The Old-fashioned Fourth of July: A Photographic Essay; on Small-town Celebrations prior to 1930
Text by John. E. Miller.
South Dakota History, volume 17 number 2 (1987)
South Dakota History is the quarterly journal published by the South Dakota State Historical Society. Membership in the South Dakota State Historical Society includes a subscription to the journal. Members support the Society's important mission of interpreting, preserving and transmitting the unique heritage of South Dakota. Learn more here: https://history.sd.gov/Membership.aspx. Download PDFs of articles from the first 43 years and obtain recent issues of South Dakota History at sdhspress.com/journal.
From earliest recorded history, celebrations and holidays have punctuated people's work routines and highlighted their calendars. Every civilization has taken time from its round of daily work for communal rest and relaxation. Although a central function of holidays has been to provide relief from toil, their origins have often been more complicated, deriving from religious requirements and impulses. In the United States, Christmas and Easter emerged as the two most important religious holidays. Since the 1800s, the celebration of our nation's founding —Independence Day — has been the greatest secular holiday.
Like Memorial Day and some other holidays, July
Fourth presents many religious trappings that make it hard to distinguish between the sacred and the secular. Similarities to religion can be seen in the centrality of the day's symbolism (flag and American eagle), in the glorification of its patron saints (Washington and Lincoln), in its special emphasis on the word (the Declaration of Independence), in its missionary fervor (United States as redeemer of the world), and in its power to weld people together in community. As the honorable Edward Frawley told a large crowd in Central City, South Dakota, on the Fourth of July in 1904: "Well may the bells of church and state pick up the notes of the liberty bell and mingle their mellow chimes in one grand anthem of joy. Days like this are the educational days of patriotism" (Deadwood Daily Pioneer Times, 6 July 1904).
By the time the frontier reached Dakota Territory in the 1860s, Independence Day had become well entrenched back East. The practice of commemorating the Fourth had slowly taken hold during the years after 1776, spreading widely after the adoption of the Constitution and becoming common after the War of 1812. (Not until 1941 did an act of Congress formally establish it as a national holiday.) From the earliest days of settlement in Dakota Territory, people made a big event of the Fourth of July. It had been a highlight of the year where the pioneers came from, and to celebrate it in Dakota reminded them of their former friends and neighbors and helped establish an aura of familiarity amidst their new surroundings. The festive day tied Dakotans to their pasts as well as to the national culture, helping them to feel comfortable in places that were not conducive to comfort during the early years.
The frontier observance of the Fourth of July created something of a paradox. Â celebration whose origins lay in a radical departure from previous traditions and whose principal value was liberty and freedom became standardized in a form that reinforced stability and regularity, order and predictability. By 1910, when the little town of Estelline in east-central South Dakota celebrated the Fourth, one could easily have predicted what the day would be like. While each town gave its festivities a personal touch, invariably the program included a parade, a speech (often accompanied by the reading of the Declaration), lunch, a baseball game or games, street sports, fireworks, and a dance. Seldom were any of these elements omitted. Often, horse racing, fire brigade contests, band music, acrobatic and high-wire demonstrations, and other types of entertainment were also included.
The day combined high patriotic pageantry with fun and games. It was hard to tell where one ended and the other began, but over the years the entertainment functions clearly took on more and more importance. On 1 July 1910, the Estelline Tribune advertised the forthcoming big day as "one continual round of pleasure." People began gathering from a thirty- or forty-mile radius almost as soon as the sun came up. Trains from both directions brought people from Brookings, Bruce, Aurora, Elkton, Castlewood, Watertown, Henry, Clark, Redfield, and other towns and rural areas. By ten o'clock on the Fourth, downtown Estelline was crowded with people, and the parade (reportedly almost half a mile in length) wended its way up Main Street from the south end of town to the north end. Floats representing various stores and more than a dozen automobiles decked out in bunting and flags followed Andrew Halseth, who was dressed up as Uncle Sam, and the Toronto band.
