Happy Birthday to Us!

By LANCE MORROW

America celebrates the Fourth from sea to shining sea

It is the high holy day of the American idea. It is also a beer bust. The Fourth is that odd American mixture of patriotic fervor and bleary ease, of sunburn and a deeper stirring. The Founders adopted the Declaration of Independence in July and not in February (imagine sending fireworks up in a snowstorm), and so the national birthday is both the nation's most powerful rite of communal identity and merely the lazy and unreflective beginning of high summer.

But this year the Fourth was different. The fireworks seemed more brilliant, the crowds denser and more celebratory. Americans' sense of pride in their nation seemed clearer and surer than it has in a long time. This year the fireworks appeared to suggest a large and complicated and real sense of shared pleasure in the nation and what it represents. They shot up over New York harbor and the Washington Monument and Boston and Philadelphia and Chicago and St. Louis and San Francisco and thousands of town squares and picnic grounds across the nation. The projectiles fired up and burst in the black summer night--magic bright sprays that looked like sudden sea anemones or supernovas, loud and martial with concussions, but fleeting and delicate. Eugene O'Neill once wrote about "the electrical display of God the Father." The fireworks of the Fourth were an explosive display of congratulation to America the idea.

Anyway, Americans were in the mood for a good party. A cynic would say that patriotism is an impulse that consults the economic indicators, and he would be partly right. Americans are more hopeful about their economic futures now, or so the polls say, than they have been in the past five years. What politicians refer to as the Misery Index (unemployment plus inflation) is down 10 points since 1980. The rate of economic growth is high (a breathtaking 8.8% in the first quarter of the year). Many shadows remain over the economy, over Central America, over the Middle East.

Nuclear war is a low-grade chronic dread in the back of the mind, Soviet churlishness a high-grade pain in the neck. And yet some deep though elusive process of healing seems to have occurred over a period of years in the American psychology, and the Fourth of July, 1984, may have been one more expression of it.

Americans are in some ways a uniquely self-conscious people. If they do not feel good about themselves, they feel awful about themselves. America becomes Amerika, evil in the world, or else an overgrown incompetent. But perhaps Americans have developed a more mature appreciation of themselves. They exhibited last week something of the sweet, intense idealism that they have demonstrated as the Olympic torch has made its way across the U.S. to Los Angeles, and some of the mellowed fervor that they felt on Memorial Day when an Unknown from the Viet Nam War was installed at Arlington National Cemetery. Patriotism seemed finally to transcend politics: the flag wavers last week were Mondale Democrats and Reagan Republicans and political agnostics.

Everywhere the crowds were large--partly because the Fourth fell in the middle of the week and people did not disperse as they often do for a long holiday weekend. In Boston, which takes a sort of proprietary interest in the Fourth of July, 175,000 came down to the Charles River to hear the annual Boston Pops concert.

One part of the program involved a patriotic singalong, and the evening air filled with thousands of voices belting out You're a Grand Old Flag and This Land Is Your Land.

Huge crowds gathered along Manhattan's riverfronts; they could take their choice of spectacles in a gaudy fireworks doubleheader. Workmen removed the weathered torch from the Statue of Liberty and lowered it to the ground. After 98 years, the beacon is being replaced by a gold-plated replica, part of the refurbishment of the entire statue.

There was about the whole holiday a good-humored air, an absence of malice or anger. Last year Secretary of the Interior James Watt banned a concert by the Beach Boys that had been scheduled for the Fourth on the Mall. He said the Beach Boys would attract "the wrong element." Watt brought on Wayne Newton instead. Now Watt is gone, but not the Beach Boys. They came to the Mall last week and played to an astonishing audience of 550,000, who arrayed themselves peacefully on the grass in what one reporter called "human gridlock." Beach Boy Mike Love greeted them giddily as "all you undesirable elements."

In Huntsville,. Ala., the Whitesburg Baptist Church presented its "living flag." The "flag" is a 27-ft. by 40-ft. version of Old Glory with 110 singers mounted on the stripes. They offer a capsule history of the U.S., accompanied by shooting rockets.

The ritual of the Fourth went on across the U.S. In Detroit, 500 immigrants raised their right hands and took the oath of citizen ship. Small-town America had band concerts and fried-chicken dinners and parades down Main Street. Clay Center, Kans., held an omelet feed in the courthouse square.

One of the most splendid of the Fourth's events was a parade of 32 tall ships down the California coast from Manhattan Beach to Long Beach harbor. Some 5,000 private boats escorted the ships, which included Producer Dino De Laurentiis' replica of H.M.S. Bounty. The flotilla was a mile long. More than 1 million people lined the coast to watch it pass, and as it did, an eerie, reverential hush settled upon the crowds.

Even the weariness and the traffic jams going home had their ceremonial purpose. A Norman Rockwell episode -- stalled Studebaker, sleeping children, fuming father, wilted wife. The Fourth is a day when people in a changing nation full of new immigrants and new ways consult their past a little -- their public past and private memories, their idealism and sentimentality. The Fourth is a way of floating briefly on an inner tube in the nation's sacred time.