In 1970, within two months of the Cambodia invasion, the student killings at Kent and Jackson State, and the shutdown of college campuses across the country, Nixon renamed that particular July 4th as “Honor America Day,” and focused the festivities on a grand nationally-televised concert on the Washington Mall, featuring “middle American” performers doing songs like Merle Haggard’s “Fightin’ Side of Me,” where the singer intones “if you don’t love it, leave it” and threatens to beat up the “cowards” protesting Vietnam.

In L.A., congressman Barry Goldwater, Jr. had his staffers go through his district, recording the addresses of those flying the American flag, so that he could send them letters thanking them for their “patriotism.” Left unspoken was the obvious point that this could also be turned into a list of those who weren’t flying the flag...

In general, the whole event was turned into a rally for the purported “Silent Majority” who supported President Nixon and his continuance of the Vietnam War, and opposed the left and the “young people” (which, by then, had become an epithet among Republicans) who made up its bulk.