After the parade, the crowd gathered at the bowery for a program of band and choir music, the reading of the Declaration of Independence, and an address by Reverend A. L. Curtis. Afterwards, the Estelline Tribune reported on 8 July, the crowd dispersed to eat lunch in the town's hotel and restaurants or from picnic baskets under shady trees. At one o'clock, the ball game between Toronto and Castlewood began over by the grandstand. Nearby, the pacers and trotters attracted a large audience, with local horses going up against those from as far away as North Dakota. Later, everyone walked or rode back to Main Street to participate in and watch "the real fun" of the street sports, including foot races, potato races, and a tug-of-war. A bologna-eating contest also entertained the crowd. At a bowery dance that evening, Lester's Orchestra of Watertown furnished the music.
Festivals like the one described above bound the community together. Collective rituals reinforced traditional social values while simultaneously promoting patriotism and civic enthusiasm. What originated as a celebration of American nationalism emerged over the years as a vehicle for local pride and boosterism. Each town tried to outdo its neighbors in putting on a memorable show. Sometimes city government helped finance the program, but more often it was the main-street businessmen who pitched in to invite entertainers, bands, fire companies, baseball teams, and other attractions to make it the most "go-lor-ious" Fourth ever held anywhere.
Sometimes the festivities were spread out over several days. Winner businessmen organized a "Grand Midsummer Carnival of Fun" from July third through the sixth in 1916, promising that it would "absolutely eclipse anything hitherto attempted in this line" (Winner Advocate, 15 June 1916). Four days of vaudeville acts, comedy acrobatics, tumbling, aerial shows, ball games, band concerts, foot and horse racing, old-time sports, a "Grand Floral Automobile Parade," rough-riding contests, roping contests, and a wild west stampede preceded a "Grand Indian Encampment and Pow Wow," which itself included Indian sports of all kinds, sham battles, Indian dances, a parade, and "a genuine Indian barbecue." The local paper approvingly noted that despite as many as five thousand people on hand for some of the events, the crowds behaved in an orderly manner, for which the police chief and his force deserved much credit (Winner Advocate, 15 June-13 July 1916).
Maintaining order and decorum during festivities that naturally invited exuberant displays of emotion was not always an easy task. Boisterous races and competitions, hard-fought baseball games, excessive consumption of alcohol, and enthusiastic release of pent-up emotions were among a variety of things that threatened tranquility. Always, the real danger of injury existed from the seemingly ubiquitous firecrackers. Fireworks caused so many injuries and deaths by the early 1900s that a concerted national drive emerged for a "safe and sane" holiday. Editorializers constantly pounded the theme, warning of "the fearful slaughter" that had marked every Fourth of July for a generation (Sioux Falls Daily Argus-Leader, 3 June 1910). As time went on, persuasion gave way to coercion or other methods of prevention. By proclamation, the mayor of Brookings prohibited the sale of fireworks in 1917, and during the First World War, the South Dakota Council of Defense banned them (Brookings Register, 24 May 1917, 27 June 1918). During the twenties, the State Insurance Department pointed out the large number of deaths and injuries from fireworks, while the Aberdeen Teachers' Association moved to prohibit their sale locally (Miller Press, 2 June 1921, 8 March 1923).
"Year by year the old-fashioned Fourth of July with spitting cannon and sizzling rocket against a blue-biack sky is becoming more and more of a memory," Aubrey Sherwood editorialized in the De Smet News on 20 June 1930. "The Fourth of July which small boys and girls awaited as eagerly as Christmas itself, a day of toy torpedo» of celluloid collared orators, and ice cream socials, has been transformed into an Independence Day of quiet and dignity." Sherwood worried that some of the meaning was going out of the day as it increasingly became more and more a day of quiet relaxation and rest.
The meaning of the old-fashioned Fourth of July remained vivid in the memory of Laura Ingalls Wilder, however, who moved from De Smet to Mansfield, Missouri, in the year Aubrey Sherwood was born and who would write during the 1930s about her experience in Dakota Territory. In Little Town on the Prairie (New York: Harper & Row, 1953), she devoted an entire chapter to the 1881 Fourth of July celebration in De Smet, which she attended with her father. Charles Ingalls, and her sister Carrie. After the oration of the day and the ritual reading of the Declaration, Charles Ingalls led the audience in a spontaneous rendition of "My Country 'Tis of Thee." Wilder experienced an epiphany of understanding when she realized the meaning of the words "Great God, our King" in the song. Americans, she remarked, did not need to obey any king on earth because they were free. That meant they had to obey their own consciences. As she grew older, her parents would stop telling her what to do, and there would be no one who had a right to give her orders. "I will have to make myself be good," she thought to herself. "Her whole mind seemed to be lighted up by that thought. This is what it means to be free. It means, you have to be good" (Wilder, Little Town on the Prairie, p.76). Freedom, therefore, did not mean license. It logically implied the necessity for self-control. Thus, freedom and control coexisted in uneasy tension.
