The Great American Birthday Party

...The Great American Flag Company in New York hoisted a stars and stripes on the Verrazano Narrows Bridge that was three times the .James Ring Adams is on the editorial staff of the Wall Street Journal...

...In such a climate, developing and articulating a strong, clear American business ethic has become absolutely necessary to the survival of free enterprise...

...About 500 miles northeast of Bermuda, a man named Karl Thompson, trying to accomplish one of the last great unachieved feats, a free balloon crossing of the Atlantic, had to leap from his craft, the Spirit of '76, and was rescued after four days in a liferaft by a Russian freighter...

...We're all very cynical about this," said one reporter on board the training ship State of Maine, "but watching those ships is a hell of a lot of fun...

...Copyright American Viewpoint, Inc...

...Business corruption is an arbitrary restraint on open, honest competition...

...Preliminary gatherings at the anniversaries of Concord and the Boston Tea Party attracted considerable attention, to the point that groups like the Heritage Foundation, the American Conservative Union, and Accuracy in Media devoted some energy to exposing the Commission's allegedly Marxist and anti-American background...

...For the squares, in fact, the Bicentennial Fourth was a cultural coup d'etat...

...But businessmen should never rationalize unethical conduct, whether overseas or at home...

...They are modern Vandals who, unchecked, could damage or destroy a brilliant but delicate market system that has taken thousands of years to evolve...

...Americans celebrated in the strangest ways...

...CBS, in fine, was devoting the day to solid, bourgeois, middle America, and who are we to say they should not...

...they cautioned spectators away from abandoned piers, for fear their weight would collapse the rotting structures...

...It didn't even matter that all but one of the vessels were steel-hulled, twentieth-century ships...

...Counterfeit Capitalists For the whole point of free enterprise--of capitalism--is vigorous, honest competition...

...Rifkin complains that television omitted all of the rally's many political speeches...

...But almost nothing happened...

...Its efforts were to culminate in a nine-hour, 250,000-strong rally in Washington, highlighting the signing of an "Economic Declaration of Independence...

...But it was a revealing shift in programming...

...The great mystery of the day for students of the mass media will always be the almost total disappearance of the nonsquares, the hippies, freaks, feminists, and far-out Left...

...That Puerto Ricans had a separate radical gathering and that feminists and homosexuals were making their own statements...

...So pleasantly surprised by this display of their own civility, New Yorkers showered gratitude on the visiting sailors...

...To sail a tall ship requires old-fashioned virtues--courage, self-discipline, a sense of duty--and these received a better press that weekend than they have gotten in a long time...

...Every corner cut, every bribe placed, every little cheating move by a businessman in pursuit of quick plunder instead of honest profit, is an outright attack on the free-enterprise system...

...New Jersey police expected about 25 deaths from people falling off the Palisades...

...it is high time that American businessmen did as much...

...Accidents were limited to a capsized motorboat in the treacherous currents of Hell's Gate, in which one woman drowned, and the collision of a boat and a seaplane in the East River...

...Yet how much of this portrait was always there...

...But the successful carrying off of the event gave a very important boost to the city's battered morale...

...Both the legal and medical professions have long since recognized the need to ostracize peers who abuse their professional trust and thereby damage the standing of all of their colleagues...

...Just as you cannot maintain a home or a healthy society without a strong degree of shared respect and common values, you cannot maintain a healthy market without a strong degree of trust and a shared code of ethics (whether stated or implicit) among the participants...

...The Senate Internal Security Subcommittee called it "the attempt to steal the Bicentennial...

...The media gave it their all...

...With one or two exceptions, reporters recognized that they weren't writing about Watergate...

...For all the foolishness, the spectacle gave as accurate an account as we are likely to get of the current state of the American spirit, and it was by no means something to be ashamed of...

