Rise in drinking age

This day of July 1776 will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America. It ought to be solemnised with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires and illuminations from one end of this continent to the other from this time forward for ever more.

You wouldn't think that that recipe for celebrating a national holiday could have been written by a notably level-headed man from Massachusetts, not given to rhetoric or show – John Adams – who was to become the second President of the United States. It only shows how the excitability of being the little guy who beat the champ spreads to everybody.

It was after the War of Independence had been won that every big and little town in the United States obeyed the injunction of John Adams and let fly with shows, games, guns, bells, etc. etc. Most of all with fireworks. We all know that the Chinese made them and used them for public celebrations centuries before we'd thought of them. I'm told by a learned man, learned, anyway, about pyrotechnics, that until the nineteenth century, fireworks still used the original element the Chinese used – saltpetre – but that the modern era began with the use of potassium chlorate.

Well, that's enough about what produces the big bang and the light that never was on land or sea. I'm surprised to hear from the same authority that in our time, say, in this century, firework displays have never touched the grandeur, the variety and the audacity of the mid-nineteenth century shows put on by the French and the British, especially the regular displays at the Crystal Palace that started in 1865.

I imagine the story is much the same in America though I have to say, in my time, nothing I've seen in this country begins to match such wonders as, for instance, at Windsor on the banks of the river one evening – I'd guess, 1959 – when, after the usual explosions of coloured fountains and green and scarlet rain, there emerged in the night sky a fiery Union Jack in the right colours and then, in the middle of it, there quickly arose a remarkable likeness of the Queen. It flared there in suspension for no more than eight or ten seconds and then dissolved into the night. It's still more marvellous to me than the microchip or sending a man to the moon.

Well, you can imagine that on Wednesday, the night skies from Alaska to the Florida Keys and from the California-Mexican border to the eastern tip of Maine were banging and flaring and whooshing away, in spite of the legal prohibition in some states and cities against fireworks at all, at least against the private ownership and discharge of same.

Our first genuinely national newspaper, called USA Today – I mentioned it a month or more ago as being printed in one place, its image conveyed by button-pressing to a satellite miles and miles up in the sky which then reproduces the paper simultaneously in, so far, 22 cities – well this paper devoted its 4 July edition to a whole editorial page on the perils of fireworks and the need for tough laws to control their management. It even quoted John Adams and wished he added to his catalogue of the things that would mark the day, the words 'pain, misery and death'.

This newspaper, which is by no means a solemn sheet, you might have guessed it would have gone all out on the Glorious Fourth with a gung-ho cheer, actually began its leader with the dire sentence, 'Some of the eyes reading this newspaper may be unable to see Thursday's edition. Thousands of Americans, most of them children and teenagers, will be blinded, maimed, burned or deafened by fireworks accidents over the July 4 holiday.'

Well, to any healthy, cheerful American, I'm sure that this is bugaboo prose until, as the man warns, Thursday morning. The authenticated figures say that more than eight thousand Americans, six thousand of them young, are injured every year seriously enough to require hospital treatment. Considering that something like 50 or 60 million Americans are at large and gaping into the sky on any fine night of the Fourth, eight thousand casualties seems miraculously few, but the editorial goes on with the steady fee-fo-fum air and its dreadful message is reinforced by articles from a chemistry professor who's the director of the American Pyrotechnics Association and by an ophthalmologist who says his busiest and most distressing night of the year is that of the Fourth when, as he puts it, 'I am the one who has to remove the eyes of people injured by fireworks. There are', he reports, 'three thousand a year such, a thousand of whom will suffer partial or total loss of vision.'

It seems the first national study, a warning study, was not made until 1927 and then in the Thirties, the Depression put a damper on celebrating the singular joy of being an American. Thirty years ago, Congress banned the shipment of fireworks into states of which, by then, there were a dozen or more that actually prohibited their sale. I don't think anything federal has been done since then but the upshot of this annual cautionary crusade is to urge people to leave fireworks alone and go off to public displays run by experts and sanctioned by the city or state.

