The Fourth of July: A Banner Day

For Americans, Independence Day means flags, fireworks, food and baseball.

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Independence Day illustration.
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Independence Day illustration.

The Fourth of July has more angles than a three-cornered hat.


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Democrat-Gazette file photo

Independence Day is celebrated even outside of Arkansas, as it was in 2015 at Thomas Jefferson’s home, Monticello, in Virginia. The same way Southerners re-enact the Civil War, some Easterners dress in period costume to relive the American Revolution.

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Democrat-Gazette file photo

A balloon toy-making Uncle Sam pays a visit to the Democrat-Gazette’s Pops on the River celebration in Little Rock. The character may have been inspired by New York meat packer “Uncle Sam” Wilson, who supplied the American army in the War of 1812. Stern and bearded, Uncle Sam is famous from artist James Montgomery Flagg’s finger-pointing portrait of him for a World War I recruiting poster.

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NWA Democrat-Gazette file photo

Families watch as fireworks splash and sizzle in the night sky over Northwest Arkansas Mall during last year’s Fourth of July celebration in Fayetteville. Dozens of communities and state parks will stage special events Monday for this year’s holiday. The Arkansas Department of Parks and Tourism has more information at arkansas.com.

• Officially, it celebrates July 4, 1776, when the Continental Congress approved the final draft of the Declaration of Independence. The Fourth of July is America's birthday, and here comes the cake with 240 Roman candles.

Who says party on? Declaration of Independence signer John Adams called for this "great anniversary festival" to be "solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward, for evermore."

• This year's Independence Day is Monday, another reason to celebrate. A three-day weekend with this holiday on a Monday is such a rare blast, it won't happen again for six years.

Who says make the most of it? Uncle Sam does, and Cousin Arkansas: Monday will be a federally and state-approved day off for many people. Government offices close, if not car sales lots and stores with mattress blow-outs.

The Fourth of July is not among the year's biggest shopping days, nothing like Christmas, but still. People spend about $750 million a year on fireworks, not counting fireworks shows, according to the American Pyrotechnics Association.

"More fireworks are ignited on the Fourth of July than for any other national celebration in the world," the association reports.

• The United States' Independence Day is one of more than 100 independence days celebrated on other days by other nations around the world, and even Texas.

Finland's Independence Day, Dec. 6, celebrates freedom from Russia; Belgium's, July 21, celebrates independence from the Netherlands; Texas Independence Day, March 2, commemorates separation from Mexico (and the birthday of Alamo defender Sam Houston); and Mexico's Festival of Independence, Sept. 15-16, gives Spain the pointy-toed boot.

Independence days often come out of armed conflicts in which one party gives another the heave-ho, like tea into Boston Harbor -- like American Colonists did the British. But American Independence Day is uniquely American.

Who says so? American humorist Erma Bombeck said it: "You have to love a nation that celebrates its independence every July 4, not with a parade of guns, tanks and soldiers who file by the White House in a show of strength and muscle, but with family picnics where kids throw Frisbees, the potato salad gets iffy, and the flies die from happiness."

• Even people so independent that they don't like fireworks and fireflies can find something to like. Monday also will be Country Music Day and Sidewalk Egg-Frying Day, according to the website HolidayInsights.com.

Besides, other momentous things have happened on the Fourth of July, not just a bad day for England's King George III.

Buffalo Bill Cody put on his first Wild West show July 4, 1883; The Beach Boys' summer classic, "I Get Around," hit No. 1 on the song charts July 4, 1964; and 130-pound Matt "Megatoad" Stonie packed down 62 hot dogs to win last year's Nathan's Famous Fourth of July Hot Dog-Eating Contest at Coney Island, N.Y.

July Fourth is a day of big doings, not necessarily noisy ones. Who says so? Henry David Thoreau, who celebrated this day, 1845, by taking to a secluded cabin -- shack, really -- in Massachusetts, where he wrote Walden.

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately," he wrote, "to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach."

In fact, the Fourth of July is one of the year's most quotable days. The shebang sets off with not just a bang and a band, but also a tradition of speech-making.

Who says so? Who speaks up for independence? For the Fourth of July?

Here, for a few:

AND SO FOURTH

"When in the course of human events ..." -- start of the Declaration of Independence as written by Thomas Jefferson.

Historic Arkansas Museum Director Bill Worthen reads the entire document as part of the Little Rock museum's Frontier Fourth of July.

"We've been reading the Declaration for at least a couple of decades," Worthen says. "We started when our research showed that the Fourth was the big holiday in antebellum Arkansas, and that the Declaration was read every year."

"It doesn't take that long, maybe 10 minutes" to read out loud, he says. But it does go on well past the first line that people might remember having memorized in school.

The bulk of it is a list of grievances against King George, including "transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences [sic]," and "Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages."

"A dry reading is pretty dull," the museum director says. "My contribution is an earnest enthusiasm -- with proper outrage -- in advocating independence and assigning guilt for the circumstance which required the remedy of independence. I am helped by our staff and volunteers and visitors who are not shy about sharing their feelings.

"Boos and hurrahs are welcome."

"You're a grand old flag,/ You're a high-flyin' flag." -- George M. Cohan.

"This is our Christmas," says Kerry McCoy, president of Arkansas Flag and Banner in Little Rock. American flag sales build up through Memorial Day and Flag Day to the top of the pole at the Fourth of July, most people buying 3-by-5-foot nylon flags to hoist a snappy new one each year.

Flag buyers come in all stripes, she says: patriots, party and home decorators, political fundraisers, "and we have lots of grieving families year-around who honor their loved ones."

Americans purchase about $150 million worth of American flags each year, according to the Flag Manufacturers Association of America.

The Congress of 1777 called for a flag with 13 stripes and 13 stars to represent the original Colonies. In legend, George Washington asked Philadelphia seamstress Betsy Ross to sew the first flag.

True or not, the Betsy Ross story "is consistent with the facts," according to the Independence Hall Association in Philadelphia. Translation: She might have.

To this day, the version of the flag she might have sewn is called the "Betsy Ross flag," as well as the "Stars and Stripes," "Star-Spangled Banner" and "Old Glory."

By any such glorious name, today's flag flies above the White House, on the moon and over that most American of summer pastimes, baseball.

"I see great things in baseball. It's our game -- the American game." -- Walt Whitman.

Like many things that seem so right for a person to have said, the 19th-century poet's famous words on baseball are a little uncertain, like a lead off third base. After all, how big a baseball fan could he have been? Not only was the game new, but he probably took his seat too soon to have found a hot dog at the ballpark.

In any case, the all-American tradition of waxing poetic over baseball goes way back and is carried on by Lance Restum, marketing director for the Arkansas Travelers.

"Baseball is so loved, followed and cherished and is America's pastime because of what baseball is at its core -- the best of what America stands for," Restum says as the minor league team looks to play a home game in Little Rock on the Fourth of July.

"You don't have to be tall, or fast, or fit to be a good baseball player. Size and speed don't always win. In baseball, everybody has a shot. And sometimes the best strategy in the world can be shot down by a lucky strike of the bat or error on the field. Dreams come true.

"At the end of the game, it's all in the amount of effort and heart you put into it," he says, "just like America."

Style on 07/03/2016

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