Patriotic Tetanus
By This July 4, remember the true cost of freedom:
These wild, towering conflagrations garnered support at the beginning of the twentieth century from an unlikely quarter: the national movement for a Safe and Sane Fourth of July. In 1903, the year that the Journal of the American Medical Association first compiled statistics, celebrations of the Glorious Fourth left more than 400 dead and nearly 4,000 injured. Blank cartridges, fired off by children with toy guns, were the leading cause of injury. “Patriotic tetanus” often ensued; the bacillus claimed most of its annual victims in that first week of July. Parents, one reformer wrote, “each hoped that the Angel of Death might pass by our own child and that it might be only a strange little toddler whose eyesight would be destroyed or whose pretty baby fingers would be torn and mutilated.”
In comparison, the deadliest single battle of the American Revolution was the Battle of Oriskany, during the Saratoga campaign, where about 400-450 died.
And before meaningless rhetoric about how this nation is the greatest in history, perhaps reading Frederick Douglass’ 1852 July 4 address is in order. In part:
What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.
Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the old world, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.
…..Also, if you feel like making your own fireworks, here’s some instructions from the 1920s on how to do it.