50 Years Ago: The Debut of the Bicentennial Minute

July 4, 1974 was the premiere of a unique regular feature on CBS television, intended to celebrate the 200th birthday of the United States. The Bicentennial Minute was a daily sixty second mini-documentary that chronicled whatever significant event had happened in America that day two centuries earlier. The public discontent that would eventually lead to the Revolutionary War and Independence had already begun to slowly churn by 1774, so there was usually something interesting to report in these shorter-than-short features. Famous actors, political figures, and other celebrities would narrate them, a large number of them connected with CBS (thus doubling the utility of the segments as commercials for CBS programming). As the series ran through the end of 1976, there were nearly a thousand installments, with a different narrator for every one, ranging from Lucille Ball to President Gerald Ford. The segments ran in prime time, usually in the slot just prior to the shows that started at 8:30pm or 9:00pm.

It was the kind of content you would expect on PBS, so it was especially commendable that a commerical network undertook the project. Frankly, it was one of the few signs of genuine patriotic observation of the Bicentennial produced by the show business community, which on the whole behaved somewhat abominably on what should have been regarded as a momentous occasion. And at that, it was widely mocked and ridiculed.

At any rate, as we approach the 250th I’ll be noting benchmarks like this. 2025 already promises more patriotic programming than we got 50 years ago, btw. That great AmericanKen Burns is producing a new documentary series about the American Revolution to mark the occasion. If it’s anywhere near as good as his Civil War series, it’s exactly the tonic we need.