‘I love my country but abhor the violence for which it too often stands.’ Photo: by Aaron Burden on Unsplash
Party political: Anthony Manousos on the fourth of July
‘History shows it was possible to achieve independence without bloodshed.’
As a child I loved the fourth of July, and looked forward to the fireworks. But when I became a Quaker I began to question the violence of the celebrations. When I hear ‘Bombs bursting in air gave proof through the night that our flag was still there’ I don’t think of the British attacking Washington, which inspired those words from our national anthem, I think of Hiroshima, or Dresden. I never stand for the National Anthem. I love my country but abhor the violence for which it too often stands.
Historically, Quakers did not celebrate this holiday, and it cost them dearly. The first official July 4 celebration did not happen until 1781, but in 1776 there were a few celebrations in Philadelphia and in 1777 there were more. That day was also marked by violence. Quaker homes were vandalized by those who believed they were not patriotic – Quakers did not celebrate any holidays that commemorated military victories.
We Americans like to imagine we are a peaceful nation, yet we are ‘largest purveyor of war in the world,’ as Martin Luther King Jnr once said. We believe passionately in the myth of redemptive violence, and equate freedom with violence. We imagine our nation could not have become free without a bloody revolution.
In the 1770s Quakers in Philadelphia believed otherwise. They refused to accept tea that had been taxed but, instead of disguising themselves as Indians and throwing it into the Delaware River, they quietly paid the British merchants to take it back to England. History shows it was possible to achieve independence without bloodshed, as was the case with Canada and Australia. It took time, patience, and a bit of cunning, but think of the lives that were saved.
The African American historian Gerald Horne has given me another reason to question the conventional ideas about the fourth of July. In The Counterrevolution of 1776, he debunks that notion that the American Revolution was a great step forward for humanity. ‘The Africans then living in the colonies overwhelmingly sided with the British’, he says, and for good reason: ‘The so-called Revolutionary War’, he writes, ‘was in part a counter-revolution, a conservative movement that the founding fathers fought in order to preserve their right to enslave others.’ Our enslaving ‘founding fathers’ were deeply in debt and used enslaved people as collateral. Our banks were tainted by the slave system from the onset, and have continued to privilege whites over people of colour.
So, like my religious forebears, I see no reason to celebrate the fourth of July. Emancipation Day – Juneteenth – is much more worthy of celebration.
