Being old has its advantages: The A.A.R.P. discount, the wisdom of years, not having to care a whit where Taylor Swift gets married. For America, born when nickels had bumblebees on ‘em and 117 years old this year, it means we don’t just have to look 25 or 50 years back to see how the nation viewed its national holiday. We’re well-seasoned enough that on this, our nation’s semiquincentennial, we can look back not just to its bicentennial in 1976, but to its sesquicentennial a century ago.

Because we are mostly Springsteen stans here at America—even more than we are de Lubac stans—the temptation is to pun on angsty Boss ballads. But as we all say hello to Independence Day, going through some of those past commentaries on the day might be better. A trip down memory lane provides some curious glimpses of what might have been on our contributors’ minds at the time.

For our nation’s 150th anniversary in 1926, a contributor by the improbable name of F. A. Fullhardt offered his “Fourth of July Musings” on a future version of the country where the federal government reigned supreme and a dictator rose to power. It’s a dark piece, not least because Mr. Fullhardt seems more than a little paranoid about the days to come:

Let us imagine that we are in the future. The Federal Government has control over education, radio, railroads, mines, merchant marine, child-welfare, the cradle, State roads and State institutions, farming, labor, and all the concurrent philosophical consequences on the minds of the citizens. 

It gets weirder from there. But more sober voices prevailed elsewhere in the magazine, including a short editorial in the issue of July 3, 1926, noting the “unfinished work” of 1776. (Rarely ones to change horses in midstream, we’re still at it. Our latest editorial? “The unfinished work that remains for the United States of America.”)

The project of governance undertaken by the revolutionaries of 1776, the editors opined, “is unfinished today. Ideals of the equality of all men before God and in the eyes of the law are succumbing to ignoble ideals of place and rank based upon wealth. In a hundred American universities ‘liberty’ is derided as a vain and subtle figment spun by medieval metaphysicians. The ‘unalienable’ rights for whose protection the Fathers of the Declaration braved death, are rejected as assumptions never reduced nor reducible to reality.”

The nation’s founders, they noted, had “held that every man had been endowed by his Creator with natural rights; that it was the task of Governments to protect these rights, not to destroy or shackle them. A pagan philosophy, imported from the purlieus of European atheism, now teaches our young men and women that such rights do not exist and that the State, not man’s Creator, is the source and sanction of all so called rights and duties.”

The Great Depression was three years away—and Russia’s October Revolution only nine years previous. One wonders what the editors and contributors would have thought about the encroaching power of the state in the days to come, when the New Deal and federal spending offered a lifeline to the nation’s destitute. 

Fifty years later, the editors chose the bicentennial to examine the state of the church in the United States. In 1976, amid many articles about the bicentennial, the editors of America chose for their editorial for the week of July 4 a long article on that topic. The Church was beset at the time by internal divisions over the aftermath of the war in Vietnam, the changes of the Second Vatican Council and the seeming worldwide crisis over institutions and their authority. “If American Catholics, in their third century, focus on the major themes of their faith, rather than on disputes about styles and programs, then a measure of grace and humor may be restored to Catholic debates,” the editors wrote. Noting the rancorous tone of many intramural Catholic squabbles, the editors called for unity: 

For all their diversity, ethnic and theological, American Catholics believe in one faith, one Lord, one baptism. Their lives are bound together by the same system of meaning and the same rhythm of celebration. Whatever contribution they will make as a community to their countrymen in the nation’s third century will depend on how well they nourish these common beliefs that offer a home for every kind of pilgrim.

Later that month, longtime associate editor John W. Donohue, S.J., wrote of the panoramic celebration around the Statue of Liberty on July 4, 1976: “That night a spectacular display of fireworks lit up the lower harbor in a wide arc above the statue. It ended when a helicopter high in the sky towed a flag of red, white and blue lights, while the crowd massed at the Battery sang the ‘Star Spangled Banner.’ Elsewhere along the waterfront, thousands of people lined the highways and climbed out on the landfills at the river’s edge.” Soon the song spread among the crowd:

They picked up that singing on the transistor radios that some of them carried, and then they sang too—but softly and tentatively, as people are apt to do in circumstances of this sort. In fact, in its meditative mood and cadence, that song in the night seemed more like a prayer than an anthem.

Some of our other more compelling musings on the Fourth of July came in an off year: Almost 20 years ago, America offered some sound advice on how to celebrate the holiday from Donald W. Shriver Jr., a Presbyterian minister, distinguished ethicist and the president of Union Theological Seminary from 1975 to 1991. Titled “Honest Patriotism” (two years later, his 2005 book with a similar title would win him the 2009 Grawemeyer Award in Religion, one of the most prestigious academic honors in the world of theology), Shriver’s article reminded Americans of the better angels of our nature when it comes to patriotism. 

“Americans need politicians and religious leaders willing to recall publicly the misuses of power in American history and also the present danger of defending against our enemies at the cost of imitating them,” he wrote. “We can be proud of much in our history, but we will always need public leaders capable of mixing pride with humility, celebration with repentance.”

And this reminder to all Christians as well:

In 1944 the U.S. Court of Appeals judge Learned Hand described “the spirit of liberty” as “the spirit that is not too sure it is right.” In saying that, he was not far from a Christian vision of a kingdom in which God alone is unambiguously good. Only in that certainty ought Christians to wish their neighbors a happy Fourth of July.

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Our poetry selection for this week is “At the end of my suffering there was a door,” by Jane Wageman. Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.

Other recent Catholic Book Club columns:

Happy reading!

James T. Keane

James T. Keane is a Senior Editor at America.