Who knows when our own long national nightmare will end. It’s nice to imagine that it could happen. But can the past be pardoned?
Ford rang in the Bicentennial for nearly the entirety of his brief, accidental Presidency. He lit a lantern at Old North Church, in Boston. He stood on the Old North Bridge, in Concord. “Behind us lie two hundred years of toil and struggle, two hundred years of accomplishment and triumph,” he told Americans on New Year’s Eve, 1975. “We remain, in Lincoln’s words, ‘the last, best hope of earth.’ ” Apparently, though, the White House hadn’t been especially keen for the President to participate in the ceremonial opening of a hundred-year-old safe in the National Statuary Hall. Getting Ford’s staff to put it on his schedule had taken no small number of memos from members of the Joint Committee on Arrangements for Commemoration of the Bicentennial, who were “becoming quite concerned as to Presidential participation.”
The safe, known as the Century Safe, or the Centennial Safe, had been one of the goofier gimmicks of 1876, an anniversary that featured a World’s Fair that was at once an expression of America’s rising place on the global stage and an illustration of its abandonment of Reconstruction’s commitment to equal citizenship regardless of race or national origin. In July, 1875, Douglass gave a speech in Washington, D.C. It was delivered, like his more famous 1852 speech, on the Fifth of July, not the Fourth, because, as Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., writes in “America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries,” Black Americans commemorated the Fifth as Emancipation Day, beginning in 1827 (the year slavery ended in New York). A hundred years after the start of the American Revolution, slavery had ended, the Union had won the Civil War, the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed equal rights and birthright citizenship, and the Fifteenth guaranteed Black men the right to vote, but Douglass found little occasion for rejoicing. The Ku Klux Klan had arisen. Jim Crow was establishing itself. And the “grand Centennial hosannah” to be held in Philadelphia in 1876, Douglass warned, seemed likely to serve to reunite whites, North and South, and, by papering over the divisions of the Civil War, erase slavery from American history. “In what position will this stupendous reconciliation leave the colored people?” he asked. The next year, President Ulysses S. Grant opened the Centennial Exposition, in Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park, after having been ushered in by four thousand troops and accompanied by a bellicose “Centennial Inauguration March,” an original composition by Richard Wagner. (“Between you and me, the best thing about the march was the $5000 they paid me,” Wagner admitted to a friend.) Douglass sat behind the President, silent.
The Centennial Exposition—thirty thousand exhibits installed in more than two hundred buildings—showcased arts and sciences from four corners of the globe but especially, as Grant said, “the attainments made by our own people during the past one hundred years,” including, in Machinery Hall, the mammoth, fourteen-hundred-horsepower Corliss steam engine and the George Grant Difference Engine, which could perform twenty calculations a minute. The grounds were open twelve hours a day, every day, it cost fifty cents to enter, and ten million, or about one in five Americans, attended. You could also climb a ladder onto the right arm—the torch arm—of the future Statue of Liberty. William Dean Howells, the editor of The Atlantic, went on what he described as “a dull, drizzling day, somewhat cold and thoroughly unpleasant.” Howells found the art indifferent. In Machinery Hall, he complained of “too many sewingmachines.” He was disappointed in the displays from other nations, finding that the foreigners didn’t look foreign enough. (The Egyptian: he “wore a fez, but a fez is very little.”) In the U.S. Hall, he looked askance at George Washington’s “camp-bed, his table furniture, his sword, his pistols, and so forth.”(“In their character of relics we severely summoned what veneration we could.”) But even Howells admitted that, for all the fair’s silliness, it was impossible not to see it “without a thrill of patriotic pride.”
Anna Deihm, a Civil War widow and a New York publisher of the magazine Centennial Welcome and the newspaper Our Second Century, had a far greater appetite for relics than Howells had. She’d commissioned the building of the Centennial Safe, which was housed at the fair. At the safe, you could stop by, peer inside, and even page through “Photographs of the Great American People of 1876,” an album that included pictures of every member of the Forty-fourth Congress (the most racially diverse until 1969). And, for five dollars, you, too, could become great, by signing a “Citizens’ Autograph Album,” to be stowed away for posterity. (The historian Nick Yablon, in his terrific book “Remembrance of Things Present,” credits Deihm with democratizing the time capsule.) “Rarely is such a chance given to become illustrious on such cheap terms,” one critic sneered.
