Boston’s Bicentennial Blues:
How Boston Captured America’s Crisis of Confidence, 1967-1976
Before my term has ended, we shall have to test anew whether a nation organized and governed such as ours can endure.
The outcome is by no means certain.
—John F. Kennedy
​
Boston, like the whole of America during this time, was not immune to the progressive strife leading to its bicentennial years. By 1969, several civil and political leaders had died in violent assassinations, most notably John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr. At the same time, the Civil Rights Movement resulted in civil resistance over America’s social structures while violent riots engulfed several prominent American cities. Even with half a million troops and the largest defense budget on the planet, the modern technological might of the American military could not overcome a determined North Vietnamese insurgency. As inflation rates climbed and unemployment soared, President Johnson’s expensive Great Society programs were generally unsuccessful in combatting poverty.
​
In America's Revolutionary bicentennial, this evolved into three phases of disillusionment and soul searching during the years of 1967-1976. F From 1967 to 1970, Boston city planners proposed an American Revolutionary Bicentennial World’s Fair in Boston that emulated the 1967 World’s Fair held in Montreal, Canada. The proposal’s rejection exemplified America’s crisis of confidence, as local Bostonians fought against it for fear of instability and planners engaged in petty competition with regional cities (most notably Philadelphia) for a exposition endorsement. From the period of 1971 to 1974, Boston stagnated its bicentennial plans amidst widespread national issues like economic and political strife, as they had a direct impact on the well-being of Bostonians. As a whole, the crisis of the early 1970s As left the city in disillusionment as to the shape and meaning of the American Revolutionary Bicentennial in Boston before the horrific acts of racial violence witnessed during the Boston busing crisis. Finally, from 1975 to 1976, the chaos and racial violence caused by the accumulation of national and local issues continued amidst the background of minutemen and Revolutionary War reenactments, a signal that Bostonians were willing to forsake the celebration of the American experiment for chaos. Though the peace and happiness of the final Independence Day celebration in 1976 were a departure from the violent crises in Boston, it also indicated something greater. The failure to compose peace in Boston through idealistic experiments like Expo ’76 and its more modest successor, Boston 200, were innate expressions of a city searching for something authentically American in a time of decline, distrust, and disgrace. It is in this mindset that one can approach and explain the things that could have happened, but did not happen in the progression to Boston’s bicentennial celebrations.
​
The years of 1967 to 1970 were characterized by a duality between imagination and disillusionment as Boston searched for its vision of the Bicentennial. This duality was captured in the fall of Expo ’76, a massive urban project proposed by hopeful members of Boston’s private and federal authorities. Its evolution from the years of 1967 to 1970, the massive urban project became the aspirant submission by these local forces as Boston’s claim for a competition hosted by national bicentennial planners, the American Revolutionary Bicentennial Commission, The promises were glorious: the selected city would be declared as the site of an official United States Bicentennial Celebration, a federally funded award that promised a billion dollar celebration to the winning city. Two aspects of Expo ’76, however, spun the duality between imagination and disillusionment and eventually brought the Expo towards its rejection by the Boston City Council in September of 1969: technological utopianism and regional politics. Through technological utopianism, a concept of urban development emphasized in previous World’s Fairs, caused Expo ’76 to heavily rely on the emulation of successful World Fair’s, particularly their vision of modern technology as the panacea of social ills. Through their concept of technological utopianism, Expo ’76 created plans for a magnificent urban community unlike any before it, but lacked the capability to respond to questions of feasibility. As Expo ’76 failed to win the confidence of distrustful Bostonians, regional politics distracted Expo ’76 planners from growing local opposition, exacerbated by cynical local politicians. Through these two factors, Expo ’76’s failure stands as the inauguration into the crisis of confidence that plagued the Bicentennial in Boston. As a whole, the inability of the Expo’s planners to overcome the dualism between their idealistic imagination and cynical social disillusionment stand as a testament to the immense challenges that would plague America throughout its Bicentennial years.
In light of Expo ’76’s failure, the period from 1971 to 1974 emptied Boston of its optimism for a harmonious American Bicentennial. The crisis of confidence that became so apparent in Boston during the Expo ’76’s campaign became even more transparent when they collided with menacing national issues. These issues, most notably economic instability and political strife transformed Bostonians attitudes on the federal government and their vision for the upcoming Bicentennial celebrations of 1975-76. Economic instability occurred with the rise of rapid inflation and threatened to halt the progress of Boston’s community development programs. Subsequent political strife caused by Nixon’s proposal of budget cuts to remedy the massive inflation rates combined with the news of the Watergate scandal. As a result, these two detrimental factors shaped the emergence of Boston 200, a cautious, minimalist alternative for the lack of a Bicentennial celebrations in the city. However, the removal of Nixon and the social trauma it caused triggered a third citywide crisis that had been avoided for years. Known as the Boston busing crisis, the city exploded into racial violence when federal courts ordered the forced desegregation of Boston’s public schools by relocating its students. The collection of these three issues challenged an already cynical Boston to focus on the agony of violence instead of the prudent development of Boston 200. The outcome of events and the failure of city and bicentennial planners to develop peaceful alternatives to violence left Boston traumatized before the beginning of its long awaited Bicentennial.
