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It felt like a proper jamboree – a coming together of diverse peoples who thought they had something to celebrate. But the defining moment of the 1976 bicentennial, the US’s last epic birthday celebration, came two years before.

“My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over,” Gerald Ford declared in his presidential inauguration speech of 9 August 1974. “Our great republic is a government of laws and not of men.”

Ford’s words, spoken in the immediate aftermath of Richard Nixon’s resignation over Watergate, were intended as balm to a nation already polarised by the trauma of the Vietnam war and the civil rights upheavals of the 1960s.

But they also set the tone for a nationwide commemoration of America’s 200th birthday that had been a decade in the making and which, when it arrived, had a badly needed cathartic impact.

The 1976 bicentennial is popularly remembered for visual events such as the tall ships parade in the New York harbour that featured 16 traditional vessels and 100 modern boats from around the world sailing down the Hudson River.

It drew state visits from the heads of state of the US’s two longest-standing allies, Queen Elizabeth of Britain and Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, the president of France.

Ford himself, in a 4 July speech, memorably characterised the American Declaration of Independence as “not a protest against government, but against the excesses of government”. In a coded message to anti-government critics in his own Republican party – including the future president, Ronald Reagan – he added that “government is not necessarily evil, but a necessary good”.

But the 1976 anniversary is chiefly recalled by historians as an event extolling the robustness and endurance of the US political system, which was widely deemed to have functioned in the face of adversity in a manner that feels distant and remote in the era of Donald Trump.

“The 1976 celebration was a more vital and happy one because of a broad belief that two years earlier the system had worked, and we were celebrating a system that had cleansed itself,” said Jonathan Alter, a historian and biographer of Jimmy Carter, who was elected president in 1976 after defeating Ford in that year’s presidential election.

“We were in a period of renewal and relief, and today we’re in a period of fear and loathing,” said Alter. “We don’t have any reason to celebrate our founding documents, because we’re living in an authoritarian state that is quite different from the one that the founders created.”

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What might have been

The prevailing mood 50 years ago was perhaps best summed up by the title of a book by the New York newspaper columnist Jimmy Breslin, How The Good Guys Finally Won, which described the role of Congress and the courts in bringing Nixon to account.

Nixon’s departure arguably dictated the tenor of the 1976 celebrations in another way. In an intriguing counterfactual, some historians contend the bicentennial may have ended up resembling the partisan events ordered by Trump to mark the US’s 250th anniversary, had Nixon survived Watergate and stayed in office.

“Undoubtedly, it would have felt very different and been much more like today,” said David McKean, a former US ambassador and co-author of a recently published book, The Flag Was Still There, exploring different anniversary periods since 1776. “There would have been a lot more discord and it would have felt very contentious.”

Nixon had, in fact, tried to assume control over the bicentennial preparations – much in the manner Trump has asserted dominion over the 250th, which critics say projects a stilted and highly selective interpretation of US history.

Within a week of becoming president in 1969, he ordered a shake-up of the American Revolution Bicentennial Commission – a bipartisan body established by Congress three years earlier to organise celebrations – to facilitate the appointment of his allies and supporters to key positions.

“There is a really easy comparison to be made between how Richard Nixon initially wanted to celebrate the bicentennial, and how Trump wants to now, which is that both administrations micromanaged and tried to exercise tremendous control over a kind of top-down patriotic commemoration,” said MJ Rymsza-Pawlowska, a history professor at the American University in Washington.

But Nixon’s approach eventually triggered a backlash as critics alleged corruption and financial improprieties while complaining of a corporate takeover of the celebration, derided as a “buycentennial”.

Amid widespread criticism even among Republicans, and with Watergate gradually consuming his presidency, the commission was eventually wound up by Congress while Nixon was still in the White House, and replaced with a new body that promised to support small-scale and decentralised events in local communities across the country.

The result was a mass of devolved grassroots celebrations encompassing different groups and contrasting sharply with this year’s Trump-inspired spectacle.

“When I talk to people about how they celebrated the bicentennial, they’ll usually say, well, I went to a local picnic, or I visited a local museum,” said Rymsza-Pawlowska, author of History Comes Alive, a study of US popular culture in the 1970s. “It was participatory and focused around self-determination.

“What we’re seeing right now, at least on the federal level, is nothing like that. It represents an administration that has been compounding power and influence any way it can.”

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Night and day

The loosely governed 1976 bicentennial gave Americans space to “find their meaning”, enabling them to “celebrate” as well as “reflect”, Rymsza-Pawlowska argued.

“American history is complex,” she said. “It’s entirely possible to be critical of some of the shortcomings of the promises of the American Revolution, but still want to celebrate the successes, and I think that’s what people did.”

It was amid that pluralistic climate that a dissenting work such as Alex Haley’s Pulitzer prize-winning novel Roots, exploring the author’s family descent from slavery, was published to wide acclaim.

The tolerant, harmonious mood seems all the more striking given that it coincided with a darkening economic outlook – which, in hindsight, prefigured long-term developments that in future decades would be the catalyst for populist forces ultimately harnessed by Trump.

The long period of prosperity and economic growth following the second world war had sputtered amid a 1973 oil shock that triggered inflation and rising unemployment across the industrialised west.

“There was uncertainty and unhappiness about the economy, as opposed to the political situation, which I think people felt good about,” said James Robenalt, a historian who has written a book on the period with John Dean, Nixon’s former White House counsel, who went to jail for his role in Watergate.

“There was inflation, stagnation, stagflation, and this feeling that we were in difficult times, and that we were also in transition economically from a country that had a lot of industry and a vibrant business environment, and farmers and so forth, to being on our way to the rust belt of the midwest, and trade opening up but factories closing,” said Robenalt. “That was a huge transition.”

Nevertheless, he added, comparing the bicentennial atmosphere with the backdrop to the 250th is “like night and day”.

“It feels very much like people don’t know where we’re going. People feel that there is a bit of a circus atmosphere about the nation,” said Robenalt. “Your political opponents today are really seen as enemies – back then, political opponents were political opponents.”

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We’ve seen it before

The closest anniversary parallel, according to McKean, may actually be a full century ago, in 1926, a year when the US marked its 150th birthday and which also saw 15,000 white-robed Ku Klux Klan members march down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House, while a nativism redolent of Trump’s “America first” rhetoric stalked the land.

“We had just gone through a major pandemic with the Spanish flu, which had killed millions of people worldwide, not dissimilar from Covid,” said McKean. “There was also this huge sort of inequality happening in America at the time. Immigration was a big issue, and laws had been passed and signed by [then president] Calvin Coolidge to impose quotas on each country that had had immigrants coming to this country.”

Other anniversaries also witnessed the US passing through dark periods. These include 1876, the year of its centenary, when Gen Armstrong Custer staged his famous “last stand” at the battle of Little Bighorn – an event with baleful long-term consequences for Indigenous Americans – and Rutherford Hayes became president after a disputed election, and subsequently cut a deal paving the way for the institution of racist Jim Crow laws in the south.

The lessons from past American birthdays are sobering, yet not absent of hope.

“We didn’t really have a full-fledged democracy during that period, and we made progress in the 1960s and 70s, and now I think we’re seeing a lot of that rolled back in different ways,” said McKean. “Yes, I think democracy is under siege, but I also think that we’ve seen that before.”