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There will be no single national Bicentennial observance. A federal commission, which was later abolished by Congress for ineptitude, spent 6½ years arguing over an appropriate national celebration and finally recommended that there be none. To coordinate and stimulate state and local Bicentennial events, Congress set up the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration on Dec. 11, 1973. Its partial listing of nationwide activities fills a book about twice as thick as the Washington, D.C., telephone directory.
The U.S. Travel Service expects anniversary activities in cities and towns across the country to draw 30 million foreign visitors and untold numbers of Americans. During the summer of 1976, Washington, D.C., alone expects more than 330,000 overnight visitors each day v. the normal average of 200,000. Among the capital's Bicentennial attractions will be the National Gallery of Art's show of paintings, sketches and other items from the life of Thomas Jefferson, an amusement park planned for an island in the Anacostia River and the Smithsonian Institution's American Folklife Festival.
Uncle Sam Statues. Some activities are already under way. The American Freedom Train, carrying historic documents and artifacts in 24 cars, is making an 80-stop, cross-country tour. Hundreds of U.S. businesses are profitably joining the celebration with products using Bicentennial themes. Among other things, Americans can now buy red-white-and-blue toilet seats, mailboxes decorated with stars and stripes, liquor in commemorative bottles, even commemorative 1776 locomotives for model train layouts, a bronze replica of the Liberty Bell and a $25,000, 100-ft. statue of Uncle Sam made of hard rubber. In Rhode Island, Bicentennial Chairman George F. McDonald was convicted of soliciting a bribe from a firm that wanted his commission's endorsement of a design for jewelry.
For the most part, however, Americans have reacted in the spirit of the patriotic occasion, usually with pizazz and gusto and often with imagination. A region-by-region sampling of representative Bicentennial activities:
THE EAST: The shots at Lexington and Concord are only the first in a series of historical re-enactments of Revolutionary War battles in the East. In the pre-dawn hours of May 10, 85 descendants of Benedict Arnold and Ethan Allen and his followers, the Green Mountain Boys, will raft across Lake Champlain from Hands Cove, Vt., to retake Fort Ticonderoga.
For the sake of late-sleeping tourists, the group will stage the capture twice more during the day. Boston-area groups will refight the battle of Bunker Hill on June 14. New Jersey will carefully restage a series of battles this winter, including George Washington's crossing of the Delaware River on Christmas night 1776 to attack the Hessians at Trenton and his victory at Princeton on Jan. 3, 1777.