As the postwar United States became more democratic, seeking to accord black Americans the full rights of citizenship they were constitutionally guaranteed, it confronted the absence of unifying American symbolism. The Second World War had disrupted so many of the traditional boundaries of American society, leaving fewer national touchstones. Hollywood and a growing national popular culture were no substitute. While other countries had glistening decorations honouring achievements in the arts and sciences, as well as ordinary citizens giving extraordinary service, the United States had a constellation of entertainment products. As one memorandum from the Kennedy administration, dated 1961, put it: ‘France has its Academy and Legion of Honor; Britain its knighthoods; Germany its Orders; the Russians the Lenin Awards; and the world the Nobel Prizes. We have Oscars.’

While the Founding Fathers were hostile to anything suggesting hereditary honour in the early republic (such as the pseudo-chivalric order of the Sons of the Cincinnati), they did not oppose medals and decorations given for merit. George Washington, for instance, found nothing in heraldry ‘unfriendly to the purest spirit of republicanism’. The distrust for pomp and circumstance derived from a mix of pioneer practicality and, particularly in the north, the heritage of Puritans, Quakers, and other groups distrustful of ostentation. The Amish, for the early period of their presence in America, blended in with their neighbours in preferring plain dress. The national mood, however, had changed by the mid-19th century. People started eagerly claiming ‘family crests’  (a term with no meaning in heraldry). Fraternal organisations, with elaborate ceremonies bordering on camp, flourished. Congress even chartered one – the Knights of Pythias, whose name hardly hides the aspiration to chivalric glory. A few states developed rudimentary honours, most notably, Kentucky’s substantive position of ‘colonel’ in the state militia transformed into first a sort of honour guard and then an outright honorary title.

Yet, while the federal government always had honours (the first Congressional Gold Medal was awarded in 1776) and a number of piecemeal honours were present by the 1960s, no comprehensive system of awards for merit ever emerged. This may in part be attributed to the unusual degree of independence of civil society from the government in America. Honorary degrees, prizes for achievement in various fields, and other civic honours derived from private universities, independent learned societies, and various patriotic organisations. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed, Americans took to forming associations that replaced what, in aristocratic societies, was a centralised  prerogative of the government.

These conditions, however, no longer obtained in the postwar years. For all the prosperity of the 1950s, the atomisation of society, later observed by Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone, was already becoming visible. The rise of suburbanisation and loss of political consensus left Americans more divided and bereft of the traditional associations of unity.

As a result, under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, there was a first push for true federal honours. In his 1955 State of the Union Address, Ike called for ‘awards of merit… whereby we can honour our fellow citizens who make great contribution to the advancement of our civilisation’. The implied point was that, without some guiding light encouraging contribution, a freewheeling and purposeless America might be overtaken by a Soviet civilisation that forced citizens to give to the common good, at least as Moscow defined it.

The proposal went to Congress twice, but both times stalled, never becoming law. Perhaps legislators were too concerned with rewarding themselves for merit; in the same period, one senator read into the record an article calling for awards for the achievements of members of Congress.

The desire for honours, however, remained. In 1961, one of Kennedy’s aides passed on a suggestion for a biannual presidential honours list, modelled explicitly on the British twice-yearly honours, to be given prestige with a grand inauguration involving a procession by the President, Congress, and the Supreme Court to the Lincoln Memorial for a solemn ceremony. Every effort was to be made to distinguish it from the usual pomp of American television, lest it be ‘degraded into entertainment’; for instance, no musician being honoured was to be allowed to give a recital.

Though nothing ever came of that suggestion, the idea of honours seems to have remained strong in the administration. In 1962, John F. Kennedy asked his Secretary of Labor, Arthur Goldberg (whom he later appointed to the Supreme Court), to put together a proposal. Goldberg outsourced the work to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a brilliant social scientist and future senator. Moynihan, in turn, took time off from the tedium of European negotiations on cotton textiles to hop to London to study the history of the British honours system. He was cheered by finding that (as he would later recall) ‘like most of the ancient institutions of the British government, the honour system was a late Victorian invention’. If the British could invent honours ex nihilo, then Americans could, too.

Goldberg’s formal report, written by Moynihan, impressed Kennedy. Plans were drawn up to repurpose a Truman era decoration, the Medal of Freedom into the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The medal, created by Executive Order in 1963, was to be given annually on the Fourth of July, in two degrees (ordinary and with distinction). When worn on a bright blue sash on formal occasions (as it was the first times it was given), it neatly resembled any European order. The first recipients were announced on the Fourth of July in 1963, with a grand ceremony to be held towards the end of the year. The diversity of the honourees was as great as that of the permutations of ‘for services to’ in any British honours list. They ranged from the metaphorical architect of European integration, Jean Monnet, to the literal architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe; from the trade unionist George Meany to the Yale swimming coach Robert J. H.  Kiphuth; from the author E.B. White (of Charlotte’s Web fame) to the Polaroid inventor Edwin Land.

This might have been the first of many such grand occasions, but Lee Harvey Oswald’s bullet intervened. After the president was shot ten days before he was to give the grand awards at the White House, his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, a practical Texan, was not interested. Johnson, after (as Moynihan recalled) first complaining he didn’t have time for the ceremony, gave out the first set of honours announced by Kennedy and begrudgingly agreed to do it again a year later, but after that the annual practice ceased. The Presidential Medal of Freedom remains occasionally awarded (in his last days in office, President Joe Biden gave gongs out to, among others, Denzel Washington and Anna Wintour), but it is only a pale shadow of the aspirations of the department.

It is tempting to write off the plans for an annual honours list as an eccentricity of the grandiose Camelot atmosphere of the Kennedy administration and the president’s (and Mrs Kennedy’s) love of glamour. It is revealing that, mixed in with the archival papers on a proposed honours system, is an apparently personal request from the president to use the Library of Congress to look up the Kennedy ‘family motto’ in Irish (Kennedy would later accept a  grant of coat of arms from the Chief Herald of Ireland on his visit in 1963). However, the underlying causes of the desire, under both Eisenhower and Kennedy, for a unifying sense of national grandeur, have only intensified in the years since. The division, anomie, and anger of today’s America makes the 1950s and early 1960s look comparatively tranquil. As silly as baubles may seem, they connect to some deep psychological need of humanity for romance and mysticism; the trouble with an ‘age of calculators’ (to quote Burke) is that it leaves people feeling cold and disconnected. Napoleon, in announcing grand new military decorations, responded to critique that they were mere ‘baubles’ by answering ‘Very well, but it is with baubles that one leads men!’