Fourth of July

The Fourth of July appears not as a single holiday episode but as a charged national reference: its familiar celebration lends an unsettling sound to battle, while its patriotic symbolism is used to praise wartime production. Across these appearances, the date links civic celebration to the machinery of war and work, exposing the distance between national ideals and the lives carried along by them.

A National Calendar in Wartime

The date carries two registers at once. It evokes a public celebration of the nation, but the novel places that language inside a world shaped by military violence and industrial demands. The result is not simply an affirmation of patriotism: the holiday’s familiar associations become a measure against which war’s costs and the uses of patriotic feeling can be heard.

Fireworks and Shellfire

In a compressed combat passage, repeated explosions are described as sounding like the Fourth of July. The shells’ fragments sing and the soldiers’ ears ring; the simile draws on the noise of a familiar celebration to render the bombardment immediately recognizable. But the resemblance is bitter. Fireworks turn explosive force into spectacle, whereas here the noise belongs to an actual front, with mud, explosives, and troops nearby. The comparison makes the distance between festive display and battlefield violence momentarily collapse.

Patriotism as Industrial Production

A public statement about wartime industry declares that victory depends on industrial workers as much as on soldiers, and points to the launching of one hundred ships on the Fourth of July as proof of what patriotic effort can accomplish. The date turns a production figure into a national demonstration: shipbuilding is presented as collective service, and the holiday supplies its unifying frame. The passage thus gives industrial labor a prominent place in the rhetoric of victory, even as that rhetoric casts the workers’ effort as evidence of patriotic purpose.

Celebration and the Unresolved War

The novel’s wider treatment of wartime labor and remembrance complicates the confidence of such public language. Joe Williams is detained during a roundup of men without draft-registration cards, although he explains that he is a merchant seaman and exempt; workers in other episodes face exhausting labor and reprisals when they organize. These scenes do not take place on the Fourth of July, but they sharpen the contrast between national appeals to shared duty and the unequal pressures borne by individuals and workers.

That contrast persists in the closing treatment of the unidentified American war dead. A congressional resolution authorizes the return of a body whose identity has not been established for burial at Arlington; the ceremony proceeds in silence, and President Harding offers an impersonal tribute. The body is then covered with medals from several nations, while Woodrow Wilson brings poppies. Read beside the Fourth of July references, this ceremonial sequence shows how national symbols can gather the dead into a collective story while leaving individual identities unknown. The date’s significance lies in that tension: celebration and patriotic achievement remain inseparable from the violence and human costs they commemorate.