Happy 150th Birthday, America!

I haven’t been feeling much Fourth of July spirit this weekend for a lot of reasons, including Cape Town’s gray winter weather. So I decided to turn to 1926, when America celebrated its sesquicentennial, hoping to find a more festive scene.* Norman Rockwell On the magazine covers, there was less celebrating than I expected. The Saturday Evening Post got the ball rolling a month in advance with a Norman Rockwell cover honoring Benjamin Franklin, and Vanity Fair, normally more into jazz than jingoism, was all in. The New York Times said in a roundup of July magazines, “All one needs for a real old-fashioned Fourth of July celebration is a pack of firecrackers, a brass band and a copy of the July Vanity Fair with its patriotic cover on which the American eagle proudly spreads its wings above a silhouette portrait of George Washington.” There were a few other nods to the occasion, including Life celebrating “one hundred forty-three years of liberty and seven years of prohibition” Eduardo…