[To celebrate
another 4th of July, a series on different cultural contexts for
this very American holiday. Leading up to a special weekend post on critical
patriotism!]
On three
evolutions of a classic, complex American phrase.
To my knowledge,
the phrase “born on the 4th of July” first appeared in “The Yankee Doodle Boy”
(usually known as “I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy”), a song that first appeared in George M. Cohan’s musical Little Johnny Jones (1904) and
became most famous through James
Cagney’s performance of it (as Cohan himself) in the film Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942). In this
context, the phrase is a straightforward as it seems, capturing the speaker’s
stereotypical all-American identity, an unironic embrace of the mythology that
is amplified by every line in Cohan’s song: “I’m glad I am/So’s Uncle Sam”;
“Yanks through and through/Red, white, and blue”; “A real live nephew of my Uncle
Sam”; and so on. I suppose it’s possible to read the song’s question about this
identity—“Oh say can you see/Anything about my pedigree that’s phony?”—as a
recognition of its over-the-top embrace of stereotypical patriotism, but I
don’t know that anything in the song, musical, or Cohan’s
career and work warrants that kind of ironic reading.
At the other end
of the irony spectrum is the use of Cohan’s phrase in a searing autobiographical
work published in the nation’s bicentennial year: Ron Kovic’s Born on the Fourth of July (1976). Kovic,
a Vietnam
veteran turned antiwar protester, was indeed born on July 4th,
1946; but in his memoir that coincidence becomes a multi-layered metaphor for both
the myths and ideals that contributed to his volunteering for service during
the Vietnam War and the realities and gaps of his experiences in that conflict
and upon his return home as a wounded veteran. As he puts it in a new introduction for a
2005 re-issue of the book, “I wanted people to understand. I wanted to
share with them as nakedly and openly and intimately as possible what I had
gone through, what I had endured. I wanted them to know what it really meant to
be in a war, … not the myth we had grown up believing.” While the myths of war
about which Kovic writes were no doubt due in part to the very specific, post-World
War II context of his birth and childhood, they’ve also been a part of our
national mythos since the war with which our nation originated, a connection
captured potently by Kovic’s evocation of July 4th.
Oliver Stone’s
award-winning 1989 film
version of Born on the Fourth of July,
adapted
for the screen by Kovic himself (along with Stone), certainly represents
another evolution of the phrase, one in which it ironically returned to a
Cohanesque mainstream popular culture prominence (thanks in no small measure to
the film’s breakout performance by its movie star leading man).
Yet I want to highlight as well a more recent use of the phrase, one that
exemplifies a more detached, less socially critical form of irony. In a middle
verse of The Killer’s
song “Sam’s Town” (2006), which opens their concept album of the same name,
the speaker portrays his family’s iconic American identity thusly: “I still
remember Grandma Dixie’s wake/I’d never really known anybody to die before/Red,
white, and blue upon a birthday cake/My brother he was born on the fourth of
July and that’s all.” Coupled with a preceding line, “Running through my veins
an American masquerade,” this verse seems to offer the first steps toward a
layered critique of American mythology to complement Kovic’s. Yet while the
remainder of Sam’s Town is engaging
rock and roll, socially or historically aware it is not—and indeed, the band’s
frontman Brandon Flowers
critiqued Green Day’s American Idiot
album and tour for attacking America. By the 21st century, perhaps,
the phrase “born on the fourth of July” has come to capture most fully the
cypher that is American popular culture.
Next 4th
focus tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Contexts or connections for the 4th you’d highlight?
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