Parading Patriotism: Independence Day Celebrations in the Urban Midwest, 1826-1876

Parading Patriotism: Independence Day Celebrations in the Urban Midwest, 1826-1876. By Adam Criblez. (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2013. Pp. xxii, 193, notes, index. Paper, $28.95).In thoroughly scholarly fashion, this book reflects the excitement and occasional conflicts and disasters that accompanied celebrations of Independence Day as the early American Northwestern frontier became the Middle West. Adam Criblez chose to concentrate on the first five to become major cities: Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Columbus in Ohio (the first state in the Northwest Territory); Indianapolis, Indiana; and Chicago, Illinois. A good location on the Ohio River for water-born commerce made Cincinnati the first real city in the region. Cleveland had an advantageous position on Lake Erie in Northeast Ohio, especially after the completion of the Erie Canal. Chicago was profitably situated on the southwest corner of Lake Michigan and profited in the 1850s from connections to a canal and railroads. Slower to develop were Columbus and Indianapolis, but the governments of Ohio and Indiana made them state capitals in central locations, which paid off in convenience. With help from roads, canals, and railroads, both eventually flourished.Criblez gives full attention to each of these cities, but Cincinnati, the Queen of the West, proves most interesting. It was well along to greatness in 1826. Just across the river from a large slave state it attracted free African Americans as well as European immigrants. The cultural interactions and conflicts that enlivened and distracted the entire nation rapidly developed in Cincinnati: slavery and abolition, white labor and free African Americans, southerners and northerners, teetotalers and serious drinkers, and German and Irish immigrants not wholly compatible with the white Protestant majority.The main trends emphasized in this study, however, simply had to do with the expansion of the respective cities and changing public attitudes toward Independence Day. Most of the antebellum years saw civic celebrations of the birth of nationhood, with parades, readings of the Declaration of Independence, and lectures or sermons honoring the Founding Fathers (two of whom died on July 4,1826). There were often special exhibitions as well. Growing hostility to Catholics exemplified by the American Party of 1856, the crisis over the expansion of slavery as seen by civil war in Kansas, and, finally, the Civil War itself affected and somewhat confused these patriotic observances in the later 1850s and the 1860s. Again, Cincinnati was most powerfully affected. When the Civil War receded into memory, new growth and prosperity changed the celebration of the Fourth of July into a holiday for relaxation, picnics, baseball games, and other summer vacation pleasures. Parades, speeches, and exhibitions did not disappear, but were mostly eclipsed by recreation. The constant, perhaps, was fireworks: both expensive displays enjoyed by thousands after sunset and the inexpensive cheap fire crackers beloved by celebrants.Criblez takes occasional digressions from his main subject. …