Arguably, the first American Fourth of July speech took place in 1634. Allow me to explain.
In 1838, twelve years before The Scarlet Letter was published and sixty-two years after the Declaration of Independence, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote a historical sketch that called out his country’s anti-democratic compulsions. “Endicott and the Red Cross” accurately relates an event of 1634, when Puritan leader John Endicott (sometimes spelled Endecott) channeled every wanna-be dictator you’ve ever heard of.
The action begins with a description of newly settled Salem, as reflected in Endicott’s shiny iron breastplate. The scene is grim: There is blood on the steps of the meetinghouse, trickling not only from a severed wolf’s head but from Endicott’s human victims: An accused royalist is confined in the stocks. A suspected Catholic is grotesquely encased in the pillory. An “unruly woman” stands mutely with a cleft stick tied to her tongue. Beside her stands a Wanton Gospeller who dared interpret holy writ by his own inner light.
For some apostates, the punishments are permanent. Nostrils have been slit and seared, cheeks have been branded with the initials of misdemeanors, ears have been “cropped like puppy dogs.” The cruelty is the point.
Images of enforced submission give way to another trait of the colonial patriarchy, the display of martial power. The entire male population of Salem between 16 and 60, brandishing firearms, musters on Salem common for training under Endicott, who reviews his stormtroopers, gestures arrogantly toward a nearby group of Native Americans, and fantasizes a massacre:
“Let us show these poor heathen that we can handle our weapons like men of might. Well for them, if they put us not to prove it in earnest!”
The lead-up to violence is interrupted by the approach of the clergyman Roger Williams, arriving from Boston on an errand from Governor Winthrop. Already Williams has a reputation as a “troublesome” person. He supports religious freedom and holds that the royal charter does not justify the taking of Indian land, beliefs inimical to Endicott’s chauvinism. He will soon be forced to flee the colony.
On this day, Williams brings a letter from Winthrop with news that an English ship arrived in Boston the day before. The letter contains the “black tidings” that Charles the First and Archbishop Laud, anti-Puritans, are planning to dispatch an Anglican governor-general with authority over the colonies.
As Endicott seethes in anger, Williams whispers an order from Winthrop “that the news be not suddenly noised abroad, lest the people be stirred up into some outbreak.”
Opportunistically, Endicott disobeys the order. “Ho, good people!” he bellows, “Here are news for one and all of you.” The soldiers close ranks around the stern Puritan, and the scene morphs into a spectacle resembling a Nuremberg rally or its Trumpist equivalent.
The essence of Endicott’s rhetoric is nationalist mythology: “Wherefore have we sought this country of a rugged soil and wintry sky? Was it not for the enjoyment of our civil rights?” When Endicott dares speak of “liberty to worship God according to our conscience,” he is cut short by the Wanton Gospeller undergoing torture on the meetinghouse steps, who shouts, “Call you this liberty of conscience?” The heckler is reminded of the destiny of dissidents: “Break not in upon my speech, or I will lay thee neck and heels till this time tomorrow!”
Endicott’s next demagogic maneuver is to foment insurrection: “Think ye, Christian men, that these abominations may be suffered without a sword drawn? Without a shot fired?” Deploying ominous images of subjugation—“Who shall enslave us here?”—Endicott finishes with a bombastic Declaration of Independence: “What have we to do with England?”
A sadistic warmonger and religious zealot, Endicott assumes the role of ultranationalist savior. In an act of political theatre right out of the strongman playbook, he calls for the colors to be lowered, draws his sword, and slashes from the English banner the red cross of St. George, which he sees as a symbol of the decadent Church of England.
The political prisoner in the stocks cries treason. The dissenter in the pillory cries sacrilege. The populist mob roars approval, sanctioning Endicott’s deed as “one of the boldest exploits which our history records.”
Yet Endicott’s power play has nothing to do with egalitarianism and everything to do with tyranny. Coming from Endicott, a generalissimo of Bible-based brutality, the term “civil rights” is a hypocritical joke. Hawthorne called the Puritans “the most intolerant brood that ever lived, a people amongst whom religion and law were almost identical.” His nickname for Endicott was “the Puritan of Puritans,” but “our first fascist” fits better.
In an unusual move, Hawthorne alerts readers to his story’s purpose. He says that the events depicted were the “first omen” of the Revolutionary War and therefore of the birth of the United States. In this origin story, however, the nascent nation is not created by opposing despotism but by embracing it.
Scholar Michael Davitt Bell argued that “Endicott and the Red Cross” records the symbolic birth of the American character. In some way, according to hime, we are Endicott and Endicott is us. The Puritans emigrated from England to establish freedoms for themselves, not for anyone different from them. Church-state separation was not in their vocabulary. For many today, it remains an alien concept. The persecuting spirit survives and runs deep in the cultural DNA.