...If Walter Cronkite were to present a similar panorama in any summer of the late sixties, we would have seen, not only the hundreds of thousands of youths gathered at Woodstock to hear acid rock, but the hundreds of thousands of middle-aged parents gathered in Central Park to hear Tchaikovsky...

...But perhaps it was better that way...

...The ships made spectacular photographs, and writer-photographer teams were dispersed to every conceivable angle, while chartered sport fishing boats churned to sea to pick up film and copy from the press ships...

...Did you know that an outfit called the Revolutionary Student Brigade claims to have attracted 25,000 to a "Rich Off Our Backs" rally in Philadelphia...

...The squares, said Herman Kahn of the Hudson Institute, are taking over America...

...The media just didn't look for them...

...Whatever happened to the People's Bicentennial Commission...

...But on the Fourth, it hardly seemed to have mattered...

...The intense coverage and lavish layouts even threatened to obscure the basic purpose of this maritime extravaganza...

...Garish and understated, banal and uplifting, ridiculous and dignified, irrelevant and thoroughly appropriate...

...To the public and the press, the event was a once-in-a-lifetime evocation of wooden ships and iron men, of the days when New York Harbor was a forest of masts...

...The most spectacular and dignified of the Bicentennial events, this endeavor brought sixteen large square-rigged sailing vessels, some two-thirds of the last operating "tall ships" in the world, to New York harbor, along with I4 The Alternative: An American Spectator October I976 some 200 smaller sloops, schooners, and the like...

...The crowds cheered the German eagle and the rising sun of Japan equally with the Polish hammer and sickle as the sailors marched past under their naval flags, and office workers showered them all with computer punch cards, shredded phone books, and, quite thoughtfully, torn-up copies of Penthouse...

...All the military...

...In his recently published memoirs, Mr...

...refrigerated trucks were ready to receive the bodies in case the traffic kept ambulances from getting through...

...And just as every American citizen bears the awesome burden of meeting his civic obligations in a way that will preserve his heritage of political liberty for his children, so every American businessman has a sacred duty to maintain a standard of behavior and a reputation for integrity that will preserve our economic liberties for generations of Americans yet unborn...

...And the picture press, to say it bluntly, went bananas...

...It is therefore unacceptable on both moral and practical grounds...

...For one thing, which the gloomiest of the bureaucrats had forgotten, a good portion of the crowd consisted of children, in the firm custody of their parents...

...His wife Laurel Ann Adams, making her first appearance in these pages, is a doctoral candidate in neuroscience at Albert Einstein College of Medicine...

...Across the country, flagpole sitters and businessmen tried to break world records...

...The public excitement rivalled the early days of Cape Canaveral...

...What references to history found their way into the speeches of politicians and businessmen were more often than not grotesquely misunderstood and twisted out of shape...

...Internationally, the United States government can help, and has already begun to do so, by working through the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris for the adoption of an international code of ethics that could help curb bribery...

...Nearly everyone insisted on calling the day "America's 200th Birthday Party," thus assimilating the event to the cultural level of a 10-year-old...

...The people celebrated by behaving happily like Americans...

...A good reputation," the old Roman proverb has it, "is more valuable than money...

...Irving Shapiro, chairman of the board of DuPont, advocates a new, uniform code of ethics to which all large corporations would subscribe, an admirable goal, even if it is unlikely to be achieved in the immediate future...

...In the end it was a Bicentennial which paid surprisingly little attention to the meaning of the event it was supposed to commemorate...

...talism retains is its reputation for providing honest value for money--in short, its good name...

...Correspondents from the Village Voice discoursed learnedly on barks and brigantines...

...No, well neither did the viewers of the CBS all-day special, who in the morning heard only that "handfuls" of demonstrators had gathered in Philadelphia, and in the evening were told that the number had actually exceeded 20,000...

...Jeremy Rifkin, its director, is still wondering...

...What had come over a city so often content to be thought of as hard, pushy, and cynical...

...Beforehand, officials warned of massive traffic jams and surging crowds...

...Consider "Operation Sail...

