HEROES: A Man to Remember

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Oh, where are the curly-fused cannon crackers of yesteryear—so thick, so roundly red, so pregnant with earsplitting, tooth-jarring noise? Where are the backyard skyrockets, with their colored, cone-topped heads and their delicate pinewood sticks? Where are the politicians who spoke, jowls aquiver and veins distended, on the glorious day amid the pleasantly acrid smell of burnt powder? Where are the red, white and blue floats built on flat bed-trucks? Where is the George M. Cohan roll for the player piano and the rock salt for the ice-cream freezer on the back porch?

Gone! All gone! New Englanders, it is true, will get a taste of traditional glare and excitement when Independence Day rolls around this week—the "Horribles," grotesquely costumed children, will parade along a few village streets, and some towns will light big bonfires at midnight on the Third (a pile of barrels a hundred feet high awaits the torch on Salem's Gallows Hill). But the U.S. as a whole will have a much more sterile diet—packaged fireworks shows in city parks and packaged patriotic sentiments on television.

For most Americans, the Fourth has become a day of escape rather than an occasion of patriotic remembrance and celebration. Beaches, amusement grounds, baseball parks, golf courses, trout streams and picnic areas are crowded. The U.S. countryside echoes the rhythmic "ka-bunk, ka-bunk, ka-bunk" of white-wall-tired family automobiles whanging over the endless, shimmering, concrete slabs of four-lane highways. Occasionally, the rhythm is disturbed by the screech and crash of shiny sedans meeting in bone-shattering collision (the National Safety Council's estimated traffic death toll for the holiday: 290). Cities lie in Sunday silence.

The Spirit of 76. Although the Old-Fashioned Fourth is dead, the nation today is more clearly than ever a vast and teeming monument to the Spirit of '76. The potent and bubbly brew of '76 was compounded of two unlike elements. Rebellion against tradition and authority, a spirit present in all men everywhere, was stepped up in America by the individualism of the frontier and the frontiersman's vision of a future that would escape and dwarf the past. This was part of the Spirit of '76, and it marched west with the mountain men, the wagon trains, the steam cars, and the jalopies of the Great Depression.

But '76 was not this rebellious individualism alone. Equally present was a reverent conservatism, also intensified by the conditions of colonial life. The challenge and menace of the wilderness livened the idea of Divine Providence. Old rights, old truths became more precious in a new land. The rebellious colonists sought and found freedoms and powers their ancestors never had; to that extent the American spirit was and remains progressive. But the rebellious colonists were as conscious of traditional rights to be preserved as of new rights to be won; to that extent the Spirit of '76 was profoundly conservative.*The American genius cannot be understood either as progressive or conservative. It lies in the tension between the two, and the tension does not exist mainly in clashing parties or "forces"; it exists mainly inside Americans.