The United States at 250: signal flares of a showboat parade

Among the many events surrounding the United States' 250th birthday, perhaps the most eye-catching was New York City's "tall ships" parade, past the Statue of Liberty and then proceeding up the Hudson River.

Aside from conjuring the New York Harbor scenery of 1776, this international fleet of rigged mast ships sought to replicate the tall ships flotilla of the "Operation Sail" event staged for the 200th anniversary of the United States on July 4, 1976 — a bicentennial parade that I attended in person as a 10-year-old Manhattanite, standing with my father near a West Side pier, snapping photographs of the white sail wonders with our trusty Kodak Instamatic.

The recurrence of the antique ships, with their attendant round number anniversaries, provokes meditations on the US ship of state — what are the headwinds, and what future is it sailing toward?

The US of 1976 certainly had its share of societal problems, notably a struggling economy beset with high inflation and job layoffs. Yet that inflation crisis pales in comparison to the travails of 2026 and the past 10 years.

The prices of necessary goods, rents and mortgages have been rising even more steeply now than in the 1970s.

And back then, average wages were increasing, unlike today.

That more tolerable cost of living was in part effectuated by the bargaining power of labor unions, which were stronger in the '70s than in all the decades that followed.

The bicentennial was also a time of peace: it was the era of detente, a welcome thaw in relations with both the Soviet Union and China.

The military draft and war with Southeast Asia were seemingly in the past. The monumental Watergate scandal of 1973 and first-ever resignation of a US president had also faded from media discourse and dinner table conversation.

For all the socioeconomic problems still facing the nation, there lingered a residual optimism that the middle class and blue-collar workers would regain their footing, that upward mobility was not just possible, but probable.

Civil liberties and public policy were still overshadowed by the unaccountable deep state and military-industrial complex, as was made apparent by the Congressional hearings led by Senator Frank Church on CIA domestic abuses.

But public awareness had been stirred, and at least some of the checks and balances against state and corporate abuse seemed to be in place and functioning, however tenuously.

Prior to its list of specific grievances against the British crown, the Declaration of Independence famously intones a set of three basic rights — "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" — London's denial of which underpinned the need for a new nation, freed from colonial tyranny by force of arms and revolution.

Of those three founding principles, the first and most basic — that of "life" — bears particular scrutiny in the year 2026. The right of all men and women to a decent existence, to keep on living. Where does it stand today, 250 years on?

In current times, when such essentials as food, housing, fuel and medicine have become unaffordable for the average US citizen, and with extreme levels of student and household debt further weighing down families, "life" itself has become quite fraught.

That inscribed right of any and all humans to exist may itself be in its death throes.

The increase in the cost of living, in turn, undermines the concerned citizen's ability to safeguard liberty, or to faithfully pursue that elusive condition known as happiness.

It's tough to attain a family-sustaining level of income, or to muster the time and energy required to verify the integrity of computer vote counts, when you are mired in a daily struggle just to acquire enough food to eat, or pay for sorely needed medical treatment.

US citizens are learning the hard way that liberty and the pursuit of happiness are predicated upon the simple, self-evident fact of a person's right to exist.

What would I suggest to remedy this epic crisis?

To begin with, the immediate enactment of federal wage and price controls, the way the Nixon administration did in 1971, and which worked quite well to keep inflation down and workers' salaries up — until heavy pressure from powerful corporations forced a stop to the policy within, whereupon the inflation crisis resumed.

I also recommend a national framework for an emergency rent freeze and rent rollback measures, the expansion of Medicare to cover all US residents in a single-payer system, wide-ranging grants to small businesses, forgiveness of student loan debt with federal compensation to lenders, mandatory tuition fee reductions, and substantive increases in Social Security and food stamp benefits, and in the federal minimum wage.

Institute all of these suggestions and I would say the general population in the US might at least have somewhat of a fair chance at digging their way out of this economic catastrophe, the worst since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Realistically, do I expect any of the above to become law anytime soon? Absolutely not.

