The Lost Spirits of ’76: Eric Sloane and the Forgotten Character of America

I’ve been contemplating the significance of the Forth of July celebrations, and the roots of the democratic experience during these troubling times for some days now. I happened to pull an old copy of Eric Sloane’s The Spirits of 76 off my bookshelf and rereading it led to the long thoughts that follow:

In 1976, amid the noise and neon of a country celebrating its Bicentennial with fireworks and televised fanfare, the American artist and philosopher Eric Sloane issued a quieter, more searching tribute: The Spirits of ’76. It was not a celebration of flags or battles or founding fathers, but of the inner architecture—the character—of the people who declared their independence.

To Sloane, the true Revolution had less to do with muskets and more to do with mindset. He proposed ten "spirits" that once defined what it meant to be American—qualities that emerged not from government mandates or patriotic slogans, but from a lived relationship with land, labor, and legacy. These spirits—Respect, Work, Frugality, Thankfulness, Pioneering, Godliness, Agronomy, Time, Independence, and Awareness—are not antiquated virtues, but tools for cultural repair.

Yet it is the final one, the Spirit of Awareness, that resonates most profoundly today, especially in an era of profound ecological amnesia. “The early life,” Sloane wrote in American Yesterday (1955), “was saturated with the essence of awareness that made living a vital experience; today we exist in a dreamlike life where everything is done for us and we seem to have very little part in the play of our own destiny.”

We live, Sloane claimed, in “a living oblivion of apathy” that had produced a uniquely twentieth-century mediocrity (which is even higher now fifty years later!). “City people,” he observed, “are victims of automation, congestion, affluence, self-protection, and lack of purpose, with the immense sadness of unawareness.” In such a world, we no longer participate—we consume. We no longer create—we order. “All the necessities of life being made for you or done for you by someone unknown from somewhere unknown,” he wrote, “produce a dehumanized existence in which the only part left for us to play is the pay out of money in exchange.”

To Sloane, unawareness is a weakness; but indifference is a sickness. “Moral indifference,” he warned, “that malady of the cultivated classes, is more of a national danger than any foreign threat, and the antidote is awareness.” Affluence, he said, is not the lifeblood of a people or a nation: “The real reason for being is the awareness and pursuit of purpose—the end comes with unawareness.”

If We Only Knew Then...

The preface to The Spirits of ’76 begins with a challenge: “Man so often comments: ‘If we only knew then what we know now,’ but few of us consider: ‘If we only could know now what we knew then!’” The wisdom of ancestors—sourced from seasons, storms, soil, and sweat—has been traded for conveniences and credentials.

Even Abraham Lincoln once noted, “Our progress in degeneracy appears to be pretty rapid.” William Morris, reflecting on the 1876 Centennial, said that the “great achievement of the nineteenth century were its wonders of invention, skill and patience which were used for the production of measureless quantities of worthless makeshifts.” And Thomas Edison, no Luddite himself, declared that “the most necessary task of civilization is to teach man to think.”

Ten Spirits, Ten Remedies

Each of Sloane’s ten spirits reads like a corrective to contemporary decay—and all trace back to our severed relationship with the land and each other.

Respect, for instance, is offered as a superior word to patriotism. “The most patriotic people in history (like the Nazis),” he wrote, “were always the most warlike and ruthless.” He points out that “the American Revolution was actually a patriotic revolution against nationalism.” Dr. Johnson warned that “patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel,” and Bertrand Russell called it “the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.” Therefore, Sloane says, “I offer that the word patriotism be substituted whenever possible, by the better word respect.” And what should be more respected, he implies, than the land which sustains us?

Work was once seen as noble, even pleasurable—not because it filled time, but because it filled barns. “Hard labor is considered either drudgery or punishment,” Sloane lamented, “and the man who works harder than his fellow worker nowadays is considered not only foolish but a danger to the economy.” Retirement has become a national goal, yet “the physical and mental pleasure from hard work has become a vanished American spirit.” In our modern world, “almost everything is done for us; we are deprived of the satisfaction of creation and accomplishment.” He reminds us: “The greatest reward of a thing well done is to have done it all yourself.”