​
For the creators of Boston 200, the economic and poltical decline of the early 1970s and the subsequent busing crisis left a severe challenge to the vision of balance that the Bicentennial offered. As an introduction to the bicentennial celebration in the city, however, Boston 200 kicked off its official celebration by opening its first major theme exhibit known as “Literary Boston.” The inception, hosted at the Boston Public Library on April 16th, was to examine Boston’s major cultural works through the extended exhibit. As an honor to its own literary reputation, Pulitzer Prize winning poet Archibald MacLeish delivered a speech on the composition of American values and society to a crowd of over 500 diplomats, scholars, writers and political leaders. After an opening address by Mayor White, MacLeish read his poem “Night Watch in the City of Boston.” Through eloquent stanzas that detailed a modern city surrounded in chaos and darkness, MacLeish questioned “Was this the city, then, of man?” His final stanza would answer his own question with a declaration: “Show me, old friends, where in darkness still / stands the great Republic on its hill!” For MacLeish, the Boston that he had come to know in its Bicentennial year, the Boston of Revere and Warren on Bunker Hill, did not reconcile with the present Boston, where shame and hatred intersected to devastating effect.
​
MacLeish’s poetic ensemble introduced the challenges that Boston would face in 1975 to 1976 in facing its crisis of confidence, where despite the steadfast efforts of Boston’s public leaders, Boston continued to be wrought with racial violence instead of national celebration. Even MacLeish the overwhelming darkness, however, MacLeish introduced a fearless statement to those gathered at Boston Public Library — Boston, despite all its misgivings, would still stand as the symbol of the gleaming metropolis that was the “city on a hill,” a prophetic vision for the enthusiastic celebrations on the Fourth of July. Through the beckoning of America’s third century would not see an end to tension in Boston, it would stand as allegory of American endurance and would answer JFK’s question that inspired Schlesinger himself to question the endurance of the American experiment. For Boston 200, it proved that even though the promise of urban utopias and bicentennial perfection failed, the celebration of the American experiment could endure through some of the most horrific events of America’s Bicentennial.
As the entire nation celebrated the Bicentennial through 1975 and into 1976, there seemed to be a pulsating exuberance in America. Even in Boston, where the busing crisis continued to exact cases of disillusionment and violence, Americans all over the country found simple reasons to celebrate. Issues of the Bicentennial Times were distributed across the nation, featuring stories on how average everyday Americans celebrated the events of 1776. Though there was little mention of the end of the Vietnam War, its veterans, or politics in general, the magazine captured what was at the heart and soul of the Bicentennial: America celebrating itself and its identity. Despite a plethora of bicentennial themed commercial efforts such as bicentennial porcelain, coin and silverware, for example, the city seemed to engage with the Sprit of ’76. Tourists and residents alike swarmed downtown Boston in the summer of 1975 to walk the Freedom and CityGame Trails, enjoy the various cultural exhibits of Boston 200, and to witness the unique city that Boston’s compactness provided. Revolutionary war ships, remodeled for public exhibition, sailed along the coast to make stops in the Charles River, drawing crowds wherever they went. Colleges and universities in Boston, such as Northeastern University, hosted historical, educational, and cultural programs directed by their professors to engage in public forums. The celebrations themselves, though all their multi-faceted public engagements, allowed space for Bostonians to engage and process their Bicentennial legacy and the social trauma of the recent years. The last in a series of horrific events involving the busing crisis, however, would test the confidence in the Bicentennial spirit one last time.