Beneath the patriotic symbols proudly displayed on the Fourth of July lay a number of similar tensions —continuity versus change, individual versus community, affirmation versus criticism, and nationalism versus localism. Civic rivalry also coexisted with civic obligation, and boastful boosterism shone through the patriotic addresses of the day. At Central City in 1904, the Honorable Edward Frawley observed: "Central City commands a prominent and exemplary place in the history of the Black Hills. It is the parent town of the Hills —Deadwood and Lead with their now metropolitan and progressive airs composed of thrifty, patriotic people were simply in their swaddling clothes when Central was a city of commanding proportions and emptying into the trade of the world from the lap and recesses of mother earth a continuous stream of the yellow metal" (Deadwood Daily Pioneer Times, 6 July 1904). Frawley's speech also gives us a dose of the flowery style typical of the oratory of the day. If each town boasted its superiority to its nearest rivals, it also welcomed its neighbors to join in the festivities, and we sometimes get the feeling that the city fathers tossed out their most outrageous claims with tongue in cheek.
Frawley's speech typified the affirmative tone of Independence Day rhetoric —the pride in America and the pride in Dakota that inspired the celebrants. "Our country today," he said, "is broad and beautiful, affording all the produce of many climes. Upon the clear expanse of our lakes commerce steams its way; our rivers are burdened with traffic; our mountains stretch their majestic length, like fortresses across the land; the buzz of industry is never still and the factory wheel sings its ceaseless song of toil. Our timber waves its branches over millions of acres and the hum of the saw tells of the homes and churches and schools that are springing up throughout the land; our mines issue forth all the minerals that mother earth conceives. Game abounds in our forests and our scenery ravishes the muse and awes the artist's brush; our farmers ride their crops into a fertile soil and ride them out again a hundred fold; our mechanics tools are never rusty and the labor of our land is our pride. Over and above all, our churches raise their spires teaching the youth as the eagle teaches its young, to soar ever higher and higher above ambition, above the mastery of wealth, above the slavery of passion, higher ever higher until the yearnings and longings of our hearts find rest at the throne of God."
The ritual and oratory of the day reaffirmed common values and reinforced community solidarity. It sought to downplay social divisions and enhance unity. "We are a united people," Frawiey intoned at Central City. There are no sections, "no longer a north and a south," but an American nation —"one flag, one land, one heart, one hand, one nation evermore." And, he concluded, we are one race. No blue blood of aristocracy here, no plebeian blood, but "good, rich, red American blood thrills and courses through our veins." Such rhetoric denied what was obvious to anybody with open eyes: blacks, Chinese, and American Indians were excluded from this group identity. The promise of American equality remained unfulfilled.
Just a couple of miles from Central City, at Deadwood, a Chinese subculture occupied a prominent place in the community, but it was always on the outskirts or beyond the pale. The status of the Chinese can be seen in their role in the 1888 celebration at Deadwood. The committee on amusements let out all the stops to stage a memorable celebration, importing hook-and-ladder teams from Omaha and Council Bluffs (both claimed to hold the world's record for speed) to compete with local teams for large purses. That the Chinese population played an important role in the community and had the respect of many cannot be doubted, but the committee's invitation to two impromptu Chinese companies to compete in a hub-to-hub race reflects how general was the tendency to see them as ridiculous and unintelligent, perhaps even subhuman. On 29 June 1888, the Black Hills Daily Times jokingly noted how the Chinese teams ran "like scared wolves" in practice and predicted that theirs would be an amusing contest. The people apparently got what they expected. "A more grotesque lot of beings never appeared in public," the Times reported after the race on 6 July.