And that would be despite the popular preference for each of them shown in survey after survey.

Their rejection by the powers that be does not really concern how spending more would exacerbate the national budget deficit either, as Congress has made it clear that when it comes to taxpayer money spent on the military, endless wars, and "national security", the sky is the limit.

US policymakers and lawmakers, and their guiding hands within the unelected, elite strata of the super-rich and the deep state hierarchy, have no intention of changing course on this one-way track toward the utter immiseration of the domestic population.

Which brings me back to the summer of 1976, specifically to the monthslong buildup to the July 4 sailing regatta, fireworks displays and whatever else was being done, when my 10-year-old self read with keen interest the posters stuck to walls by left-wing activists in my neighborhood urging people to protest the looming presence of one of the Operation Sail vessels, the Esmeralda of Chile, which represented the US-backed, brutal military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet.

That regime had covertly been installed by the CIA and US executive branch in a bloody coup on Sept 11, 1973, which overthrew and assassinated the elected, leftist president, Salvador Allende, and destroyed Chilean democracy. So much for the state of US adherence to that "liberty" word in the founding fathers' Declaration.

Soon after the coup, many thousands of political prisoners were rounded up, tortured and murdered in detention centers created by Pinochet, who also harbored fugitive Nazi war criminals.

One of those centers had been the Esmeralda ship itself, which was transformed from a Navy training vessel into an anchored dungeon of horrors. According to survivors' testimonies, dissident men and women were killed, tortured and raped inside the ship.

The Esmeralda sailed up the Hudson that festive bicentennial day unimpeded, alongside the other tall ships with sails of purest white.

There were two other ships in that bicentennial parade that I now recognize should have drawn objections from advocates for democracy and justice, but as far as I can tell stirred no controversy.

One was the Nippon Maru of Japan. Built in 1930 as a training vessel for Japan's merchant marine cadets, it was later requisitioned by the Imperial Japanese Navy during World War II (from 1943 onward). In that capacity, it served primarily as a transport ship for military supplies and personnel, and also provided training for naval recruits.

Another was the tall ship from Italy, the Amerigo Vespucci, which, in its little-known, dark past, had been a training vessel for dictator Benito Mussolini's navy and his Axis Italy wars of conquest.

Those fascist Italian forces, like the Japanese, had fought and killed US troops, and together with Hitler's Germany aimed to extinguish the very ideals of democracy, equality and freedom worldwide.

Flash forward to July 4, 2026, and a further problem emerges in the form of one glaring difference between the bicentennial tall ships and the new regatta cruising New York waterways, one that evinces how US national priorities have sunk ever lower over the past 50 years.

The symbolic, white-sails parade has now become extensively militarized; a festive paean to overseas war that would have greatly dismayed those brave anti-imperialist men who gathered in Philadelphia to sign and adopt the Declaration of Independence.

The show was named "Sail4th 250", and the official website proudly states: "This isn't just a handful of boats sailing around, it's a display of 48 historic tall ships from 20 different countries in honor of the US' Semiquincentennial.

Plus, it features an International Naval Review with 50 US and allied warships anchored in the Hudson and an International Aerial Review where the Navy's Blue Angels will lead a flyover of more than 100 aircraft."

And in procession with the many gray-hulled military vessels, those unsolicited new fleet mates to the tall ships, the old Esmeralda, that notorious Chilean ship of neo-fascist atrocities, floated once more upon the Hudson, and apparently did so to no visible objections this time around.

May we divine from this portentous maritime spectacle a future for US citizens that is bright with the promise of liberty, peace and prosperity, to be realized soon, and enduring happily for the decades to come?

The leading indicators, both material and symbolic, suggest not, I am sorry to report.

That ship has sailed.

The author is an independent historian specializing in Northeast Asia and author of A Plague Upon Humanity: The Secret Genocide of Axis Japan's Germ Warfare Operation.

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