A 250th birthday party to unite America? Sadly, that ship has sailed

The summer of 1976: America’s bicentennial.

- Erica Wagner

It was everywhere, the celebration, the red, white and blue: and even at the age of eight I was aware of how vast, how universal, the party was.

From the windows of my parents’ apartment on the far west of Manhattan island, we could see all the way down to the harbour, and all the way across to the Jersey shore — a perfect vantage point from which to see the tall ships as they processed up the Hudson to mark the Fourth of July.

Fifty years have passed: America marked another milestone birthday yesterday. It is not partisan to say that the way the two events have been commemorated could not have been more different. The first was largely unifying, a demonstration that even a country in trouble - post-Vietnam, in the midst of an oil crisis — could come together; this year’s events are a damp squib, ruthlessly politicised so that genuine acts of commemoration look like resistance.

Operation Sail in 1976 was the brainchild of Frank Braynard, who had once been programme director at the South Street Seaport Museum. By the time the summer of the bicentennial rolled around, Braynard had been planning the event for nearly three years, scouring the seven seas for the great square-riggers that had, by then, been turned into training vessels. Sagres from Portugal, a three-masted barque with a red Maltese cross on its sails; the Christian Radich from Norway with its 38-metre main mast; Ara Libertad from Argentina, carrying 2,650 sq metres of sail; not to mention the US Coast Guard's Eagle and — Braynard’s great prize — Amerigo Vespucci, the Italian 101-metre steel frigate. “I fought to get her for eight months,” he told the New York Times. “She's one of the greatest ships in the world”