Hawthorne prompts readers to think: What does the Fourth of July mean? Which Declaration of Independence, Jefferson’s nominally democratic one, or Endicott’s authoritarian one, more accurately describes us as a nation and a people?
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The best American writers have wrestled with these questions for a long time, and one of their focal points is the annual cultural phenomenon known as “Fourth of July” speech. The granddaddy of them all is “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July,” Frederick Douglass’s 1852 address to the Rochester Ladies Anti-Slavery Society:
“Fellow citizens; above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them.
“I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this Fourth of July.”
My favorite part of this manifesto is the moment when Douglass turns American Exceptionalism upside down. Having already observed to his audience that “Americans are remarkably familiar with all the facts which make in their own favor,” he closes with a backhanded compliment. The USA of 1852 was indeed exceptional, number one, the greatest land of all, at certain things:
“Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the old world, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival!”
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Second prize for Fourth of July truth-telling goes to Margaret Fuller, author of the feminist tract Woman in the Nineteenth Century and the first self-supporting female journalist in U.S. history. Fuller was also the first woman permitted to use the Harvard Library. Though that happened in 1843, Margaret still wouldn’t have been allowed to speak publicly in 1845, so she published her Fourth of July oration in Horace Greeley’s New York Daily Tribune.
Her opening sentences allude to the many celebrations throughout the land, including the ringing of bells, the booming of cannons, “little flags and crackers,” and orators putting the final touches on their “yearly panegyric” in homage to the great nation. Then her tone shifts:
“And yet, no heart, we think, can beat today with one pulse of genuine, noble joy. To unbiased minds must come sad thoughts of National Honor soiled in the eyes of nations, of a great inheritance, risked, if not forfeited.”
Fuller acknowledges that “Much has been achieved in the country since the first Declaration of Independence.” But in 1845, something changed:
“This year, which declares that the people at large consent to cherish and extend Slavery as one of our ‘domestic institutions,’ takes from the patriot his home. This year, which attests to their insatiate love of wealth and power, quenches the flame upon the altar.”
Why “this year”? What had extinguished the flame upon the national altar? Fuller is referring to the annexation of Texas as a slave state, an act that tipped the balance of federal power in favor of Southern slaveholders.
Perhaps the most galling aspect of the annexation was the conduct of President John Tyler, a lifelong slaveholder. In reaction to efforts by Great Britain to negotiate a treaty with Mexico that would free Texas’s slaves, Tyler engaged in an imperialist conspiracy to protect and expand the “peculiar insititution.” The president’s rushed, aggressive signing of the Texas annexation bill hours before leaving office in March 1845 gifted over 250 million acres to the Slave Power.
We had shown our true colors; for Fuller and for Northern abolitionists, it was a telling moment. The United States, presented with an off-ramp from slavery, instead doubled down on it, embracing a massive, calculated expansion of human bondage. This is the reason Fuller asserts that instead of being a city upon a hill, we are now a failed state, “soiled in the eyes of nations.”
Rather than anger, Fuller is siezed by deep sadness at the loss of her country: “It is not easy, it is very hard right now, to realize the blessings of Independence. For what is Independence if it do not lead to Freedom?” As Fuller concluded, “The country needs to be born again; She is polluted with the lust of power, the lust of gain.” Today, most Americans share this feeling.
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In Louisa May Alcott’s 1863 short story, “My Contraband,” there is only one reference to Fourth of July speeches, but it is a powerful one.
The story opens amid the grim conditions of a Union military hospital at the height of the Civil War. The narrator, Alcott’s alter ego Faith Dane, is a Massachusetts-born ward nurse given the undesirable task of caring for a captured Confederate captain with typhoid fever.
Nurse Dane accepts the risk of caring for the highly contageous enemy in deference to “common charity” and a desire to show her judgmental hospital colleagues that her radicalism is rooted in compassion: “Some of these people think that because I’m an abolitionist I am also a heathen,” she quips.
Aware of Dane’s views, Dr. Franck asks her to bring about another kind of healing: “Speaking of abolition reminds me that you can have a contraband for a servant, if you like.” In Civil War-era lexicon, “contraband” meant a slave who had escaped from the South to the Union Army and freedom.
Nurse Dane finds her feverish Confederate patient “dissipated looking” and unremarkable. She is decidedly more interested in the Black man: “I had seen many contrabands, but never one so attractive as this.” The nurse longs to “know and comfort him,” and asks him his full name.
The former chattel can only be addressed by his first name, Robert, because he never accepted the surname of his owner, who is also his father. Nurse Dane is profoundly moved by Robert’s repudiation of his enslaver and recognizes this act of liberation as “a more effective Declaration of Independence than any Fourth of July orator could have prepared.”