An odd thing, a sobering thought at any rate, about John Adams who started the whole thing was that only one year after his appeal for bonfire shows, guns, bells and the like, at the very first anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, he confided to his diary that walking through the streets of Philadelphia, he'd come on 'the most splendid illumination I ever saw'. It was not produced by any fireworks, but by the whole city lighting up candles in its windows. Well, this is certainly a touching and happy method of celebrating the Fourth and is followed by prudent people, but then to children everywhere, the excitement of fireworks or of any other escapade come to that, does not lie in prudence. Still, there is a general move to do what 75 per cent of adult Americans approve of, that is to ban the sale of fireworks to minors.

A much bigger to do, moving into actual legislation has been made in the past few weeks over the drinking habits of minors – minors being defined differently by different states. For the first time since Prohibition, the federal government is about to do something about drinking. Since Prohibition was repealed in 1934, it has been left to each of the states to set its own policy about the sale, manufacture of alcohol. You must remember that though Prohibition was repealed by a constitutional amendment, many states maintained it until fairly recently.

I recall some years ago the outrage of the late Randolph Churchill, taking a train from New Orleans across the continent on his way for some big reporting assignment in San Francisco. The train slid out of New Orleans and across the bayous of Louisiana all through the afternoon. It crossed over into Texas as the sun's shadows were beginning to lengthen and an hour or two later across the eastern plain, the twilight fell and, at that latitude, twilight is more of a poetic idea than a fact. It falls very fast and no reporter I ever knew was quicker than Randolph to get the message so movingly expressed by E. B. White, 'the most beautiful sound at twilight is the tinkle of ice'.

The rubicund and impressive Briton heard the distant echo in the club car or thought he did and he lumbered off there, plumbed down and commanded a double whisky. In those days, they still had Pullman porters and the amiable black man, already got up in his blazing white jacket to begin laying the tables for dinner, he looked at Mr Churchill as if he were demented. 'Why, bless you, sir,' he said, 'ain't no liquor of any sort allowed till we cross the New Mexico line. This is Texas!'

Randolph, as was his wont, bawled out the amiable waiter and demanded to know when the line would be crossed. The man took out a fob watch and he said, 'Well, now, I should reckon it will be about four o'clock in the morning.' Mr Churchill was purple with disgust. First, to discover that Texas is 800 miles wide and that Texans, of all legendary hellions, should still deny themselves the comforts of alcohol.

However, while there are still counties in the United States that sell no alcohol, there is no state that maintains the Prohibition law. The states vary greatly in their laws that set a minimum age for the purchase of alcoholic beverages. In 23 states, the age is 21. Elsewhere, in the other 27 states, it varies between 20 and 17, in only one state, Arizona.

There are six states that permit the sale at 18 and I doubt that the most knowing student of American manners and mores could correctly call them off. New York and Hawaii, the Big Apple and the Big Pineapple are not surprising. Or Louisiana, cradle of jazz and lover of Bourbon. But how about the austere Scandinavians of Wisconsin? The border state of West Virginia? How about the dour, law-abiding Yankees of Vermont? It is 18 in all of them.

Well, now, President Reagan, of all anti-federalists, who does share Jefferson's strong belief in as little national government as possible, Mr Reagan has done a flip-flop. He wants a national law raising the drinking age to 21 in order to reduce the driving accidents caused by alcohol. The new and shocking fact is that of all accidents due to drunk driving, 42 per cent involve adults between the ages of 16 and 24, though they are only one-fifth of all licensed drivers. The House has already passed such a bill and it's now before the Senate.

Apart from the moral question or the safety principle, the inducement that the bill offers to have the states fall into line is the threat of withholding from them government funds that go to maintain the federal highways that run through their states.

This is a very big stick. So far, the debate has been short and sharp and the bill seems hell bent for passage, while very few voices are heard suggesting that compulsory seat belts reduce accidents more drastically or that, as we discovered during Prohibition, once the apple is forbidden, many more young people yearn for it who never cared for it much in the first place.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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