Dawn had just cracked on America’s 250th birthday when a couple from Texas jogged past a sign outside the U.S. Capitol that read “POLICE LINE — DO NOT CROSS.”
It was the start of a day that did not go according to plan. Visitors in red, white and blue darkened with sweat stood in lines for hours, sometimes screaming in frustration and other times collapsing from exhaustion. The Independence Day parade was canceled and the Great American State Fair delayed. Steel fences and closed roads made photos of iconic monuments hard to capture. Both white supremacists and liberal activists marched through the city, each demanding their country back.
But before all that, Diane and Bill Riggs, their foreheads beading with perspiration, decided not to let the barriers, physical or meteorological, spoil the landmark occasion.
Diane wore a shirt with a slogan she proudly described as obnoxious: “Sorry I can’t hear you over the sound of my freedom.”
That ideal, Diane said, is what makes this day and this place special.
“That was the establishment of the greatest country in the world — the one that decided to take a stand and end slavery, and did it, followed through, who decided to put a man on the moon and did it, followed through,” she said. “I’m allowed to say things like this… allowed to be Jewish, Buddhist, Presbyterian, whatever I want. … Very few other countries have those.”
It was not Diane’s first time in D.C. for a landmark birthday. As a 6-year-old, she’d visited for America’s 200th anniversary, just after the end of the Vietnam War. That, too, was a tumultuous time in the country, but in her mind, all she could see were families sprawled across blankets on the lawn and, in every direction, the colors of patriotism she’d come to glimpse once again.
Like Diane and Bill, thousands of Americans in pursuit of some happiness, or at least some history, arrived this week in their broiling capital to celebrate the anniversary of an indivisible nation that remains deeply divided. Awaiting them was the promise of a spectacle intended to allay the disunity: rodeos, concerts, reenactments, speeches, parades, a sprawling fair, burgers and dogs and $12 Bud Lights, ear-popping flyovers and, for the planned late-night finale, some 850,000 fireworks.
Not all of it happened at Washington’s semiquincentennial celebration, largely thanks to an oppressive heat wave that pushed temperatures beyond 100 degrees.
All over the eastern half of the country, the ill-timed summer swelter forced cities, large and small, to abandon plans. From Madison, Alabama, (in Madison County, named for Founding Father James Madison) to Philadelphia (the site of the Declaration’s signing), parades to celebrate those rich pasts were scuttled.
In hundreds of other communities, though, celebrants appeared undeterred.
The Boston Pops still planned to perform along the Charles River. Some of the country’s most popular performers were ready to take stages for a free show in Nashville. Chicago prepared to ignite its largest and longest fireworks display. On the Las Vegas Strip, nine rooftops had been loaded with pyrotechnics.
In New York Harbor, tall sailing ships from around the world cruised past the Statue of Liberty and up the west side of Manhattan.
For the first time in the city’s history, the iconic Times Square Ball dropped on a day other than New Year’s Eve, drawing thousands at midnight. For July Fourth’s start in every time zone with a U.S. state or territory, the glittering orb descended eight times, beginning at 10 a.m. Friday to mark midnight in Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands and ending shortly after sunrise Saturday, for American Samoa.
America250 — the bipartisan group tasked by Congress with planning the day’s festivities before President Donald Trump started his own effort — pressed ahead with celebrations around the country, all billed as “America’s Block Party.” The anchor event will be a benefit concert at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum hosted by hip-hop star Queen Latifah — with an eclectic lineup including country singer Chris Stapleton and rock band the Smashing Pumpkins.
In Washington, where most of the festivities have been organized by Trump’s Freedom 250 team, many visitors found that the robust security didn’t help the mood. Dozens of roads have been closed, and the National Mall was largely impenetrable this morning. Tourists who wanted one of those iconic, golden-hour photos at the Lincoln Memorial had to capture them through fences.
“Can we pass through here?” a woman, dressed in an America250 shirt with red and blue glitter and rhinestones, asked a National Guardsman at the corner of Constitution Avenue and 14th Street.
“No, ma’am,” he said, “Only volunteers and authorized personnel.”
“Okay, thanks,” the woman said, though she didn’t look all that thankful as she searched for another angle to see the Washington Monument.
“Nothing is opened, and the parade is canceled,” a man nearby complained in a Southern drawl to a couple standing with their arms crossed.
Diane and Bill Riggs seemed mostly unbothered by restrictions and, as Texans, haven’t been fazed by the heat, but they were disappointed that it has upended the festivities, particularly the parade.
“We were at the fair yesterday,” Bill said. “There were people dropping everywhere.”
Outside the National Archives, where hundreds had gathered to watch the annual reading of the Declaration, organizers’ sudden decision to move the festivities inside infuriated many in the crowd who feared they wouldn’t get to witness a historic retelling of a historic moment. When multiple lines formed, the early arrivals objected, some of them with shouting.
