One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (45 page)

As the Fourth of July dawned, with a forecast calling for high heat and humidity, crowds began converging on the capital. Special trains and nearly five hundred chartered buses brought thousands from across the Northeast, while a five-hundred-car caravan made its way from Richmond, Virginia. Despite organizers' insistence that the attendees would be diverse, they turned out to be overwhelmingly white, middle-class, and middle-aged. “The styles were straight,” a reporter for the
Baltimore Sun
wrote. “There were fewer black faces than one might have expected in Alaska.” This was the Silent Majority in the flesh. “They gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial, where so many others have assembled in protest,”
Time
reported, “to bear witness that it was their country too, a country more right than wrong.” A woman in the crowd expressed the same sentiment, but in more confrontational terms. “The hippies have had their demonstration,” she said. “Now it's our turn.”
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Honor America Day began, as planned, with the morning religious service at the Lincoln Memorial. Roughly fifteen thousand spectators attended, but the television networks broadcast the service, allowing thousands more to follow along at home. “It was like a small-town Fourth of July on a super scale,” the
Washington Post
noted, “with the favorite ordained men thoroughly fusing God and country.” Dressed in a blue-and-white striped suit with a red pocket handkerchief, Pat Boone led the crowd in the national anthem. The Centurymen Choir of Fort Worth and the US Army Band joined together to perform “America the Beautiful,” but Kate Smith stole the show with her rendition of “God Bless America.” For the scripture reading, Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum selected a passage from Chapter 25 of the Book of Leviticus, the same passage the Committee to Proclaim Liberty had used in its Fourth of July festivities nineteen years earlier.
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Graham, of course, was the main attraction. Standing in the same spot where Martin Luther King Jr. had delivered his address to the March on Washington seven years before, the evangelist cast himself as an heir to
the slain civil rights leader with a sermon unsubtly titled “The Unfinished Dream.” “We have listened and watched while a relatively small extremist element, both to the left and to the right in our society, have knocked our courts, desecrated our flag, disrupted our educational system, laughed at our religious heritage, and threatened to burn down our cities,” the preacher said. “The overwhelming majority of concerned Americans—white and black, hawks and doves, parents and students, Republicans and Democrats—who hate violence have stood by and viewed all this with mounting alarm and concern.” At long last, these once silent Americans were starting to speak out, “to say with loud voices that in spite of their faults and failures, we believe in these institutions! Let the world know that the vast majority of us still proudly sing: ‘My country 'tis of thee / Sweet land of liberty!'” The crowd roared in approval.
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Graham insisted that the secular institutions of American life were worth defending because they were rooted in spiritual truths. “Why should I, as a citizen of Heaven and a Christian minister, join in honoring any secular state?” he asked. “The Bible says, ‘Honor the nation.' As a Christian, or as a Jew, or as an atheist, we have a responsibility to an America that has always stood for liberty, protection, and opportunity.” In Graham's view, those national values were no accident but were instead rooted in the founding fathers' explicit embrace of the Judeo-Christian tradition. “The men who signed the Declaration of Independence were moved by a magnificent dream,” Graham claimed. “This dream was rooted in a Book called the Bible. It proclaimed freedoms which most of the world thought impossible of fulfillment.” The vision he attributed to the founders had not been fully realized, he acknowledged, but it was within reach. “I call upon Americans to bend low before God and go to their knees as Washington and Lincoln called us to our knees many years ago,” he implored. “I submit that we can best honor America by rededicating ourselves to God and the American dream.” A return to religion, Graham argued, would bind the wounds of the nation and “stop this polarization before it is too late.”
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As Graham looked out from the Lincoln Memorial, though, it seemed it might already be too late. The crowd before him welcomed his message, but they had become increasingly distracted by a smaller contingent of radicals arrayed behind them. Roughly a thousand sprawled in the shadows of the Washington Monument, smoking red-white-and-blue joints and waving Vietcong flags. Though Graham had hoped to win them over, they still viewed him and his supporters with suspicion. (Speaking with a reporter, a young man with long brown hair and a drooping mustache referred to Graham's clean-cut crowd as “the Americans.”) As the service went on, a few hundred radicals, some completely nude, waded waist deep into the reflecting pool and launched into antiwar chants. At the near end of the pool, Graham's audience watched with rising anger. Allen Brassill, a Kraft Foods salesman and chairman of the Americanism Committee of Maumee, Ohio, had driven to Washington with his wife the day before. “The speeches were inspiring,” he said, his eyes shaded by a straw hat with a small American flag tucked into the band. “But we haven't enjoyed some of what we've seen here. Those filthy hippies in the pool, they should be locked up.” For others, confronting radicals was the entire point of the event. Jim Reilly, a fireman from Maryland, said it was “the main reason I'm here. I want to show those characters who are yelling obscenities that we don't have to take anything from a small minority.” When mounted policemen finally intervened to keep the hecklers at bay, the conservative crowd cheered them on. “Push 'em back,” yelled a man in yellow Bermuda shorts. “They can use a bath!” “They ought to be clubbed,” said a bald man in a striped shirt. An angry housewife upped the ante: “I hope they break a few necks, that's what I hope.”
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For the Fourth of July in 1970, the Nixon administration and its allies promoted “Honor America Day,” which was highlighted by a morning religious service led by Billy Graham at the Lincoln Memorial and an evening entertainment program emceed by Bob Hope at the Washington Monument. Nominally a celebration for all Americans, the event proved in practice to be a rally for the conservative Silent Majority.
AP Images.

