The Fourth of July

By Peter de Bolla

Profile Books £15.99, 196 pages

FT bookshop price: £12.79

Americans, unlike poets, are made, not born. Peter de Bolla, in his witty monograph on that most patriotic of days, July 4, dismantles the making machinery. His book urinates, in the most scholarly way, on the parade by which America annually affirms its identity. It would be unwise for him to do any book signings in Washington next week. He might encounter another American tradition: tarring and feathering.

With a spoilsport historian’s pedantry, de Bolla strips away the glory from “the Glorious Fourth”. America, he asserts, was not “founded”. It “happened” - gradually. The Declaration of Independence was not drawn up and signed on the 4th July. The document oozed into existence, with many compromises, over a year’s long process. Nor was its majestically declarative prose the sole composition of one mind. De Bolla virtually accuses Thomas Jefferson of plagiarism and life-long dishonesty in allowing himself to be celebrated as the Declaration’s “author”.

De Bolla does not (cannot) contradict the extraordinary coincidence of the two principal signatories of the declaration, Jefferson and John Adams, dying on the same day, July 4 1826. But he snorts derisively at the cultish belief that, as Lincoln solemnly opined, it was “a dispensation of the Almighty Ruler of Events” - that is to say, proof that God loves America.

As for Old Glory, the flag to which American schoolchildren pledge their allegiance, de Bolla pours derision on the myth that the homely seamstress Betsy Ross ”made it”. And the Liberty Bell: it was made in London, it was defective, it was never rung, and the object now worshipped is a facsimile: no more authentic than Disneyland’s Pirates of the Caribbean ride.

In crisis however, purposive action is what is needed. And patriotism, however engendered, supplies that. I was in the US on 9/11, and in London on 7/7. What was extraordinary over there was how quickly the country rallied round the flag. Wal-Mart sold hundreds of thousands. The whole country was shrouded in star-spangled grief.

The flag unified and consoled the nation, and gave it purpose. In London by contrast there was confusion: huge feelings swirled round the capital with nothing to attach to. The response was not action, but a resurgence of the plucky second world war spirit: “London can take it!”

America does unperplexed patriotism better than any imperial power since Rome. So what if it’s no more genuine than the Wizard of Oz’s wizardry. It works. That is all history cares about. And that is the conclusion which de Bolla reaches in his elegant, ironic, brief but deeply researched meditation on what makes America America.

John Sutherland is visiting professor of literature at the California Institute of Technology.