Born on the Fourth of July

In George Vecsey’s excellent 2006 book Baseball: A History of America’s Favorite Game, he devotes a chapter to the New York Yankees titled Why the Yankees Exist, writing “Quite like America itself, the Yankees were either classic champions, envied and admired all over the world, or else they were haughty oppressors, resented down the downtrodden masses.”

Moving on to George Steinbrenner (again, this is 2006), Vecsey added: “New York in the mid-1970s encouraged more flamboyant magnates. A builder with eccentric orange hair and equally flaming ego, Donald Trump, openly boasted about his real estate prowess.

“The Boss (Steinbrenner) seemed to take his cue from being born on the Fourth of July, surrounding the Yankees with patriotic rituals involving flags, anthems, military choruses, and, for playoff games, trained American eagles soaring over Yankee Stadium."

This is the same Steinbrenner who was convicted of making illegal contributions to Richard Nixon’s presidential campaign (with no prison time) and was suspended from baseball at one point for paying a known gambler to dig up dirt about Dave Winfield, with whom he was feuding.

He was quotable and commandeered the back pages of New York City’s tabloids, then hijacked national sports pages on the morning of the 2010 All-Star Game by dying.

Gee, much of this seems strangely familiar. 

Factoring in their separate relationships with Rudy Giuliani and this sentence – frightening in so many ways – from Wikipedia's Steinbrenner entry: "In 1989, after seeing Donald Trump on The Morton Downey Jr. Show, he wrote a letter to Trump suggesting he should run for president," the public lives of Steinbrenner and Trump are intertwined in many ways.

Yankee fans of a certain age learned that if they squinted hard enough, Steinbrenner’s lording over their favorite team could fade into the background. Today, some New York Giants fans are learning to compartmentalize Jaxson Dart’s apparent admiration for the current administration. Or as many did a decade ago, choosing to look past all that embarrassing commentary by several NBA players that the earth was flat.

Sometimes viewing things through that sort of lens is the only way to keep your sanity. 

P.S.

George Vecsey turns 86 on July 4. As a reporter for Newsday and The New York Times he covered the New York Mets from their inception; his 1970 book Joy in Mudville is the franchise’s origin story. Vecsey also wrote Coal Miner’s Daughter, about Loretta Lynn and was one of 25 Newsday journalists who contributed to the 1969 novel Naked Came the Stranger, a satire of the then-current popular literature, as well as sex in suburbia. There’s some Metsiana in the name of the main character in Vecsey’s contribution, Morton Earbrow, inspired by Casey Stengel who said Gil Hodges was so strong that he could "squeeze your earbrows off."

The Ballad of the Green Berets

Sixty years ago this month, the most popular record in America was The Ballad of the Green Berets, written and sung by Sgt. Barry Sadler. It was the #1 record on Billboard’s Hot 100 for an astounding five weeks, at a time when there was still a wave of patriotism over U.S. involvement in Vietnam – the idea that the war was an immoral quicksand pit sucking up American lives had yet to hit home.

Lyndon Johnson’s approval rating was 67 percent in early ’66; it would drop steadily from there, as would the 48 percent of American college students in favor of the war.

Sadler was a Green Beret medic wounded in Vietnam, so there was a whiff of authenticity about The Ballad of the Green Berets, which he wrote during his convalescence. Performing the song on The Ed Sullivan Show launch pad, the record took off, selling nine million copies and becoming the top-selling record of the year. Sadler also recorded what amounted to a concept album, Ballads of the Green Berets, that sold a million copies during the first five weeks of its release.

The record’s success was a reminder that while the Top 40 was mostly reflective of the musical tastes of teenagers, occasionally adults flexed their wallets and had some say. Some other examples: Everybody Loves Somebody and Hello Dolly in the middle of 1964’s Beatlemania, and later in 1966, Strangers in the Night. All #1 records.

Younger kids may have helped with The Ballad of the Green Berets as well, the eight- and nine-year olds pretending to be Vic Morrow and Rick Jason in their backyards playing with toy guns.

The irony of The Ballad of the Green Berets at the top of the charts is that it created a logjam of songs in the top ten that, at least in their titles and universal themes, spoke more powerfully about the emotional churn of soldiers trapped overseas and their families: California Dreamin’, My World Is Empty Without You, Homeward Bound, Nowhere Man, Daydream.

The song didn’t sit well with on the British pop charts. Mick Jagger called it “terribly sick,” and various Beatles offered up words like “crap” and “propaganda.” Paul Jones, of Manfred Mann, said, “The main point is that the American State Department is clearly annoyed because they cannot get people to volunteer to fight in Vietnam.”

Emotionally manipulative and jingoistic, The Ballad of the Green Berets, coupled with the moronic Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C., whose run as one of the top three network shows pretty much ran parallel to the war and was filmed with the cooperation of the Marines, were a low-key recruitment effort that missed the mark badly.