The disruption aside, Honor America Day continued as planned. Bishop Fulton Sheen brought the morning religious service to a close with his benediction. In a rebuke to the radicals in the reflecting pool, he proposed a West Coast counterpart to the Statue of Liberty, a “Statue of Responsibility” to “remind Americans that we have no rights without corresponding duties.” Fireworks soon screeched from behind the Lincoln Memorial, exploding in a colorful display that ended with tiny American flags, attached to parachutes, floating gently down to the crowd. As the speakers descended the steps, they joined the crowd in a procession down Constitution Avenue. US servicemen and Boy Scouts led the way with the American flag and the flags of states and territories. Hippies stood on the sidelines chanting “One, two, three, four! We don't want your fucking war!” but the color guard focused on reaching the Ellipse. “There,”
Newsday
noted, “on the very spot where students staged their bitter protest” two months before, Honor America Day participants raised a giant American flag. They then planted their small flags “into the letters U.S.A. which have been carved 42 by 24 feet into the green sod.” Relay racers who had set out the day before from Independence Hall, Colonial Williamsburg, and Valley Forge soon arrived, planting their flags as well. As military bands performed throughout the afternoon, more and more members of the Silent Majority filed past, adding their individual flags to a growing “sea of red, white and blue” and reclaiming the Ellipse from the radicals.
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That evening, Honor America Day moved to the Washington Monument. Despite a late afternoon thunderstorm that soaked the lawn and drove the humidity even higher, the crowd only continued to swell. American Legionnaires, unmistakable in their caps displaying their names and post numbers, turned up in clusters across the crowd. A group of short-haired high school kids in hard hats loudly sang patriotic songs; empty beer cans piled up beside them. Teams of Boy Scouts rushed around
providing first aid to those suffering in the heat, while roughly five hundred members of the conservative Young Americans for Freedom sported armbands that identified them as official “information aides” for the event. By nightfall, park police estimated that more than 350,000 had gathered for the evening's entertainment, forming a thick carpet of people, picnic baskets, and blankets that stretched out from the spotlighted monument a half mile in all directions.
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The few thousand antiwar protesters, now badly outnumbered, had been pushed to the fringes. Nevertheless, they had grown bolder over the afternoon, “liberating” a concession stand, raiding two Pepsi trucks, and, most improbably, flipping a giant spotlight into the reflecting pool. “The police are under orders to play it cool, to lean over backwards to avoid violence,” a
Time
reporter explained in a wire to his office. Policemen tried to preserve the “DMZ” between the Honor America Day crowd and the radicals taunting them, but when a small group started throwing rocks, bottles, and cherry bombs, they moved in. As the US Navy Band began “The Star-Spangled Banner,” park police launched tear gas into the thicket of protesters. They misjudged the wind, however, and the smoke swept over the celebration's attendees. “To the final strains of the anthem,” a reporter wrote, “there was a mad stampede of weeping hippies and Middle Americans away from the fumes.”
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When the evening's entertainment began, the crowd tuned out the protesters at the perimeter. As promised, master of ceremonies Bob Hope kept the program largely apolitical, though partisanship occasionally crept in. A prerecorded message from Nixon drew applause and a scattering of boos from the back, and when Hope set up a joke about a possible monument to Agnew, the crowd interrupted him, cheering the premise more than the punch line. On a few occasions, however, the political emphasis was quite overt. Country singer Jeannie C. Riley, best known for her hit “Harper Valley PTA,” a send-up of small-town hypocrisy, performed Merle Haggard's Silent Majority anthem “The Fightin' Side of Me” instead. “If you don't love it, leave it: Let this song that I'm singin' be a warnin',” she sang to sustained cheers. “If you're runnin' down my country, man, you're walkin' on the fightin' side of me.” Later, comedian Red Skelton recited the Pledge of Allegiance, defining each word at length as he went. “Since I was a small boy,” Skelton observed at the very end,
“two words have been added to the Pledge of Allegiance: ‘Under God.' Wouldn't it be a pity if someone said
that
is a prayer and
that
be eliminated from our schools, too?” At this, the crowd came alive, whistling and hooting.
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For the most part, though, the performers stuck to traditional patriotic routines. Dinah Shore, who had been picked up from the Washington airport and whisked to the vice president's mansion the day before, played it straight with a standard rendition of “America the Beautiful.” The Centurymen Choir, participants in the morning program, returned with the sentimental “We'll Find America.” Occasionally these anthems served as an ironic score for the chaos unfolding in front of the performers. While the earnest New Christy Minstrels performed a sanitized version of “This Land Is Your Land,” the crowd watched park police handcuff a black teen and usher him into a paddy wagon. In the end, only the magnificent final fireworks display brought all the crowd together, however briefly, in a shared moment of awe. As soon as it was over, the two sides went their separate ways.
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The next day, the men behind Honor America Day were quick to pronounce it a major success. “It was a great Fourth of July celebration,” Nixon claimed, “the kind of patriotic thing we need.” Organizers were thrilled that the size of the crowd had lived up to their highest hopes, despite the brutal weather. The television audience at home was even more encouraging; three-quarters of TVs in Washington had tuned in, and countless more across the country. Marriott had no doubts that the event had resonated with its target audience. “The people who attended were nice looking,” he reflected the next day. “They were Middle Americans, the backbone of the country. That's what thrilled me.” (As for the antiwar protesters, he had a different take: “It's too bad we have to have people like that trying to destroy the country.”) To spread the message more broadly, organizers made arrangements for the production of a special two-disc collector's album of the event titled
Proudly They Came
. . .
To Honor America.
The recording was narrated by actor Jimmy Stewart, in echoes of his earlier service as emcee of the “Freedom Under God” festivities decades earlier. The Capitol Record Club soon made the double album its selection of the month and had to send out “reservation certificates” for copies when demand far surpassed the original supply.
Meanwhile,
Nation's Business,
a publication of the United States Chamber of Commerce, started selling copies of the record as well. All things considered, Marriott reflected, the event had been “very successful.”
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