REVOLUTIONARY WHIPLASH

Commemorating a nation's founding in a time of fear and foreboding.

- JILL LEPORE

Frightened of controversy, some cultural organizations have decided to do nothing.

This past June, at a No Kings rally outside a white clapboard church in a little brick town in the lower right-hand corner of Vermont, Green Mountaineers huddled together in raincoats under a pearl-gray sky. Some ironic anti-royalists wore golden paper crowns from Burger King, but the more sartorially, not to say lepidopterously, dedicated came dressed as orange-and-black butterflies, these being the only monarchs allowed in America. “Rejecting Kings Since 1776” read a sign carried by a woman wearing a rainbow bucket hat. In the matter of handmade placards—Magic Marker on cardboard, duct-taped to wooden yardsticks—there was a certain amount of politico-literary one-upmanship. “Cry My Beloved Country” was clever, but was “Make Orwell Fiction Again” cleverer?

Abraham Lincoln was there, grim-faced and sepia on a sign that read “Government of the People, by the People, for the People.” A red-white-and-blue printed poster quoted Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense”: “In America, the Law Is King!”