JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
July Fourth has become synonymous with a kind of pure Americana, waving flags and family barbecues. But for our series, America In Pursuit, NPR's Matt Ozug explored a more mischievous side of America's birthday.
MATT OZUG, BYLINE: The Fourth of July parade in the small town of Brooklin, Maine, is postcard-level adorable.
LORNA GRANT: There's always floats, decorated bicycles and antique cars.
OZUG: Lorna Grant runs the town's historical, or keeping, society. And she says Brooklin's ritual on the night before the Fourth was much more interesting.
GRANT: People have traveled all around Hancock County night before the Fourth to come down and see what happens at Brooklin.
OZUG: I first visited Brooklin 25 years ago, pulling in late on July 3 as a crowd of people stood around a pile of the town's garbage, couches, road signs.
GRANT: We used to go and find an old outhouse. Sometimes that was a smelly deal, but we would drag that outhouse up to the corner.
OZUG: Decorating the corner was the euphemism for this tradition.
GRANT: And then they would put stuff around it, old barrels or an old car or an old boat.
OZUG: There was a joyful prankster element to the night.
GRANT: I remember one time there was four barrels on the corner, and they picked up this small car, like a Volkswagen, set it on top of those barrels because the driver in the car was drunk and had no idea where he was. But when he woke up, he had to jump out.
OZUG: It turns out July 3 shenanigans were not unique to Brooklin. For more than a century, New England towns celebrated the night with an explosive fervor. In the early 1900s...
YONI APPELBAUM: The really raucous celebrations were on what was known as the night before the Fourth, when boys and men who behave like boys would use any form of pyrotechnic that came to hand.
OZUG: That's the Atlantic's Yoni Appelbaum, author of the magazine piece, "The Night Before The Fourth."
APPELBAUM: I'm talking about toy pistols and improvised cannons and firecrackers and gunpowder just set off to explode.
OZUG: Newspapers across the country documented this patriotic mayhem.
GARY JOHNSON: We're going to look at some newspaper microfilm.
(SOUNDBITE OF MICROFILM READER CLICKING)
OZUG: Gary Johnson is a reference librarian at the Library of Congress.
JOHNSON: This is July 3, 1910. And we've got an image of a gentleman who's on a stretcher.
OZUG: Johnson reads from the 1910 Richmond Times Dispatch.
JOHNSON: Then when the smoke of carnage cleared away, five were found dead - two shot down, three giving up their lives as human torches. Yikes.
OZUG: Many of the deaths were not from the explosions, but from something called patriotic tetanus. Here's Applebaum again.
APPELBAUM: This is before we have a tetanus vaccine. What happens is that the toy pistols or the cannon are often faulty. There's no consumer product safety yet. They explode. They may take a couple of fingers with them, but they embed little bits of metal in the flesh of the people who are using them, and that leads to tetanus infections, which is a terrible way to die.
OZUG: All the death and destruction led to something called the National Movement for a Safe and Sane Fourth of July (ph), which advocated for other forms of entertainment.
JOHNSON: Moving pictures, plays, parades and sports - the committee proposes also mammoth bonfires.
OZUG: Mammoth bonfires - the Safe and Sane movement became a champion of the bonfire.
APPELBAUM: Yeah, this is an irony because if you look at a photo of a giant bonfire, the last thing that you're going to think is, wow, gosh, that's sure safe and sane. In order to convince boys not to set off toy pistols or firecrackers, what you've got to do is give them something that's even better.
OZUG: And what's better than a toy pistol? A giant bonfire often made of wooden casks or barrels.
APPELBAUM: And so on the night before the Fourth, people start organizing truly spectacular bonfires around which thousands, tens of thousands of people can gather, and that magnetic draw of the bonfire pulls people away from these private celebrations and into a grand civic occasion.
OZUG: Over time as municipal firework displays became more affordable, the July 3 bonfire faded away. And in Brooklin, Maine, nobody drags outhouses to the center of town anymore. But Applebaum says he misses the idea of more raucous local rituals on the night before the Fourth.
APPELBAUM: We are a country full of people who disagree with each other about all kinds of things, but we've typically been able to come together around the celebration of a set of simple ideas. We believe in freedom and in justice and in opportunity. Those common values bind us as a nation. And although they may not seem to have a lot to do with a giant pyramid built out of casks, I think that there was something really democratizing about the shared spaces those bonfires created, and I think that Americans are hungering for that today. They would like some simple, uncomplicated, apolitical ways to draw together and to celebrate the values that they share in common.
OZUG: In Brooklin, Maine, I'm Matt Ozark.
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