Frugality, once a sign of intelligence and sensitivity, is now confused with stinginess. “We waste more in one second than our gross national earning of two hundred years ago,” he wrote. “Frugality is founded on the principle that all wealth has limits.” Thoreau observed, “Money is not necessary to buy one’s necessities of the soul.” Sloane noted that “today, nearly half of the national spending is for things not actually needed.” In contrast, the early farmer’s wealth lay in his woodpile, his haystack, his land—the things grown, stored, and stewarded with reverence.

Thankfulness was tied not to sentiment, but survival. “To voice gratitude is remarkable,” Sloane wrote. Pioneer Americans were rich in thankfulness, and “20th century prayers seem mostly a request; old timers’ prayers were more often expressions of thanksgiving.” The American Indians, he noted, “regarded gratitude above simple good manners.” They lived in reciprocity with the land; today, we act more like absentee landlords than tenants.

Pioneering was more than westward movement—it was inward daring. “Adventure is not outside a man, but within.” We have become “watchers instead of participants,” and “push-button life is without much adventure.” Civilization without adventure is, he says, “automatically in the process of decay.” Sloane does not yearn for empire, but for encounter—for living in such a way that weather, wind, and wildness still shape the soul.

Godliness was not merely religion but humility before nature. “Villages no longer are born around a central church; instead they start around wherever a bank is built.” Civilization, Sloane insists, “was based upon godliness,” and godliness included a reverence for Creation, not just Creator.

Agronomy, he insists, must remain part of the American heritage “for our eventual survival.” “The reverence for the land as an inherent part of man must continue… it was our way of life.” Now, “children would inherit money instead,” and capitalism took over both economy and philosophy. “I have often read about the American Indian’s belief that God owns the earth and that man is only a tenant upon it: the idea seems primitive and quaint to us nowadays. Yet the sooner we realize it is a basic truth, the better for civilization.”

Time, once linked to seasons and sowing, is now devoured by speed. “Speed has become today’s fullest measure of efficiency,” yet “only fraud and deceit are ever in a hurry,” wrote Benjamin Franklin. Emerson observed, “Manners require time, as nothing is more vulgar than haste.” Nostalgia, Sloane warned, can be a form of “dis-ease,” but it’s also a clue—an indication that the present has lost its meaning.

Independence once meant self-respect, and that self-respect came from growing food, building shelter, and knowing your place on the land. Now it is lost in conformity, consumerism, and apathy. “Mediocrity finds both safety and acceptance in standardization,” Sloane warned. “He that loseth spirit losethall.”

A Declaration of Self-Dependence

In a moment of half-sleep reverie, Sloane imagined rewriting the Declaration of Independence—not as a public proclamation, but as a private commitment: A Declaration of Self-Dependence. It was, he said, “a more pertinent, personal declaration.”

“I believe that self-dependence produces self-respect,” he wrote. “Helping a man to be self-dependent is admirable; but helping a man while taking away his initiative and independence is degrading.” In this view, thrift is not tight-fistedness, but wisdom. Labor is not punishment, but dignity. Democracy is not a structure of rights alone, but of responsibilities rooted in self-restraint, devotion, and reverence.

“I believe,” he said, “that the moral strength of the nation is only as strong as the moral strength of its individuals… that the American heritage is not only something bestowed upon the individual but equally what the individual contributes to his country.”

Sloane’s creed concludes: “Democracy without commitment to God is a departure from the original American concept… All men are endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights… [but] the foregoing creed renders not only independence to the nation but self-dependence for each American.”

A Legacy, or a Warning?

Sloane’s final writings carry a tone of elegy—and warning. “The performance of living has become a quarrel instead of an enjoyable experience.” The humor is gone. The countryside, he said, “has already gone wherever we have ‘developed’ it.” The urge to commercialize beauty, “to become rich at the expense of the land,” is now “a recognized national trait.”

“Moderation, peace, decency, freedom, discipline, devotion to country, reverence for God—almost everything on which our country was founded,” he wrote, “are suddenly on trial: the real danger is that we tolerate it.”

Unless there is “a national revolution of indignation,” he saw no way forward. A revolution of reflection. A renaissance of spirit. And maybe—just maybe—a return to awareness.

For “you will never love art,” wrote Ruskin, “till you love what she mirrors better.” And what she once mirrored—what Sloane urged us to remember—is not merely a nation, but a soul.

Worth some long thought or pondering on everyone’s part I believe, and some real labor toward reimagining the deeper underpinnings of the American experience.