“The only reason to write history is because it helps us in the present. It’s not a vegetable. It’s not good for you.” — Katy Siegel
It’s been three months since America’s 250th, although I’m guessing few are nostalgic for those official MAGA celebrations. That said, nostalgia is a feature rather than a bug of these types of anniversaries in America. Take, for example, What Was America? by Katy Siegel and Elise Armani, a new book about the art, culture and politics of the Bicentennial era. Siegel and Armani are nostalgic for nostalgia. We don’t do anniversaries as we used to, they worry.
What Was America? opens with the African-American artist Benny Andrews, who feared exclusion from the Bicentennial celebrations and responded with a feverish six years of monumental paintings. Then there are the Bicentennial quilts which Siegel and Armani see as a metaphor for a nation whose strength has always lain in its diversity. Both leftist women in Northern California and the Daughters of the American Revolution quilted the Bicentennial. 1976, then, was a genuinely national celebration.
So how will we look back at this year’s celebrations in 2076 when America celebrates its 300th birthday? The final chapter in What Was America? is on how people in 1976 imagined the America to come. School kids predicted no pens and lessons taught by computers. One person worried there would still be no woman president. Nobody predicted President Donald Trump.
“It’s tough to make predictions,” Yogi Berra said, “especially about the future.” Where have you gone, Yogi Berra? Now, I’m getting nostalgic for nostalgia.
FIVE TAKEAWAYS
1. 12,566 official Bicentennial Communities reached an estimated 85 percent of the population. Art historians are sentimental about the WPA; Siegel says five years of research persuaded her that 1976 dwarfs it for scale of cultural participation. The book began with a coincidence rather than an argument.
2. Benny Andrews followed the planning coverage in The New York Times in 1969, worked out that black America would get a thin, stereotyped slice of a two-hundred-year story, and answered with a six-part cycle of 250 works, some canvases forty feet across. To him, critique was the most patriotic act available.
3. Asked whether she envies 1976, Armani turns the question from temperament to conditions: a wage you could live on, the chance of buying a house, and time left after a full-time job. Artists could work part time and still give hours to their communities. She says that inroad feels foreign to her own experience.
4. Nixon built an arts apparatus he did not care about. He wanted the bicentennial centralized, found Americans trusted Washington too little to permit it, and wanted to outdo Kennedy abroad. Siegel’s contrast: Trump wants to undo Obama. Reagan could not cut the NEA in his first year because Congress liked it.
5. Stanley Forman’s The Soiling of Old Glory — a white man swinging a flag at a black lawyer in Boston, 1976 — is, as Siegel says, very much a January 6 photo. Fifty years sounds long; from a bird’s-eye view of history it is the blink of an eye.
THE BOOK
What Was America? Art, Culture, and Politics in the Bicentennial Era (Yale University Press, 2026) — https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300284430/what-was-america/
ABOUT KEEN ON AMERICA
Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. With 3,000 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is a daily conversation about the ideas, books and arguments shaping the United States. New episodes every day.
CHAPTERS
00:00 — Intro
01:50 — Why this book, and the reference that kept appearing
03:17 — A shoebox with 1976 in glitter on the lid
03:50 — 12,566 communities, 85 percent of the country
05:08 — Are we especially nostalgic now?
06:03 — The parallels that fell apart
08:33 — A decade in the works: LBJ, Nixon, Ford
10:15 — Outdoing Kennedy, and undoing Obama
11:18 — The Kennedy Center, then and now
13:03 — Is any of this agitprop?
13:50 — Benny Andrews reads the planning coverage, 1969
15:00 — Critique as the most patriotic act available
16:29 — Quilting, and the People’s Bicentennial Quilt
19:20 — Did conservatives switch off?
22:27 — The correction: BINET and the bicentennial network
24:30 — Why Reagan could not cut the NEA
25:40 — Future Shock, and three thousand time capsules
27:41 — No pens, no woman president, robots to dress you
29:09 — The Soiling of Old Glory
31:30 — History is a tool, not a vegetable
32:56 — A living wage, time, and the inroad to participate
35:08 — History as a baseball game
35:50 — The title they feared was too cynical
36:46 — Closing