On the way to a meeting on April 5th, 1976, lawyer Ted Landsmark attempted to take a different way to work to avoid growing crowds near City Hall, and instead got caught in a vicious mob. With objects flying at him, Landsmark was beaten and pushed in a gauntlet of angry anti-busing protestors. Though some in the anti-busing mob attempted to protect Landsmark, one white youth, armed with a flag, attempted to hit Landsmark before he escaped into City Hall. Though he narrowly missed, the moment was captured by photographer Stanley Forman, who would eventually win the 1977 Pulitzer Prize in Spot Photography for the piece, titled The Soiling of Old Glory. The very occurrence of a savage attack of that magnitude reignited Boston while it was in the process of contemplating its Bicentennial existence and remedying the immense issues that faced Boston’s modern urban society. For the city itself, however, the incident brought reciprocal violence back into the spotlight and tore at the hems of a still fragile mission of the Bicentennial celebrations. The next day, a white mechanic named Richard Poleet was attacked in Roxbury and left in a coma. He would die two years later. As Mayor White urged Bostonians to join him in a peace march, a young white girl was injured after a stoning by a black youth near Columbia Point. Blacks protested against White for an alleged lack of leadership, while whites appeared ready to abandon him for his political adversary, Louise Day Hicks. With Bicentennial progress hampered, there was growing concern that the Fourth of July celebrations occur. Even in a Boston was able to put aside With the Fourth of July fast approaching, Boston’s bicentennial was threatened by growing discord.
The Fourth of July was celebrated not to be defined by the suspended tensions of the busing crisis or economic and political instabilities that had held Boston captive for so many years. Nor was it to be an expression of years of bureaucratic infighting and senseless bickering seen in the earliest conceptions of a Bicentennial celebration. With only $125,000 and 400 event workers, Boston 200 officials instead planned a citywide fireworks show that went through the afternoon and into the evening. As one Boston editorial commented:
Boston never looked more beautiful than it did on the nation’s 200th birthday, and the mood of this city outmatched the weather as one of the most massive crowds ever seen in Boston gathered to prove to themselves and the nation that happiness, kindness, and hope for the common future transcend the troubles that have been so widely publicized here.”
As Boston officials would later record, an unanticipated 400,000 gathered from the Charles River to the Boston Commons for an evening of music, picnics, barbecues, fireworks, and fellowship. In a meeting between the revolutionary past, the chaotic present, and the hopeful future, many gathered felt something special lingering in the air for the nation’s 200th birthday. “It was as if,” later editorial commented, “the entire city — at least for a weekend — had remembered what it really is, beyond the anger and the discord that flaw so many of its moments.” Even with fresh memory of water, boats, and celebrations of Independence, however, the Bicentennial celebrations in Boston continued until Boston 200 shut its doors in November of that year. The final event of the American Revolutionary Bicentennial came with the reenactment Washington’s Crossing of the Delaware River. Though turmoil continued in the city, the Fourth of July gave its citizens the motivation to endure through the some of the darkest times of the Bicentennial year. Bicentennial was not a cure, but rather a symbol of acceptance by Bostonians that the American experiment was worth continued crisis As local news reporter Mike Taibbi would later reflect: “to have gotten to this evening marks us as having endured, heroically or passively, but undeniably.”
For a nation that had gone through decades of turbulence, the Bicentennial and its various manifestations and celebrations provided the opportunity for cities, and the entire nation, to rediscover what it meant to be truly American. In the end, there were several aspects of American society that were captured in the events that unfolded around Boston’s Bicentennial. The beginning of Boston’s Bicentennial years created a hopeful vision around the technological utopianism of Expo ’76. Even with the brightest of minds and the greatest of possibilities, however, Boston created a duality with this Bicentennial imagination as a society disillusioned by urban renewal and regional politics. It’s failure proved that a modern utopia was impossible, as it could never eliminate Boston’s social ills without the support and trust of its city. Despite a historical standoff with Philadelphia, the end of grandeur in Boston proved that Bostonians themselves were still seeking the answers to what made them capable of celebrating America.
The best way to celebrate the Bicentennial after the collapse of Expo ’76 was not emphasis but rather on synthesis, and Boston did so despite overwhelming odds. The progression of economic decline and political strife were only the first in a series of challenges that Boston 200 had to adapt and conquer on its road to the Bicentennial. Racial tension spurred by the busing crisis would not end for another ten years, when a federal judge ruled that the desegregation of Boston’s schools through busing were successful. Recession and its accompanying inflation would continue to haunt America through the 1980s. The Vietnam War still left its scars with thousands of unemployed or homeless veterans, who carried with them the stories of a heavy-hearted war.. As the nation and Boston looked past local and national disillusionment, however, the simplicity of Boston 200 provided the chance for Bostonians to look at what composed their past and reconcile it with their vision of the future. Though the celebration could be summed up with the words “whatta party,” as Globe writer M.L. Montgomery commented, it provided something much, much more. It provided kinship, happiness, hope, and most importantly, it taught a nation that there is always something to celebrate. After nine years, the American experiment had not only survived, but had started on the path to thrive in its third century.
​
- Cullen Smith, Summer 2016