MacLeish's The Great American Fourth of July Parade is subtitled A Verse Play for Radio. It is a public speech to be broadcast—MacLeish's contribution to the bicentennial. It marks a return to a mode and to an obsessive theme. The mode was poetic drama for radio…. The obsessive theme, of course, is America…. [In his thirties poems such] as Frescoes for Mr. Rockefeller's City, Land of the Free and America Was Promises, and in Colloquy for the States (1943) MacLeish agonizes over the dark fields of the republic. The agony has become excited reverie in The Great American Fourth of July Parade—promises forty or 200 years after. To Jefferson's characteristically sanguine "A sovereign people never can despair," Adams, foreknowing Watergate, can respond
Even a sovereign people that's no longer sovereign?
Even a sovereign people that has learned
its servants have become its masters?
That those who govern, govern for themselves?
A knave in office and a palace guard of fools?…
MacLeish has already lived longer than Jefferson; may their common dream live long beyond them. (pp. 348-50)
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