“Whoever is responsible for this mess should be fired,” said a woman in an American flag bucket hat who identified herself only as Regina R. “They’re not even coming out here to talk. … I’ve asked to talk to them, to suggest to them that we need to be the first ones in who are waiting on the steps. She doesn’t even want to hear them.”
She was later removed by security.
Inside, people didn’t know where to walk or sit or stand, and as organizers tried to accommodate everyone who’d been waiting, they delayed the reading.
Among those quietly suffering were Noël Bitner, 79, and her daughter, Tabitha Frawley. Noël, from New Orleans, had waited for three hours but didn’t regret coming. In a way, she’d been waiting much longer to witness the reading.
In 1977, when her daughters were 2 and 5, she’d longed to come to D.C. on July 4, but with two young kids and all the upheaval in the city, her husband wouldn’t let her. Now, that her daughter, who serves in the U.S. Coast Guard, lives in D.C., she got another chance.
“The reading of the Declaration — that performance was excellent,” she said. She had one additional note, though: “They had a few too many politicians speak.”
Meanwhile, not far away, the earliest signs of protest bubbled up when hundreds of uniformed members of Patriot Front, a white supremacist group, marched toward the Capitol. Their faces covered in white masks, the men beat drums and carried flags — some upside down, others Confederate — as they chanted, “Reclaim America!” Some gripped combat shields as they passed the U.S. Capitol building.
At Union Station, they stopped for a demonstration.
“The only way to secure our existence is to become all that we aspire to be,” chanted founder Thomas Rousseau. “Our national independence was seized by a natural aristocracy of our people, the best of our Anglo-Saxon blood.”
Around 9:45 a.m. on Saturday, Jennifer Wood was working at a book shop in the Eastern Market neighborhood when she saw hundreds of Patriot Front members marching down Pennsylvania Avenue. Enraged, she ran outside.
“Go away!” she shouted, demanding that they uncover their faces. “Cowards!”
After dropping her husband off at the Capitol Hill parade around 9:30 a.m., Rachel Barnett said she was driving around Eastern Market trying to park, when she saw the marchers coming up the street. but police had blocked off lots of the roads.
She worried that they were going to try to crash the parade, which her husband organized through Naval Lodge No. 4, a local Masonic lodge, but that the group ended up leaving the area.
“It shows the status of our country right now that they feel comfortable doing that on the Fourth of July,” Barnett said.
Twenty miles south, a very different vision of America’s future unfolded at Mount Vernon.
“We’re going to have Mommy’s ceremony for citizenship,” Ahmed Ajghiouan had told his son that morning, but now 6-year-old Yakoub was squirming out of his father’s lap, more interested in the white-wigged George Washington impersonator waiting a few yards behind the stage.
Ajghiouan, a federal contractor originally from Morocco, hoisted his 17-month-old daughter, Assil, onto his hip, whispered good luck to his wife, and took off after Yakoub. Fatema Ezzahrae Zouhri, 33, whipped her red-white-and-blue paper fan through the air and brushed rivulets of sweat from her forehead. Someone with a microphone told her to stand, and she rose alongside 149 strangers from 50 countries, gathered for a naturalization ceremony at George Washington’s former home.
She had felt sure this moment would never come.
After nearly seven years in this country, Zouhri still called her English “broken,” but she knew enough to follow the basics of Trump’s attempts to limit birthright citizenship. The president, she understood, wanted to make it harder to become an American citizen.
As the stay-at-home mother slogged through the nearly nine-month application process, she thought about her children. Yakoub could become a pilot someday, Zouhri hoped. And Assil, who’d put on a pink princess dress for her mother’s special day, might become a doctor.
But not if the family had to return to Morocco, where opportunities were few, Zouhri believed. Even after Trump slashed government jobs last year, distressing her husband, America’s future still felt more secure.
Now, right hand aloft, Zouhri repeated the words, swearing allegiance to the Constitution and laws of the United States.
“America is ours,” Doug Bradburn, president and CEO of George Washington’s Mount Vernon, told Zouhri and the other new citizens. “Let’s make the best of it together.”
So — after the last warbling notes of “God Bless America,” after she’d found her husband and children amid hundreds of milling, dripping spectators in American flag gear — Zouhri headed toward the station where, she’d been told, she could register to vote. As soon as possible, she planned to cast her ballot for anyone who opposed the president.
Walking faster, Zouhri gripped Yakoub with one hand and her citizenship papers with the other. No one, she thought, could take it away from her now.
Stella Canino-Quiñones, Taylor Swinton, Scott Nover and Hannah Knowles contributed to this report.