Philly’s Bicentennial remains a bit of a mystery

The 200th birthday of the United States was celebrated across the country on July 4, 1976. In Philadelphia, tens of thousands gathered on and around Independence Mall. 

Some writers and participants said Philadelphia’s celebration was a success. Others said it was a failure. Is it possible they’re both right?

The Bicentennial celebration had its pluses and minuses. There were the crowds at Independence Square. An estimated one million people visited the city for the events, which included a five-hour parade that included thousands of participants from all 50 states. Queen Elizabeth II of England visited and presented a gift for the country, a larger replica of the Liberty Bell (called an “Independence Bell”) made at the same foundation that created the original. Other dignitaries visiting Independence Hall included King Carl XVI of Sweden; Valery Giscard d’ Estaing, President of France; Crown Prince Harold of Norway; Helmut Schmidt, Chancellor of West Germany; and Princess Grace and Prince Rainier of Monaco.

Some famous structures around town were reconstructed or refurbished, including the second floor of Independence Hall, the Second Bank of the United States, Old City Hall, City Tavern. The Liberty Bell was moved from Independence Hall to its own pavilion on the mall. 

Legendary filmmaker John Houston created a movie called “Independence.” According to Hobie Cawood’s book, “Celebrations! A Personal Memoir Commemorating America’s Bicentennial Era: 1971-1991,” the film allowed viewers to study up before coming to Philadelphia for the Bicentennial.

“Such an introduction would allow visitors to understand how each building fit in the overall story of America’s independence,” said Cawood, the superintendent of Independence National Historic Park for two decades. “The film would also allow our guests to experience a virtual 18th century setting set in the buildings they would soon visit.” 

The film featured actors Eli Wallach as Ben Franklin, Pat Hingle as John Adams, Patrick O’Neil as George Washington and Ann Jackson playing Abigail Adams. 

But it was a far cry from the plans that began to bubble up almost two decades earlier.

Grand plans

In 1959, city planner Edmund Bacon conceived of Philadelphia hosting not only a Bicentennial celebration but also a World’s Fair. Grandiose plans by Bacon and his staff included festival grounds built at the railroad yards west of 30th Street Station. They conceived of trams, built stories above ground, that would transport people from the station to Center City and Old City.

Those projects never materialized.

For both the 100th and 150th national celebrations, the city had constructed many buildings, some of which are still in use today. Philadelphia did not build many facilities for the Bicentennial. Its largest major project, a Living History Center at 6th and Race streets, did not draw the expected visitors and closed after 1976. It has since become the home of WHYY, Philadelphia’s largest public media organization and Billy Penn’s parent.

A presidential visit had been a staple of these previous national milestones. Again, the 1976 version lands somewhere between victory and snub. President Gerald R. Ford was in the city on Independence Day — but left for New York, where he watched the historic “Tall Ships” enter New York Harbor, judged at the time to be the highlight in the celebration.

So, success or failure?

Whether the 1976 Bicentennial was a success really depends on how you define success, said Dr. Seth C. Bruggeman, professor of History and director of the Center for Public History at Temple University.

Formal planning for the Bicentennial had begun under President Lyndon Johnson in 1966, under the direction of a bipartisan American Revolution Bicentennial Commission (ARBC), Bruggeman said, but things changed dramatically with the election of President Richard Nixon in November 1968.

“Johnson took a mostly hands-off approach, preferring that a nonpartisan committee manage planning. Nixon involved himself directly, and chose rather to replace the planning committee with partisan supporters whose purpose was to leverage the event in support of his own political ambition,” Bruggeman said. “This is to say that, at the federal level, the Bicentennial grew up between two very different definitions of success. If in hindsight we perceive the Bicentennial as a failure, then it was so in no small part because Nixon’s presidential worldview was deeply flawed.” 

The differences in scope were jarring. The Philadelphia delegation that presented to ARBC in 1969 pitched a World’s Fair celebration with various venues across the city to offer innovative solutions to urban problems. They anticipated 100 million visitors, and projected the budget at more than $1 billion, according to the Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia. 

That plan was rejected, which led to a bitter divide in Philadelphia along racial lines over the themes and locations of events. Progress stalled, and Rizzo canceled the bid for a World’s Fair entirely in 1972. Nationally, ARBC encouraged Bicentennial celebrations all over the country, not just in Philadelphia.

“On other fronts, too, it’s worth considering what success means with regard to Philadelphia’s various centennial celebrations,” Bruggeman said. “In my view, a key point of confusion concerns the intent of centennial planners. 

“We look back at 1876, 1926, and 1976, and presume that the planners organized those events primarily as celebrations of American history. Note though that the planners have never been historians, at least not how we’d define them today. The planners have typically been business magnates, industrialists, philanthropists and others who stage the centennials by way of arguing for the centrality of private capital in American life. 

“History — often bad history, at that — gets deployed as a vague justification for ‘progress,’ which is typically presented as the unfettered expansion of private enterprise, at home and abroad.”

Bruggeman noted there was an unexpected, ironic result that sprung from the chaos of these clashing visions.

“One ‘success’ resulting from Nixon’s inability to deliver the funding he had promised was a wave of grassroots history programming all across the U.S.,” he said. “Some of it was sponsored by state and local governments. Some of it was organized around protesting the Nixon administration. 

“Much of it, though, demonstrated that Americans can take control of their own cultural lives and organize around their own interests. That, in my opinion, was a success — a qualified success, at least — for public history, one that is instructive as we approach yet another centennial celebration wherein the play of private interests is just as problematic as it was during the last three.”

Problems at home

There were other winds blowing against the centennial in Philly, too. The event took place during a time of frequent protests and unrest. The Bicentennial included some of that, in the form of counterprogramming — parades in other parts of the city that served as alternative celebrations. They were peaceable and there were no arrests.

Mayor Rizzo apparently was unnerved by the plans for these events. According to the New York Times, weeks before the July 4 observation, Rizzo wrote to President Ford requesting 15,000 federal troops “because Philadelphia has received threats of violence and disruption.”

“Mayor Frank Rizzo was actively telling people to not come to Philly for this. And out of that, there was not only no coordination, but there were a lot of protests that came out of it, both of the national political environment of ’76, but also of the different festivities that were popping up and people just weren’t notified because government wasn’t supportive,” said Matt Winberg, communications director for at-large Philadelphia City Councilman Isiah Thomas, who is involved in preparations for the upcoming 250th anniversary.

There were broader issues of re-making cities and who was being privileged and accommodated in those plans, too.

“So, you think about where the city was in the mid-1960s, we’re at the peak of the urban renewal phase and Ed Bacon is running these major clearance, redevelopment, eminent domain seizure programs,” said Brent Cebul, a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

“In University City and Society Hill, those clearance projects are also engendering protests, in addition to protests around police violence that actually explode in violence all over the city in the 1960s. And there begins to be a real concern that planners, like Bacon, were thinking the Bicentennial is an opportunity to extend Philadelphia’s redevelopment, and to get access to big federal money to redevelop the waterfront, to do a whole bunch of other potential projects,” Cebul said.

In the end, that money and those projects didn’t materialize — and neither did the expansive reputational success of 1876. The Bicentennial was in some ways a confirmation of what people brought to the moment. Maybe that’s not so unique, though the canvass on which it happened was.

Next up for Philadelphia, 2026. Billy Penn will be reporting on the city’s plans for the 250th over the next year — and maybe writing a recap of it in 50 years or so.