This Pageant consists of a parade of simple floats which may or may not end in a dramatic and choral performance or “masque” in some athletic field or fair ground or stadium. The floats and their costumed characters are to be the actors in this masque.
These floats need not be elaborate or expensive or hard to construct. In most cases all that is required is a plain large truck, festooned with simple garlands, and with the wheels hidden in oak branches. This truck carries the necessary characters, dressed, of course, in the costume of the period.
There need be none of those complicated, elaborately colored, pyramidal structures of “staff” which endangered the success of the Hudson-Fulton Celebration in New York City. For they are difficult and costly to prepare and doubtful of effect. The effect sought should be pictorial rather than sculpturesque. In many cases a single small platform or table is the only “property” required.
The floats in procession represent the history of the modern struggle for liberty. This history, however, may be depicted as fully or as sketchily as the particular resources of each place suggest, each foreign colony in a town working up its own float under central supervision.
In our day most American cities and towns have a large percentage of the foreign born. Let us suppose, for example, that a certain large town consists of the following nine nationalities: Americans, French, Irish, Servians, Germans, Greeks, Hungarians, Italians, and Persians. In that case its particular pageant would consist of at least ten floats, each attended on foot or horseback by its appropriate escort of the same race, preferably in national costume, and by bands of music playing—perhaps on native instruments—those national airs most nearly identified with the particular historical event set forth.
I. The American float will naturally head the procession, for precedence in this pageant is fixed by the historical order in which the various struggles for liberty occurred.
The American float might represent the Fathers sitting about a table and signing the Declaration of Independence, with the Liberty Bell hanging aloft. Or it might be boat-shaped, with Washington in the bow, crossing the Delaware and tattered soldiers straining at the oars or poling away at imaginary ice-cakes.
The other floats would follow in this order:
II. France. King Louis XVI is forced to recognize General Lafayette, the commander of the new National Guard, on July 17, 1789, and affixes to his own royal garments the tricolor cockade of red, blue and white, the symbol of liberty. This event occurred three days after the storming of the Bastille, a subject that would not lend itself well to pictorial treatment.
III. Ireland. Some incident from the Rebellion of 1798. The float might be in honor of the patriotic Society of United Irishmen and of their founder, Theobald Wolfe Tone. Or it might represent the dramatic betrayal, on May 19, 1798, of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, the promised leader of the revolt.