...The Alternative: An American Spectator October 1976 15...

...Other, more radical events dropped totally out of sight...

...The squares who gathered for Operation Sail were always there...

...The continuous struggle within capitalist ranks has always been between those enlightened businessmen who recognize this ethical but also utilitarian basis for sustained prosperity and those who lose sight of it in pursuit of the quick killing...

...Entrepreneurs in Baltimore baked the world's largest cake, 69,000 pounds in all, but could only sell 20,000 of its estimated 400,000 slices...

...Although some of the networks covered portions of the PBC's program, including a morning memorial service, Mr...

...Manhattan was flooded with white uniforms, and columnists wrote nostalgically of World War II and the "New York, New York" of Dan Dailey and Frank Sinatra...

...Saturday traffic was the lightest in memory, and on the big day, public transportation handled millions with remarkable dispatch...

...James Ring Adams and Laurel Ann Adams The Great American Birthday Party For all their foolishness, our Fourth-of-July celebrations gave as accurate an account as we are likely to get of the current state of the American spirit, and it was by no means something to be ashamed of What kind of Bicentennial was it...

...Hundreds of thousands lined lower Broadway on July 6, as the sailing ship crews and sailors from the 50 warships in the separate International Naval Review marched in the first ticker-tape parade in a decade...

...The day was a family affair for middle Americans...

...Such people are counterfeit capitalists, outlaws within the fold...

...For five or more years, this radical, anti-Corporate outfit had built its propaganda around the revolutionary tradition to be celebrated on July 4, 1976...

...At a time when the business community has been shorn of most of its traditional political leverage, in the face of a new public mood of angry questioning, and in a political atmosphere in which it is all too tempting for demagogues to blame American business for the economic and social problems we face, the most valuable asset American capi...

...Bribery, of course, is a two-way street, involving those who seek as well as those who offer bribes...

...You know," said one reporter, "the Times is probably going to run a correction on July 5 saying, 'We forgot to mention in yesterday's story on Operation Sail that Sunday was also the 200th anniversary of American independence.' " But the attention was not necessarily misdirected...

...And as for the theorists, well, there's always 1987...

...Channel 13, New York's public television station, rebroadcast all 13 episodes of"Flash Gordon: Space Soldier" from midnight July 3rd to four a.m., and Walter Cronkite stayed on the air until the following midnight with national coverage of everything from hymns to fireworks...

...Serious students of America could justly lament that a great moment had been missed for educating fellow citizens in the meaning of their country...

...And though he admits that the turn-,out was much less than the Commission expected, he avers that the press estimates of 5,000 participants were ridiculously understated...

...In St...

...It didn't matter that windjammers had only a tenuous relation with the Declaration of Independence...

...tn short, as several sociologists told Newsday, the crowd was composed of "squares...

...The military was once more in fashion...

...The ships were no less salutary for the City of New York...

...Louis, a pre-medical student stood on his head on the wings of a hi-plane...

...The latter group is every bit as contemptible as the poacher who slaughters endangered species to sell a few fur coats, or the exploiter who plunders forests or destroys the environment for short-term returns ot unacceptable long-term cost to us and to posterity...

...It was a vastly appealing and entirely recognizable portrait of America that Walter Cronkite presented that day, a country coming to peace with itself after a decade of torments, not smug, not satisfied, certainly not serene, but more self-confident than we have seen her for a while...

...He says that even the service, broadcast live for nearly half an hour,-was never identified as a PBC event...

...How had it managed to bring together millions without a hint of disaster...

...size of the largest flag reported by Guinness and watched in horror as the wind promptly ripped it in tatters...

...The day may have been an intellectual disappointment, but it was a great vulgar success...

...Stanley Marcus of Nieman-Marcus expressed the same thought another way: "There is never a good sale for Nieman-Marcus unless it's a good buy for the customer...

...For the press, covering the story itself was a return to a simpler way of life...