Centennial: The Great Fair of 1876 and the Invention of America’s Future by Fergus M. Bordewich pub. by Knopf (2026)
Half a century ago, I went to various events celebrating the Bicentennial in 1976. Now, as we prepare to mark the 250th Anniversary, I think back to those earlier celebrations and wonder how we ever got to where we are today. Where are the meanings of those events that brought us together and promoted a common purpose? But, perhaps I have added a rosy glow to those memories. Unfortunately, the more I look at the earlier celebrations, the more comparable they seem to today under Trump.
In 1976 there was OpSail in which dozens of sailing ships arrived in New York Harbor and we were able to go onboard. There was a giant celebration in Washington and Philadelphia, and hundreds of smaller cities and towns had community events to celebrate the Spirit of ’76. The Federal government made grants available to local groups to mark their regions’ history for the Bicentennial, and many museums on African American and Women’s history today date back to those old grants. There were daily Bicentennial Minutes every night on TV in which an actor or a historian told a story related to the Revolution in only 60 seconds (which now would be too long for the social media generation). All of these commemorations were prominently featured in the news media. Still, what I also remember was the disastrous close of the Vietnam War just two years earlier, the recent resignation of President Nixon, and the calling out of the official Bicentennial observance as a cleaning up of our history. I also remember that in July 1976 I attended an “Alternative Bicentennial” rally on the lawn in front of the Capitol trying to present a more realistic portrait of our nation’s history, or at least more realistic to me.
What about the Centennial in 1876? It was not ignored by our government as it now is. It had some major events like the holding of a massive Centennial Fair in Philadelphia where the main event was not a reenactment of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Instead it was the first public display of the telephone by Alexander Graham Bell. There was also some social progress on display like the inclusion of a women’s pavilion at the Centennial fair and a work of art by a Black woman that was the talk of the event. But, of course, not everything was copesetic. Two weeks before the celebration, Col. George Armstrong Custer led his men out on a genocidal adventure in the Dakotas. He was defeated and his men were slaughtered. Throughout the South, formerly majoritarian governments were taken back by white supremacists who were unsparing in the use of force, and in Washington the race between Hayes and Tilden for the presidency would be resolve through the means of corruption that helped end the progress of Reconstruction.
Please don’t ask God to live through a celebration of our country’s Independence! Those major anniversaries were marked by tragedy as well as celebration.
In the new work, Centennial: The Great Fair of 1876 and the Invention of America’s Future by Fergus M. Bordewich, the author focuses on the month before and the month after July 4, 1876. A week before July 4, Americans got news of the slaughter of Custer’s men at the Little Big Horn. When the fair opened, people for the first time could talk to each other with an electrical device made by Alexander Graham Bell that would change how we communicate forever. In the background, the Republican Party was preparing to have the presidency stolen from it, with Rutherford B. Hayes defeated by Samuel L. Tilden in one of the most corrupt elections ever.
Fergus Bordewich is a well-known writer of popular history who combines intimate details of his subjects lives and careers with world-changing decision. Last year he came out with Klan War: Ulysses S. Grant and the Battle to Save Reconstruction which used the story of Ulysses S. Grant and the Black community of South Carolina to show how Reconstruction could have continued even in the face of White terrorism. Six years ago he authored Congress at War: How Republican Reformers Fought the Civil War, Defied Lincoln, Ended Slavery, and Remade America where he used the stories of Thaddeus Stevens, Pitt Fessenden, Ben Wade and other Republicans to show how men who had not even been Republicans half-a-decade before could transform their party into an effective vehicle for destroying slavery and winning elections. In all three of his latest works he details the relationships that helped make the modern United States during the 1860s and 1870s. While his two earlier books show great promise for the Republican reformers, by July 4, 1876 the Republicans are incredibly compromised and the public has grown tired of them and their now-shaky ideals.
The Republicans’ retreat from reform is best shown in their labor policy. The Great Depression of 1873 was still handicapping the economy leading to unprecedented labor organizing, particularly among the Irish immigrant workers. These immigrant workers, just like immigrant workers today, took jobs no one else wanted at wages that made their employers rich and left the immigrants condemned to permanent proletarianism. These Irish men. women. and children labored to build unions in the factories, the railroads, and the mines both to defend against the owners slashing their wages, and to introduce basic safety provisions into the workplace. In the 1870s tens of thousands of workers were killed every year when the urge for profit cut back on protection of the lives of working people.
In the coal fields of Pennsylvania, these immigrants joined the emergent miners’ union and they made some real gains, but the owners said that the union was secretly backed by the Ancient Order of Hibernians, an immigrant-led secret organization, that conspired to control industry and politics in coordination with the hated Catholic Church. If this was not enough to revive the Know Nothing resolve of the Protestant majority, the mine owners said that the mine union had a secret terrorist militia, the Molly Maguires, which was murdering anyone who opposed labor organizing. Now there was violence in the coal fields, but it was not only coming from the workers. The owners hired goons to intimidate the union organizers and to violently break up strikes. The Republicans, who had a mixed record on labor issues previously, now got behind the mine owners, allowing them to hire the Pinkerton Agency to infiltrate the union with agents actually encouraging violent action by the workers. The the mine owners would arrest the members of the union, with lawyers from the companies prosecuting the workers, all with the cooperation of the Republican officeholders. Twenty Irish workers were put to death. By 1877, thousands of workers of all nationalities went on strike throughout the North. The Republicans met the strikers with trains carrying soldiers with gatling guns. By 1877, the Republicans went from being a movement of liberation to the repressive political mechanism for keeping wages low and ushering in the Gilded Age of untold wealth for a very few.
Fergus Bordewich also covers the developing feminist movement that grew after the Civil War. Many female Abolitionists had cast their lot in with the Republican Party, and at least some leading Republicans like Frederick Douglass came out in favor of female suffrage. It looked like the 15th Amendment might remove bars on women voting, but the leadership of the party told its feminist advocates that they would not allow it. At the Centennial Fair there was a great hall on the contribution of women, but it did not in any way show the work of feminists. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton tried for nearly a year to try to include not only the work of women, but the rights of women in the exhibition, but they were blocked by the party.
Not everything in the book was about Native Americans being pushed off their land, the judicial murdering of Irish labor activists, or the mistreatment of women. There are some heartening stories. A Republican commissioner working for the Centennial Fair reached out to Edmonia Lewis, an African American sculptor living in Europe. She was one of the most popular sculptors on the Continent, although she was originally from New York State. Commissioner John Forney, approached her to submit a work to the Fair. According to Bordewich, “In an editorial in The Philadelphia Press, he offered her as an urgent symbol for the nation, declaring that her presence would show that the gains of Reconstruction had not been defeated.” He wanted her as a sculptor and as an example of the heights Black people could reach if they were accepted. She submitted The Death of Cleopatra, a realistic sculpture of the powerful North African queen. While the higher-ups at the Fair did not recognize its worth, attendees lined up to see it. For many Americans it was the first work of fine art that they had seen by a modern American Person of Color. Lewis later sold it, but it went missing. In the mid-20th Century it was found again an now is part of the permanent collection of the Smithsonian.
These details are not lost in Bordewich’s telling of the larger story of race, gender, and labor relations of 1876. There are many stories of politicians, organizers, artists, and fairgoers that make the one hundredth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence a time to look back on today, 150 years later.
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