Washington had more than fireworks to celebrate on July 4th, 1919. The Great War was over, the doughboys were coming home, and the city responded with what the Evening Star called “the biggest Fourth of July celebration in the city’s history.”
These three Library of Congress photos capture the day, and the mood. This wasn’t just Independence Day. It was a peace celebration.
The centerpiece was an international parade of floats down Pennsylvania Avenue, one for each of the Allied nations, and each nation paid for its own. The Star’s reporter caught the crowd’s reaction:
Washington has become accustomed in the past few years to witnessing parades on Pennsylvania avenue, but the international procession yesterday was different, and the thousands who watched it go by registered their approval by generous applause.
Look closely at that float. The banner draped over the horse reads “Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes,” a country that had existed for barely seven months and would later take the name Yugoslavia. Postwar Europe’s brand-new nations, Czechoslovakia among them, rolled down the Avenue alongside the older Allies.
The afternoon brought seven “tableaux of peace” staged on the steps of buildings around downtown, directed by Mrs. Marie Moore Forrest, the city’s reigning pageant master. They proved such a hit that she repeated them the next evening at the Sylvan Theater by the Washington Monument.
The crowds braved brutal July heat for all of it, and the Star’s reporter found even the grumps won over:
Even those pessimistic souls who are always to be found in a crowd could be overheard along the Avenue and at the Capitol admitting in spite of themselves that the parade of gorgeous floats, the tableaux in the afternoon and the spectacles of peace last night were worth braving the heat to see.
One notable Washingtonian missed the whole thing. President Wilson spent the Fourth in the middle of the Atlantic, steaming home from the Paris peace conference aboard the George Washington with the Treaty of Versailles in his luggage.
If you want the longer arc of how Washington lived through those years, the full story of the city through the Great War, told through the front pages of the Washington Times, from the Titanic in 1912 to the armistice and beyond, is worth reading alongside these parade photos.