On September 11, 1974, in the midst of confusion and controversy whereby the founding chairman Representative George McDonald was ousted, I apprehensively assumed the acting chairmanship of the Rhode Island Bicentennial Commission (ri76) from my position as vice chairman. Some of my friends felt it was like accepting the captaincy of the Titanic. But after all, I had studied American history at Notre Dame and taught it for 11 years at Providence College. Now I had the opportunity to teach it in a much larger classroom and to share with the people of Rhode Island my enthusiasm for our heritage.

The chairmanship of the Rhode Island Bicentennial Commission was a once-in-a-lifetime position — a chance not only to teach history but to make it — and to make the academic world at least a small part of the daily life of those who would join in commemorating our two hundredth anniversary as an independent nation.

Fortunately, the commission that I inherited contained a nucleus of honest, dedicated, and energetic civic leaders — people like Senator Bob McKenna, Professor Joel Cohen, Dean Terrelle Crum, attorney Frank Darigan, businessmen Dick Belanger, Robert Lynch and scholar Al Klyberg, director of the Rhode Island Historical Society. Like me, they had been with the commission since its creation in 1969, and they had laid most of the plans and groundwork for the big year of 1976.

The commission’s greatest asset, however, was its paid staff, led by Ron Tracey, Mary Brennan, Gladys Wyatt, and five newcomers whom I hired shortly after taking office: Glenn LaFantasie, Paul Campbell, Robert Godin, Helen Hodde, and Charles Healy. The CETA program and the generosity of Governor Noel, who strongly supported the commission, made possible the expansion of this “crack staff” to thirteen full-time members during the hectic months of 1976.

Although these people were the only paid participants in the state’s bicentennial effort, they earned every cent they received. The taxpayer often levels criticism against public employees in patronage jobs, but no such criticism could be directed against the ri76 staff — their pay was not great, and their hours were long and irregular. Often, they reported to work seven days a week because most of our events were on weekends. Sometimes they started as early as 5 a.m., and on other occasions they worked into the early hours of the morning. I took the bows, but they were the unsung heroes of the Bicentennial. Their service was ten times beyond the call of duty; it was a labor of love.
It did not take long to discover that a small core of energetic commissioners and Bicentennial Foundation members (the foundation was the financial arm of ri76) and a willing and able staff were not sufficient to bring the Bicentennial to all the people of Rhode Island; ri76 needed a much broader base and greater diversity. This fact prompted me to direct most of my attention to recruiting volunteers in every conceivable area of Bicentennial concern — to get citizens with enthusiasm and expertise to serve on a ri76 committee in their area of special interest.

The twelve hundred volunteers from around the state who joined the commission because of this format were responsible for the impact and scope of ri76. When this expansion and recruitment drive ended, ri76 had nine standing committees and fifty subcommittees, covering everything from parades to sports to women’s programs to religious observances to ethnic heritage.

For example, I created a Sports Committee with 11 subcommittees for an array of high-interest athletic endeavors. The most popular sports project was the ri76 Senior (over 35) slow pitch softball team that consisted of baseball all-stars from the 1950s. During its 94-game season this team played for charity in every city and town against all comers and staged and won the first ever Rhode Island senior slow pitch tournament. Our sports committee was not duplicated in any other state.

A special category of volunteers who gave their time in abundance were the members of Rhode Island’s militia groups and the state’s National Guard under Major General Leonard Holland. They consistently provided the pageantry and the manpower essential to the success of our Bicentennial events and worked with my Veterans Committee led by Webster “Ted” Pidgeon to establish the Rhode Island Veterans’ Cemetery in Exeter.

In addition, long established heritage groups like the Bristol Fourth of July, Gaspee Days, and Tiverton Muster committees, had already developed traditional historic celebrations that they expanded for the Bicentennial. ri76 worked closely with them.

These volunteers from established groups were supplemented by recruits from each of the state’s thirty-nine cities and towns. The ri76 organization had used its first forty thousand dollars in federal grant money as a catalyst to get the local communities organized for the celebration. Each municipality was given one thousand dollars if it would match that sum, appoint a local Bicentennial committee, and develop projects in the areas of festival, heritage, and “horizon.” Every community responded, making Rhode Island the first state in the nation to be fully mobilized at the municipal level for the Bicentennial observance. Staff member Robert Godin coordinated this effort.

On the state level, the commission endorsed or sponsored, and therefore helped implement, more than six hundred projects and events. The combined efforts of the cities and towns at least equaled that number. Such dynamism from the grass roots upward made Rhode Island one of the most active states in the nation in observing the Bicentennial, yet our level of public funding was quite low in comparison to that of other states.

Two mainly privately-funded maritime history projects conducted in concert with the ri76 Commission were the construction of replicas of the Sloop Providence, the first ship of the Continental Navy, and the HMS Rose, the British customs vessel that terrorized Narraganset Bay in the aftermath of the Gaspee burning. That ship was financed largely by ri76 commissioner John Millar. Unfortunately, both vessels have since left the Ocean State — the Providence for Alexandria, Virginia and the Rose for San Diego. Rhode Island has a habit of squandering its maritime heritage.

The Rhode Island taxpayers got their money’s worth from the Bicentennial! In fact, it could be argued that the regional and national festivals and sporting events staged here for the Bicentennial attracted enough revenue into the public treasury to offset the money allocated to the state and local commissions. Besides our cultural mission, ri76 was concerned with the economy and the promotion of tourism.
A little-known Rhode Island contribution to this celebration was the creation of the Bicentennial Council of the Thirteen Original States (BCTOS) that evolved by 1987 into the U.S. Constitution Council, a body I came to chair. BCTOS was the brainchild of Rhode Island State Representative George McDonald of Cranston, the first chairman of ri76. It staged and coordinated events involving the united 13 colonies and established commercial relationships with the Franklin Mint and other commemorative companies by which it raised thousands of dollars that it distributed to each state commission. I have written a detailed history of the BCTOS/U.S. Constitution Council describing its important patriotic endeavors.