After The Ballad of the Green Berets, Sadler did some television acting, wrote a series of men’s adventure paperbacks, then was found guilty of manslaughter when he shot an unarmed man in an argument over a woman. He met up with more violence after moving to Guatemala and was shot in the head while sitting in a cab. Left with brain damage and quadriplegic, he died in 1989.

On Spotify, The Ballad of the Green Berets has more than 9.7 million total plays and songs by Sadler are played more than 53,000 times a month.

The home of the brave

The textbook year for divisiveness in America that’s always cited is 1968: Vietnam, race riots, the murders of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and on and on. Today, it’s only February yet 2026 is shaping up as possibly one of the most brutal and contentious years in U.S. history.

The Super Bowl should be apolitical, but it seldom is and this year’s halftime entertainment has right-wingers jumping down a Bunny-hole. Ironically, in 1968 another Puerto Rican-born singer pissed off a different generation of conservatives during a sporting event.

Born blind, Jose Feliciano was 20 years old when his jazz/folk take on the Doors' Light My Fire went to #3 nationally, winning him Grammies for Best Contemporary Pop Vocal and Best New Artist. Choosing Feliciano to sing the national anthem before the fifth game of the 1968 World Series between the Detroit Tigers and St. Louis Cardinals seemed like a safe bet.

Sitting on a stool in the infield with his guide dog lying next to him, Feliciano shed the bombast usually associated with the anthem, slowed it down and reshaped it much as he did with Light My Fire.

Conservatism in 1968 meant membership in the “silent majority,” a hawkish view of U.S. involvement in Vietnam and, according to public opinion polls “found the antiwar movement, particularly its radical and ‘hippie’ elements, more obnoxious than the war itself.” If you were male, you likely served in the military at some point. 

Short-sighted viewers were presented with a singer with longish hair, who doesn’t even have the decency to remove his sunglasses and with a foreign name yet, fooling around with the national anthem. People freaked out and provided feedback the old-fashioned, pre-social media way: angry calls to the NBC switchboard and letters to the editor for weeks afterwards. One example: “I have never heard anything so disgraceful or disrespectful.”

“When I did the anthem, I did it with the understanding in my heart and mind that I did it because I’m a patriot,” Feliciano said in 2018. “I was trying to be a grateful patriot. I was expressing my feelings for America when I did the anthem my way instead of just singing it with an orchestra.”

Earlier in the World Series, the anthem was sung, predictably and colorlessly, by 1950s pop singer Margaret Whiting and Marvin Gaye, whose version is straightforward (at a time when Berry Gordy was looking to move his Motown acts deeper into the world of white entertainment and before Marvin’s soul got psychedelicized). “I was very disappointed that Gaye didn’t do his own thing,” said Feliciano later. “Gaye chose to follow the old, safe path. He had a wonderful opportunity to say something for his people.”

Gaye made up for it before the 1983 NBA All-Star Game with a version that, just as Feliciano reshaped the anthem in the same manner that he reinterpreted Light My Fire, turned The Star-Spangled Banner into a coda for his 1983 hit Sexual Healing.

Released as a single, Feliciano’s version of the anthem went to #50. He's also performed it at naturalization ceremonies welcoming new immigrants to America.

Ragtime

Fifty years this summer, E.L. Doctorow’s turn-of-the-century historical novel Ragtime was published.

An interwoven narrative revolving around a WASP family, a black pianist and an Eastern European immigrant, their lives, like organisms seen under a microscope, collide and intersect each other, along with those of some of the era’s most famous and notorious, including Harry Houdini, J.P. Morgan, Sigmund Freud, Emma Goldman, Evelyn Nesbit and Booker T. Washington.

Ragtime occurs during America’s Gilded Age (aka The Progressive Era), years of economic growth, industrialization and technologic advances as the country transitioned from an agrarian society.

With its selective view of history and zero sense of irony, the current White House has expressed romantic admiration for the era because of its tariff acts, ignoring the tremendous influence the rich held over politicians who helped boost their financial empires, while the gap between the haves and have-nots grew wider and violent: armed militias were called in to bust heads when workers – mostly immigrants – held work stoppages or tried forming unions. Casual racism was universal.

Coming as it did in 1975, Ragtime was part of the run-up to the nation’s 1976 bicentennial celebration, an affirmation of two centuries of opportunities and anxieties. Burning through the book are lit fuses timed to explode over the coming years: feminism, celebrity culture, domestic terrorism, mental health issues, the rise of the munitions industry, mistrust of immigrants.

Ragtime also acknowledged that what lies at the heart of the American Dream is the spirit of DEI: acceptance and opportunity. An artistic immigrant lifts himself and his daughter from an airless ghetto hovel to a career making movies. Only a few decades after the end of slavery, the black musician makes a good enough living playing ragtime piano to afford a new automobile. A young man who today would be considered on the spectrum designs advanced war weaponry.

The family in Ragtime made its fortune in the fireworks business. As we near next year’s 250^th anniversary celebration, fireworks displays will likely burst over every corner of America’s skies. Expect them to illuminate only what we want to remember, while keeping what we’ve chosen to forget in the dark.