Interestingly, American Indians were invited to participate in many Independence Day celebrations and often did. Frequently, especially in the west river region, they would come and set up camp, don their native costumes, dance in the streets, act out mock battles, and display their traditional culture to curious whites. On the Rosebud Indian Reservation in 1906, just as settlers were beginning to stream into the west river region ahead of the railroad, the Indians themselves held a seven-day celebration from 2 to 8 July. On 14 June 1906, the Lyman County Republican urged people to attend this great attraction to learn about the ways of the cowboys and Indians. Spectators, the paper continued, would be able to view sham battles fought with bows and arrows, "as they were fought in the early days." Dancing Indians, wearing paint and regalia, were another attraction representing life as it had been during territorial days. While the truth is obviously more complex, the unfortunate impression one gets from the participation of American Indians in Fourth of July celebrations is the suspicion that their culture was on display as a curiosity from the past — something akin to a museum piece —and was much like the high-wire specialists and acrobats the town fathers also brought in for people's amusement.
Fourth of July celebrations in South Dakota, like civic rituals of other times and places, provided commentaries on identity and ideology. They helped define what the community was and clarify what it believed. On this occasion, perhaps more than at any other time, a broad consensus on social values was articulated. The day combined both high seriousness and animated frivolity. It was a time to remember the past and to peer into the future. It was a time to play and a time to reaffirm that hard work was necessary to maintain a community's freedom and opportunity. While illuminating civic realities. Fourth of July celebrations also projected an ideal vision of human relationships. The ceremonial occasion may have reaffirmed traditional values and supported ruling interests, but it also restated principles that could call those values and interests into question.
The Fourth of July was a civic ceremony carried on within the context of civic time and space. Coming once a year, between planting season and harvest, the midsummer celebration constituted an important event in tbe seasonal rhythms that imparted continuity and meaning to people's lives. Each year, it marked a confirmation of the strength and solidity of the republic —another year with the ship of state intact, another bit of evidence for the superiority of republican institutions. The Fourth of July occupied as important a spot on the calendar as any, except Christmas.
Occupying a central place in time, the day also occurred in a central location in space. It is no coincidence that most of our pictures of July Fourth celebrations were taken on main streets (especially in the era before towns began to build parks, to which some of the celebrations would be moved in later years). Main street was the center of activity and the heartbeat of the town. There, people did business and interacted with their neighbors. There, town and country met, and the meaning of the town emerged. On July Fourth, the parade marched down main street, the Indians danced, and the street sports took place. If the town had no opera house, main street was probably where the Declaration was read and the oration of the day delivered.
By the 1930s, when automobiles were available to most people, main-street celebrations increasingly gave way to excursions, with groves and lakes outside of town as destinations. While most towns had not celebrated the Fourth every year (taking turns in putting on the celebration), the frequency now declined. The focus increasingly shifted from ceremony to play. The picnic, tbe games, and the dances, which had always been part of tbe day, began to dominate the event. People tired of long-winded orators. They had lost the patience to listen to the reading of the Declaration of Independence. No one seemed to memorize it any more. People were not necessarily less patriotic, but society had changed. As patriotism found different outlets, the old folks began to get nostalgic about tbe "old-fashioned Fourth." Something about the modern holiday was different —it was hard to put a finger on Just what had changed, but those who remembered those old Fourths did not doubt that something had.
To read further about Independence Day celebrations in the United States, see Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans: The National Experience (New York: Random House, 1965), pp. 373-90; Dictionary of American History, rev. ed., s.v. "Fourth of July" (Edmund C. Burnett); Maymie R. Krythe, All about American Holidays (New York: Harper & Row, 1962); Robert J. Myers, Celebrations: The Complete Book of American Holidays (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1972). pp. 188-205; Charles Warren, "Fourth of July Myths," William and Mary Quarterly 3d ser., vol. 2 (July 1945): 237-72.
South Dakota History is the quarterly journal published by the South Dakota State Historical Society. Membership in the South Dakota State Historical Society includes a subscription to the journal. Members support the Society's important mission of interpreting, preserving and transmitting the unique heritage of South Dakota. Learn more here: https://history.sd.gov/Membership.aspx. Download PDFs of articles from the first 43 years and obtain recent issues of South Dakota History at sdhspress.com/journal
