SEVENTY SIX, Ky. — If the increasing turmoil in Washington makes you worry about our country’s future as we prepare to mark the 250th anniversary of its independence, come with me to Seventy Six.
The derivation of this place’s name has been lost to history, but it seems safe to conclude that it was inspired at least in part by the year the country was founded. The phrase “Spirit of ’76” was in use by 1806, the year John W. Semple settled on Indian Creek, a tributary of the Cumberland River. When he laid out the town of Seventy Six in 1817, Lot 76 was near the Big Indian Creek Falls, which was more than 80 feet high but soon became known as 76 Falls, with a height supposedly based on the name or vice versa. Now it’s the southernmost landmark on Lake Cumberland (which made it shorter).
Seventy Six got a post office but never developed, and the Semples left for Illinois and California, making big marks; one of their many notables published California’s first newspaper and chaired its constitutional convention in 1849. The area continued to have a colorful history, and as the nation’s semiquincentennial approached, my brother David, an Albany attorney, concluded, “What better place to celebrate the Spirit of 76 than the only place in America named Seventy Six?”
So, we are having the Spirit of 76 Celebration in Clinton County this weekend, not only to mark the nation’s 250th birthday but to celebrate our local history. The story of the United States has been written not only in places like Philadelphia, New York and Washington, but in every community in the country, including Seventy Six, and those histories are part and parcel of our national history.
And at a time when the national celebration is colored — many think tarnished — by the political circus in Washington and adventures abroad, our celebration has been assembled by a group of residents and donors with a wide range of political persuasions and opinions. The national stuff was never mentioned at our weekly meetings, even as some of us made political posts on social media. Our eye is on the prize, holding a celebration to increase our sense of community, instill more pride in our history, and, yes, attract a few more tourists.
So what does this have to say about the future of the country? Maybe that our future depends on personal connections that foster trust in a search for things we have in common.
That may seem like a lost cause at a time when both Democrats and Republicans tell pollsters that the opposite party is a threat to the country. Those opinions are driven by national news media and social media that tend to emphasize the extremes in either party, including a president who stokes division, and by the decline of local news media that help foster community cohesion. That decline, and the president’s incessant presence in national media, have made our politics more national than local, upending Speaker Tip O’Neill’s motto that “All politics is local.”
So, too many of us now make national politics part of our personal identity, often a very important part of it. We think too little of what we have in common with others, and that’s bad for the country.
One antidote could be some thoughtful reflection about the content and meaning of the document whose 250th anniversary we will celebrate Saturday. The Declaration of Independence provided the moral foundation for our country, and it still should.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” Thomas Jefferson and others wrote, capitalizing the important words.
Actually, those notions were not self-evident; we had to fight a war to fully create the country, and “men” didn’t include women, enslaved people or Native Americans. But for the first time, a nation was founded on ideas, not on ethnic, religious or other group identity. And the central idea of 1776 was that governments get “their just powers from the consent of the governed,” and that we no longer consented to being governed by a tyrant king.
In the last century or so, we have expanded the notion of equality to include those who weren’t included in the century and a half before. But in pursuing social justice for minorities, we have also enhanced group identity — and stirred pushback from majority groups and those who have held the most political power. Our would-be tyrant king has capitalized on those reactions. He will not last, but his methods might. So that may be our nation’s future. But not if we remember the Declaration and places like Seventy Six.
This column first ran in the Northern Kentucky Tribune.
Al Cross is professor emeritus of journalism at the University of Kentucky. He was the longest-serving political writer for the Louisville Courier Journal (1989-2004) and national president of the Society of Professional Journalists in 2001-02. He joined the Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame in 2010.
