What Was America? Katy Siegel and Elise Armani on the Bicentennial We Lost

*“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 **INTRO** 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. **FURTHER READING** •   Katy Siegel and Elise Armani, What Was America? Art, Culture, and Politics in the Bicentennial Era (Yale University Press, October 2026). Siegel’s essay in Artforum on what the bicentennial tells us about the art world that followed is the short version of the argument. •   Benny Andrews, who opens the book — his biography and chronology. The Bicentennial Series ran 1970 to 1975, one monumental painting a year. He also founded the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition in his studio in January 1969, which protested the Metropolitan Museum’s *Harlem on My Mind* for planning an exhibition about Harlem without Harlem, and he served as Director of the Visual Arts Program at the NEA from 1982 to 1984 — the governmental role Armani refers to at 11:53. •   Stanley Forman’s photograph, discussed at 29:09 — what happened that day on Boston City Hall Plaza, 5 April 1976. The man with the flag was Joseph Rakes; the man being attacked was the lawyer and later academic Ted Landsmark. The book Siegel mentions is Louis P. Masur’s The Soiling of Old Glory: The Story of a Photograph That Shocked America — published in 2008 rather than recently. •   The Ant Farm Collective, whose attempts to imagine the future close the book — their work and chronology, including *Media Burn* and the Cadillac Ranch. •   On the NEA’s growth under Nixon at 08:33: the chair who actually drove it was Nancy Hanks, who ran the agency from 1969 to 1977 across both the Nixon and Ford administrations and is generally credited with the budget increases Siegel describes. •   The federal machinery behind all of this: the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration, created by Congress in December 1973 to coordinate locally sponsored events after the original commission concluded there should not be a single national one. Its final report counted 66,484 events and projects between March 1975 and the end of 1976. •   Alvin Toffler’s *Future Shock* (1970), raised at 25:40 as the period’s instrument for measuring dread about the pace of change, and the Golden Record, launched in 1977, as the era’s largest time capsule. **FIVE TAKEAWAYS** **1. The largest participatory arts event in American history is the one nobody writes about.** Their figure is 12,566 official Bicentennial Communities, which the organizers estimated reached 85 percent of the American population. Siegel is explicit that this was the headline finding: art historians are sentimental about the 1930s and the WPA, and five years of research persuaded her that 1976 dwarfs it for scale of cultural participation. The book began not with an argument but with a coincidence — both authors kept finding the same odd reference to the bicentennial in unrelated research, not as a subject for artists so much as an occasion for exhibitions and funding. **2. Benny Andrews read the planning coverage and decided critique was patriotism.** Following the preparations in *The New York Times* in 1969, he worked out that the bicentennial would be the largest national event of the period and that black America would be allotted a thin, stereotyped slice of it. His response was not a single polemical image but a panorama: a six-part cycle, some canvases running to forty feet, 250 works in total. Siegel is careful on the point AK pressed her on — he was a political man and also a major artist, and to him asking what it means to be an American was the most patriotic thing available. **3. A living wage bought the time to participate.** Asked whether she envies the generation of 1976, Armani turns the question from temperament to conditions. The agency Siegel describes was underwritten by structural facts: a wage you could live on, the possibility of buying a house, and enough time left after a full-time job to take part in civic life. Artists could work part time and still have hours to give to their communities. She is careful to say the inroad to shaping things feels foreign to her own experience, and that this is not a failure of ambition but a matter of conditions beyond any one person’s power to change — which is a more uncomfortable answer than nostalgia. **4. Nixon built the apparatus he did not care about.** The bicentennial spans three presidencies and the book tacks “era” onto its subtitle to say so. Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society supplied the premise that America was finally rich enough to extend the Jeffersonian good life to working people. Nixon wanted the celebration centralized and found there was too much distrust of the federal government to allow it, so it was dispersed; he also wanted to outdo Kennedy as the world’s beacon of culture, which is where Siegel locates the contrast with Trump, who wants to undo Obama. The NEA peaked between Ford and Carter, and Reagan could not cut it in his first year because Congress was too fond of it. **5. “Very much a January 6 photo.”**