The volunteerism generated by the Bicentennial in Rhode Island was one of its most inspiring features. I urged that the volunteer committees in each city and town be transformed into permanent, standing local heritage commissions. They were nonpartisan and represented a cross section of community activists. As such, they could have served as planning boards for historic, cultural, or esthetically oriented community projects. I proposed this idea to local officials before the Bicentennial year expired, and before these valuable local resources were disbanded, but that exhortation was seldom followed.
I have often been asked to list those Bicentennial events that were the most successful or gave me the greatest degree of personal satisfaction.
The most spectacular event that we cosponsored was undoubtedly Tall Ships — a great adventure in international good will. The single biggest in-house festival project was our 1976 Rhode Island Independence Parade, perhaps the largest all-Rhode Island parade in history.

Since I am a history professor and a lawyer, the event that gave me my greatest personal and professional thrill was my Bicentennial Law Day address (May 3, 1976) to the members of the state’s judiciary at the Colony House in Newport.

The general program that has been most satisfying and successful is the Ethnic Heritage Program of ri76. This was a pet project related to one of my areas of academic interest. Ethnicity first attracted my serious attention when I was doing research in 1971 for the history of the multiethnic Diocese of Providence. A subsequent grant from the Rhode Island Committee for the Humanities allowed me to continue and broaden my studies. When I became chairman of ri76, I had the chance to transform this academic interest into a working program.

Rhode Island was a natural setting. It is the state most affected by the successive waves of European migration that began with the Irish in the 1820s, and it is a state today with one of the highest percentages of foreign stock. In addition, ethnic heritage was a means of involving more people in the Bicentennial observance, for I have always felt that ri76 was observing not only the events of 1776 but the full two hundred years of American independence.

Not all Rhode Islanders can trace their ancestry back to the Mayflower or the American Revolution, but all of us have ancestors who helped our state develop politically, economically, socially, or culturally. Thus, the Ethnic Heritage Program of ri76 was designed to commemorate and recall the role of each ethnic group in the history of Rhode Island. Its slogan is “one out of many;” its theme, “knowledge promotes understanding and understanding begets brotherhood.”

The response to this program has been most gratifying: we had a general Ethnic Heritage Committee (chaired by Chester Browning) and 18 subcommittees, representing every major ethnic component in our state. These groups worked on publications, folk festivals, sporting events, musical projects, art exhibits, and numerous other programs designed to make their culture and contributions better known by their fellow Rhode Islanders. It was my hope that this program would outlive the commission and become a permanent cultural legacy of the Bicentennial. That hope was realized when 15 of those committees wrote pamphlets for our Ethnic Heritage Pamphlet Series.

Another project that rivals the Ethnic Heritage Program in its long-range significance is the publications program of ri76. Our Publications Committee, staffed by Glenn LaFantasie and Paul Campbell, produced approximately thirty hardcover books and a dozen historical pamphlets relating to various aspects of Rhode Island’s Revolutionary history. This is the largest scholarly publications program ever undertaken by a state agency. By 2026, the Rhode Island Publications Society, converted to a private nonprofit organization in 1981, has produced and marketed 130 books and pamphlets on every aspect of the state’s development with a dozen more in process under the editorship of me, Russell DeSimone, and Christian McBurney. These volumes are now funded by my Heritage Harbor Foundation.

It is two ongoing projects — Ethnic Heritage and Publications — that justified the continued existence of ri76 for the duration of the Bicentennial era (i.e., to 1983) but the commission had a legislative deadline of June 30, 1977, the end of the state’s fiscal year. The festival events, directed by the tireless and competent Bob Lynch, decreased, but there were many Revolutionary occurrences yet to be observed by our volunteers in the weeks and months down to 1983 notably the patriot victory in the August 29, 1778 Battle of Rhode Island and General Rochambeau’s march from Newport to Yorktown in 1781.
The electronic media (especially WPRO, WJAR-TV, WTEV-TV, and WPRI-TV) gave the Bicentennial super coverage and the smaller newspapers (especially the Woonsocket Call) did likewise. Providence Journal reporters Ron Winslow, John Mulligan, Bill Gale, and their associates also did a fair and able job of reporting commission activities and Bicentennial events.

Any event as large and diverse as the Bicentennial must have some frustrations and disappointments. Thankfully they were so few! My many hours of involvement were no sacrifice; in terms of satisfaction, memories, honors, and new friends, the Bicentennial did ten times more for me than I ever did for it!

The positive aspects of the Bicentennial far outweighed the negative. The Bicentennial was a time for civic and cultural renewal, an opportunity to get involved, a challenge to improve society and enhance the quality of life, a way to transmit our heritage to future generations, and a stimulus to volunteerism and to intelligent patriotism — it was a civic Great Awakening.

Our performance earned Rhode Island the award for the best and most comprehensive state observance in the nation from the federal American Revolution Bicentennial Administration. In Rhode Island the Bicentennial was no one person or group; it was a mighty outpouring of people and spirit that will never be forgotten by those of us who were privileged to have played a part.

Dr. Patrick T. Conley is an author, lawyer, real estate investor, and former history professor who served as Rhode Island's first historian laureate from 2012 to 2025.