As the country spent these years planning its bicentennial celebration, organizers faced the challenge of telling a story that by now had splintered. The country was also in a state of total unrest with protests over Vietnam and racial inequality, the Watergate scandal, a presidential resignation. An official government commission tasked with running the bicentennial was accused of partisanship.
Still, many Americans kept interpreting the founding in ways that lent their causes the greatest meaning and legitimacy. Evangelical Christians, upset over developments like Roe v. Wade, used the bicentennial to revive a vision of America as God’s uniquely chosen nation. In 1977, a popular history called “The Light and the Glory,” by two evangelical writers, warned that America was falling short of the founders’ supposed Christian vision. “God’s call on this country,” they wrote, “has never been revoked.”
Liberal activists began alternative bicentennial groups to highlight the shortcomings of the country and argue for reforms that might rectify them, such as greater federal funding for American Indian tribes. The activists viewed their efforts as ultimately patriotic. As one major group put it, they were trying to revive “a mass revolutionary consciousness in tune with the revolutionary legacy of 1776.” Another group demanded a greater place for Black Americans in the telling of the country’s history, in order to reveal their connection to the spirit of the revolution.
By the 1980s, though, and the rise of Ronald Reagan, the right had cemented a Cold War-era national story of personal liberty and limited government, rooted in the founding itself. The more liberals insisted on telling the truth about America, the more conservatives insisted on its exceptionalism. The two sides only hardened, as the right argued that critique implied a lack of patriotism.
In a way, President Barack Obama offered a truce when he rose to power, by reviving an idea from Douglass that the country was imperfect, yet redeemable. Obama’s account allowed for America’s fallibility without succumbing to cynicism. The Constitution, he said in a 2008 speech, was both “stained by this nation’s original sin of slavery” and the source for our notion of “a union that could be and should be perfected over time.”