Holidays used to bring us together. In the Trump era, they tear us apart.
By James Hohmann July 3 at 8:59 AM
With Joanie Greve and Mariana Alfaro
THE BIG IDEA: Thomas Jefferson and John Adams both died on July 4, 1826 — 50 years to the day after the adoption of the Declaration of Independence.
It remains one of the most remarkable coincidences in U.S. history, but what’s even more noteworthy is how the two Founding Fathers reconciled in their final years after a long period of estrangement. (Abigail Adams made it happen.) Jefferson, a Southerner with a small-r republican vision, defeated Adams, a New England Federalist who supported a strong central government, in the particularly nasty presidential campaign of 1800.
Both future presidents had been members of the Committee of Five that drafted the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia in 1776. They remained patriotically committed to the preservation of the American experiment, and they worried about the growing sectional divisions that would eventually lead to the Civil War. “I look back with rapture on those golden days when Virginia and Massachusetts lived and acted together like a band of brothers,” Adams lamented in an 1825 letter to Jefferson.
Jefferson was invited to speak at a celebration in Washington for the 50th anniversary of independence. He declined because of his failing health. In an elegant letter from Monticello, he sent his regrets and reminisced on the importance of the day – when colonists chose the sword over submission.
“May it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government,” Jefferson wrote. “All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. … For ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them.”
That’s what July 4 is supposed to be about. Instead, Americans – whose modern-day tribalism would doubtlessly disturb Adams and Jefferson – are squabbling on Independence Day Eve over whether it condones slavery to honor the third president or to put the Betsy Ross flag on Nike sneakers. More significantly, President Trump has ordered tanks and other military assets into the nation’s capital for a new kind of ceremony that critics fear will be as much a celebration of himself as the nation’s birthday.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2019/07/03/daily-202-holidays-used-to-bring-us-together-in-the-trump-era-they-tear-us-apart/5d1b9487a7a0a47d87c56faa/
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