced that the perfect Fourth of July is a barbecue in my hometown of Pasadena followed by the big fireworks display above the Rose Bowl—which calls itself, officially, “America’s Stadium.”

What place could possibly top such a Fourth?

San Diego could.

Last year on the Fourth, my wife and kids and I went down to San Diego to visit cousins, and by the end of the holiday the revelation had hit with the force of a cruise missile: San Diego has America’s Finest Fourth of July.

What makes it so special?

It’s not just the fireworks show right there in the harbor, even though it’s the biggest show on the West Coast, televised live not only in San Diego but also in Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, Palm Springs, and even northern Mexico.

And it’s not just the cool breezes that make San Diego one of the most pleasant places in California to spend a hot July day. It’s not just the assets San Diego offers visitors, from the zoo to the Gaslamp District to the museum treasures of Balboa Park. It’s not just that the San Diego County Fair is up and running every Fourth along the glorious coastline in Del Mar. And it’s not just that San Diego offers baseball and tasty hot dogs in the state’s most comfortable sports venue, Petco Park, (or that this weekend the Padres are at home to play the Yankees).

San Diego’s Independence Day advantage runs deeper. It is the most American of California cities.

It also may be our most patriotic pueblo. If you attempted a census of American flags, San Diego would win hands-down; look in any direction in the city and you’re all but certain to see the stars and stripes in some form or fashion.

Before you quibble with my claims about San Diego’s Americanness, consider its competitors: the Bay Area and Los Angeles are technological and cultural oddballs, proudly out of step with reality, not to mention the rest of the country. And our inland cities swing too far country and right of the mainstream. San Diego County, with fairly equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans (and lots of independents), represents our middle, and the closest approximation to the American norm that California can offer.

In other ways, San Diego is abnormally American. While the military is no longer the engine that drives the city, the visibility of the armed forces, via ships and military installations and veterans, offers constant reminders of America and its history that you don’t get at the same pace in the rest of the state. Being on an international border plays a role too. San Diegans, particularly the hundreds of thousands who cross the border at Otay Mesa or San Ysidro (or use the Tijuana airport), must pony up proof of their U.S. citizenship more often than most Californians.

Beyond the fertile patriotic environment, there’s San Diego’s theatrical geography, perfect for a show.

Sandy Purdon, a marina owner, Marine veteran, and longtime San Diego mover-and-shaker, was building a home out on Point Loma more than 16 years ago when it hit him: San Diego’s downtown waterfront sits at center stage of a massive natural amphitheater created by Mission Hills to the north, the hills east of downtown, the hills of Point Loma to the west, and the hills to the south on the Mexican side of the border. So why not fill it with a fireworks show that would draw big crowds over the July 4 holiday?

The Port of San Diego and port-affiliated businesses agreed to sponsor it, with proceeds going to the Armed Services YMCA, a charity supporting military families. The show started small in 2001, and there was a famous mishap in 2012, when all 18 minutes worth of pyrotechnics fired off in about 30 seconds. But the show has grown into a reliable giant, with four barges in the harbor now serving as staging ground.

The effect is powerful, like four simultaneous Rose Bowl-sized fireworks displays with an impressive water feature thrown in. And it’s possible more spectacle and more barges could be added in the years ahead.

Last year, my cousins took us out to the old Point Loma Lighthouse, which is part of the national monument named after the Portuguese explorer Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo, the first European to navigate the California coast. The site, at the end of a peninsula, offered a stunning vista encompassing ocean, Mexico, downtown, harbor, and North County. From that vantage point, we could see smaller fireworks shows from different local communities around San Diego, as well as the shows at Sea World and the fair to the north.

Then the main show, called Big Bay Boom, exploded, bigger and more beautiful than any fireworks I’ve ever seen. The majesty of the lights and the setting, at the southwestern edge of our country, left me with nothing to say except three words, uttered without irony: God Bless America.

The post California’s Finest Fourth of July Is in San Diego appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.