The United States of America celebrated the 200th anniversary of the country on July 4, 1976. Richard Nixon had resigned on August 9, 1974. The war in Vietnam had ended on April 30, 1975.
In the 12 years before those events, the country saw a growing tension between those in power and those who objected to their actions. It began with student protest against racial injustices, and rapidly expanded to frustration with what students saw as embedded and uncaring professors and administrators. Those early protests laid the groundwork for protests against the Vietnam War.
I am sure for most people reading this, these events are far in the distant past. Maybe there was reference to protest in their advanced-placement history class, or an odd song referring to death in Ohio. Unlikely things safe in the distance.
Not for me: I lived through it. I was a freshman in a women’s liberal arts college when a high school classmate wrote me from jail. She had been part of the sit-in at Berkeley University in California in the fall of 1963. Even in her heavily redacted letter, it was clear what she was saying: “I am in jail. Why aren’t you?” Her words echoed the probably apocryphal comment by Emerson to Toreau: ”Henry, what are you doing in jail?” to which Thoreau is supposed to have replied: ”Waldo, what are you doing out of jail?”
The anger behind that sit-in spread rapidly across the academic world. In the spring of 1966, I was part of a group of five students who disrupted our Spring Convocation to hand the college president a petition. He was upset enough to go off his written text and call us “a burp from Berkeley.” He was roundly booed by the student body.
In the spring of 1970, I joined a street theater group protesting the politics behind the war in Vietnam. We were not movie or rock stars, just Columbia University students who felt passionately that the war was wrong, and that we had an obligation to try and bring that message to anyone who stopped by and listened.
I have tried since then to explain to my daughters just how frightened the group was as we sang and danced our way through what even we knew was a very small, perhaps pathetic, effort. But that May, we had reason for our fears. It was May 4, 1970, when four students died at Kent State University in Ohio. It was May 8 in New York City when men building the World Trade Center took their lunch hour to attack students protesting on Wall Street. And finally, it was May 15 when three more died at Jackson State College.
Somehow during that turbulent time, something odd happened. Ownership of my country’s flag was taken over by the Republican Party. Nixon wore a flag on his lapel, and conservatives waved large flags as if they were the only true patriots. The only thing a liberal Democrat like me could do was to childishly refuse to stand as the American flag — my flag — went by in parades.
On July 4, 1976, I joined 6 million people in and around New York City Harbor to celebrate our country’s 200th anniversary. At the very end of the fireworks, an American flag covering half of the Verrazzano Bridge was unfurled, the simulcast radio program played “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and, yes, the sky turned red from the fireworks.
I was on a yacht in the harbor. We stood, some of us for perhaps the first time in many years, and we sang along as our national anthem played. Around us, on the water, on the shore, and on the bridge above, multi-generation and brand-new citizens sang. Refugees and immigrants joined in. And beyond the bridge, the Statue of Liberty kept watch over her harbor and our liberties.
I have written at length about the protests 50 years ago to try and explain my reaction to a young man who turned up at a No Kings Rally with two flags: a Trump banner and an American flag displayed together. I wanted to scream, “They’re doing it again! They’re trying to steal my flag!” Now, don’t get me wrong. I believe deeply in every human being’s right to life, right to liberty, and right to turn up at a No Kings Rally with a Trump banner. He clearly thought he was protecting the U.S. from those who dared to question its actions, and was unconcerned with how little impact his presence had.
The No Kings protesters handled his presence in a dignified manner: We did not scream; we just ignored him. Symbolically, the double flag display became too heavy for him, and he was reduced to displaying only one flag. But I was left with the frustrating feeling that once again, the right, particularly the MAGA right, was trying to claim my flag. They were once again projecting their self-righteous belief that they were the only ones who had the right to display the flag of the U.S. and the symbols connected to it.
So I went home and did something whimsical but satisfying: I bought a 250th anniversary hat. It has an American eagle, flanked by the Statue of Liberty and the Liberty Bell, with a colonial flag draped behind them. I had no idea what I had started.
It turned out that the algorithm attached to that hat believed that anyone who wanted to order a patriotic birthday hat was male, with appalling taste in T shirts. The topics ranged from the chauvinistic to the gross to the anti-anyone-not-a-white-male.
The sort of pop-up ads that produced this stream of disgusting T shirts rarely last long, so I figured if I waited a few days, they would go away. At some point, however, some far-right organization bought or found my phone number, and is now sending me MAGA texts. They started with “Are you still a Republican?” and have moved on to asking me to immediately support something that Trump is doing.
The odd thing about that algorithm is how bad a job it is doing. It has completely missed that I am a knee-jerk feminist liberal, and that I buy T shirts with quotes such as Benjamin Franklin’s “Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are,” and Sojourner Truth’s “If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back, and get it right-side up again!”
Despite all this nonsense, I am still committed to not letting anyone take my flag away. So on this 4th of July, I intend to put on my 250th anniversary hat with my flag and my eagle and wear my “All of My Heroes Have FBI Files” jacket. See you at the parade.
Elizabeth St. John Villard is president of the Rotary Club of Martha’s Vineyard.