Fourth of July

The most useful thing to know about Fourth of July photographs is that around 1910 the holiday changed character completely, and it changed because it was killing people.

Nineteenth-century Independence Day was celebrated with explosives handled by anybody who wanted them. Children fired blank cartridges from toy pistols, threw giant firecrackers, and set off homemade devices. The wounds became a recognized annual medical event, and the Journal of the American Medical Association began tracking the toll. The figures are hard to read even now: hundreds of deaths a year nationally, thousands of injuries, and the largest single cause was not burns or blast but tetanus, because blank cartridge wadding drove dirt and cloth deep into a wound. In 1903 the count ran to well over four hundred deaths.

The response was the Safe and Sane Fourth movement, which ran through the 1900s and 1910s and was led by women’s clubs, medical societies and municipal reformers. Cities banned private fireworks and replaced them with organized programs — parades, band concerts, athletic contests, historical pageants, community picnics and a single public fireworks display run by professionals at the end of the day.

That is why so many Fourth of July photographs from the 1910s and 1920s show enormous civic events with everybody participating. Decorated bicycles and baby carriages in a children’s parade. Automobiles wrapped in bunting. Historical pageants with hundreds of townspeople in costume, staged on a hillside or a fairground. Those were built deliberately, to give people something to do with the day besides blow their hands off.

The other great Fourth of July subject is naturalization. Independence Day was the traditional occasion for public citizenship ceremonies, sometimes with hundreds of people sworn in at once at a park or a stadium, and Americanization programs of the 1910s and 1920s made a spectacle of it. There are photographs of the Ford English School graduation in which immigrant workers walked into a giant prop melting pot in their national dress and came out the other side in suits carrying small flags. That image is now used to criticize the era, and it was made at the time as a boast.

The bunting and flags themselves date pictures. Before an executive order in 1912 there was no official arrangement of the stars, so flags in nineteenth-century photographs show them in circles, ovals, one large star made of small ones, or simply scattered. A flag with an irregular star field is not a mistake by the photographer or a fake — it is a flag made before anyone standardized it.

Oratory belonged to the day as much as the noise did. A Fourth of July program through the nineteenth century meant a public reading of the Declaration and a long address from a local figure, and the platform draped in bunting with a crowd of several thousand standing in a field is a standard photograph of the period. Frederick Douglass gave his best-known speech on July 5, 1852, asking what the day meant to a slave, and the tradition of using the occasion to argue about the country is as old as the occasion.

Small towns are better represented here than cities. A Fourth of July parade down a main street of two-story brick storefronts, with a band, a fire company, veterans in uniform and children on decorated bicycles, is the single most common form of this photograph in any American archive, and the storefront signs behind the marchers usually date it faster than anything else in the frame.

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