The Fourth of July Before Fireworks: The Strange, Rowdy, and Often Dangerous Ways America Used to Celebrate Independence Day

The Fourth of July in 1903 killed 466 people and injured 4,449 more. Not from war, not from a disaster. From celebrating. Giant firecrackers, toy cannons, firearms, dynamite, and homemade explosives turned the holiday into what one Baltimore Sun editorial writer called, with considerable accuracy, an annual sacrifice of human life in honor of the revolt against an English tyrant. The Safe and Sane Fourth of July movement arose specifically to stop this, and it is the reason the holiday looks the way it does today. Before it, the Fourth was something considerably louder, more dangerous, and considerably more interesting.

What the Founding Fathers Actually Had in Mind

John Adams, writing to his wife Abigail on July 3, 1776, laid out his vision for how independence should be commemorated: “Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.” Guns. Bonfires. He was not being metaphorical.

The earliest celebrations drew directly from what colonists already knew: the annual celebrations for King George III‘s birthday, which traditionally featured bell ringing, bonfires, parades, and cannon fire. When independence arrived, Americans kept the format and switched the honoree. The first organized July 4 celebration, in Philadelphia in 1777, included a fleet of ships firing 13-cannon salutes, a cannon fired from each of 13 galleys, and fireworks. In Boston, soldiers fired shells over the common. George Washington gave his troops a double ration of rum that year and ordered a cannon salute.

So the template for American Independence Day from the very beginning was: lots of gunpowder, lots of alcohol. This combination held for roughly a century.

The Calithumpian Parades

Here is the part of early American Fourth of July celebrations that I had never heard of and cannot stop thinking about.

Throughout the early 19th century, especially in cities with significant working-class immigrant populations, the Fourth featured what were called calithumpian parades. These were processions of maskers, people in costumes and disguises, marching through streets making deliberate noise and chaos. The participants banged pots and pans, played instruments badly on purpose, shouted, and generally created what contemporaries called “rough music.” The parades were explicitly anti-elite in character, mocking formal celebrations and the people who organized them.

Upper and middle-class reformers hated calithumpian parades and spent decades trying to suppress them. Working-class neighborhoods loved them. That argument about what July 4 should look like, dignified and sober versus loud and chaotic, ran for the whole 19th century and eventually produced the Safe and Sane movement as the establishment’s final answer.

The Speeches

What you mostly did on the Fourth of July in the 19th century, if you were not actively shooting something or banging a pan, was listen to speeches. Long ones.

The holiday was the primary occasion for American political oratory. Politicians of every stripe claimed the Fourth as their platform. Abolitionists gave speeches arguing that a nation celebrating liberty while enslaving millions was a hypocrite. Women’s rights advocates gave speeches noting that the Declaration of Independence said all men were created equal and asking why only men. Temperance advocates gave speeches about alcohol. Nativist groups gave speeches about immigration. The Fourth became the day when every political movement in America claimed the Revolutionary legacy for its own cause.

Frederick Douglass gave his famous “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” speech on July 5, 1852, the day after, because he refused to celebrate a holiday that existed alongside slavery. The speech remains one of the most important in American history. It was also, structurally, a Fourth of July speech doing what Fourth of July speeches had always done: using the day’s claims of freedom to indict a specific American failure to live up to them.

The Death Toll

By the late 19th century, fireworks had become the dominant celebration technology, and access to them was essentially unrestricted. You could buy black powder and make your own explosive devices. Children’s toys included miniature cannons that were genuinely functional. Giant firecrackers capable of blowing a barrel to pieces were commercially available and widely purchased.

The American Medical Association began tracking casualties in 1903. In 1903 alone, 466 people died and 4,449 people were injured from holiday-related accidents. Many deaths came from tetanus infections caused by shrapnel from fireworks and toy guns that broke the skin. The Playground Association of America noted in 1910 that the killed and injured at the Battle of Bunker Hill totaled only 1,474, compared with 1,622 killed and injured while celebrating the Fourth of July in 1909.

A Lima, Ohio newspaper writer described the pre-reform holiday this way: no Independence Day was properly started unless the old Civil War cannons were loaded and fired at sunrise, and from then until dark, firecrackers, torpedoes, bombs, firearms, pistols, and even dynamite celebrated the occasion.

The Safe and Sane Movement

Cleveland became the first city to ban fireworks in 1908, after a series of accidents including the explosion of a fireworks factory situated in a crowded urban neighborhood that demolished 12 buildings and killed several people. The Safe and Sane movement spread from there.

Reformers insisted that Fourth of July celebrations should focus on family and picnicking, remaining free of violence. They promoted parades, athletic contests, pageants, and organized fireworks displays run by professionals rather than individual citizens with explosive devices. Doctors, women’s groups, police departments, and progressive reformers all ended up on the same side of this one, united by the shared interest in getting through a national holiday without a four-digit injury count.

By 1910, dozens of cities had implemented restrictions. By 1920, organized professional fireworks displays had largely replaced the individual free-for-all. And finally, by the mid-20th century, the holiday had settled into the version most Americans recognize: parades, barbecues, and fireworks you watch rather than detonate yourself.