In other words, the contraband’s rejection of his oppressor is an eloquent commentary, the only pure answer to a tortuous dynamic that has burdened American civilization since 1619. For Nurse Dane, one man’s refusal to self-identify as property predicts the redemption of a nation in the midst of its own identity crisis—a crisis as fundamental as the one we face now.
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Paul Green (1894-1981) was a left-leaning humanist playwright, reformer, and early civil rights activist who collaborated with Richard Wright on the stage adaptation of Native Son in 1941. In the 1930s, Green submitted several plays to the Socialist-led Theatre Union, which staged dramas designed to appeal to working-class audiences.
In January of 1936, Green’s one-act “Hymn to the Rising Sun” was performed at New York’s Civic Repertory Theatre, after which New York Times drama critic Brooks Atkinson called the play, “an overwhelming piece of work.”
“Hymn to the Rising Sun” takes place on the morning of July 4, in a convict stockade during the “second slavery” of the Jim Crow South, among a chain gang comprised of 18 men whose bodies have been rented to a railroad corporation.
As the sick, starving prisoners in leg irons are roused from sleep to a roll call and hard labor, they are informed by their “convict boss” that it is Independence Day. Under orders issued by the state legislature, they must listen to an address “in honor of the occasion.”
On a day when the legislators who created chain gangs (and profit from them) make speeches to one version of America, Paul Green gives us a Fourth of July speech to another America. How would a convict boss explain the national idea to the downtrodden and dying? Green’s answer to this question acquires what the Times critic called “an imaginative richness that is dramatically emotional.” Here’s an excerpt:
“This is the glorious Independence Day, the great day when old King George got his tail bit off.
“This ain’t no riding on a Ferris wheel, or eating peanuts and popcorn and drinking cold drinks at a lemonade stand. No, it ain’t, you bet your life. This is the chain gang, the chain gang. This is the ball and chain, the nine-pound hammer, the wheelbarrow, the shovel, the twenty-nine lashes, the seventy-two lashes, the sweatbox, the steel cage, the rifle and shotgun.
“If you don’t make your time you can’t pay your debt to the State. And the only way you can pay it is by work. It’s work we want. Work the State wants. It’s for that the great railroad company has hired you from the Governor. Yes, Sir, the Governor has rented you out the way he would a mule or a shovel—hired you out to build that railroad. And, boys, you got to build it, ‘cause they need coal down in Floridy, and they need oranges and musk-melons and bananas up there in New York. And the cotton has got to get to the seaport, and the tobacco’s got to get to the factory and there’s a world of shipping and trade got to happen, boys. And it all depends on you. I know it’s a hell of a life. It’s a hell of a life for all of us—the shackles of the iron pin, the hammer and the ball. But, damn your son-of-a-bitching souls, I’m going to see that you wear them till the end!
“Alright, gentlemen, give us another little salute to the morning sun. For this is the day the Thirteen Original States freed themselves from the bloody Englishmen. Fee-fi-fo-fum. Come on, boys, give us a cheer for your country!”
While the boss speaks, he is twice interrupted, first to administer a bloody lashing to the youngest Black convict, Bright Boy, who is accused of faking illness when he collapses from malnutrition. A second diversion is caused by desperate sounds from inside the “sweatbox,” where another Black convict, Runt, has been locked up, agonizingly immobilized and suffocating in an upright coffin. Runt’s screams for water give way to noises of writhing panic, “as if a huge bird were beating at the plank walls with bony, featherless wings,” followed by silence.
The convict boss, his speech concluded, pulls a crumpled sheet of paper from his pocket. “Order of the day so certifies that before we set forth to work it shall be the duty of the boss to have a rendition of ‘America’ sung by the prisoners.”
Bright Boy, still in pain, is forced to lead the singing and does so “in a clear, beautiful voice”: “My country, ‘tis of thee, Sweet land of liberty, Of thee I sing. . .”
Afterward, Runt’s body is pulled from the sweatbox. He will be buried, the convict boss decides, under the railroad cross-ties, where “Night and day the great trains will be running over old Runt’s bones, running from the big cities up north to the Floridy pleasure-grounds and back again, carrying the President and his folks maybe.”
Paul Green’s play explores how Independence Day rhetoric resonates, or fails to, among the abused and disenfranchised. What truths follow, Green asks, from a juxtaposition of the “American Injustice System” and the entity identified by Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser as the “Ideological State Apparatus” of American patriotism?
At the end of his play, Green tacked on an important footnote about the song Bright Boy sings on the morning of his decidedly unfree Independence Day. The note reads, “‘America’ is an anthem sung to the tune of ‘God Save the King.’”
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