Parades

The ticker tape parade began by accident. In October 1886, as a parade in New York celebrated the dedication of the Statue of Liberty, office workers along Broadway threw the paper tape from their stock tickers out the windows. It looked so good that the city kept doing it.

Parades were one of the main ways Americans celebrated, mourned and made a point in public. Towns marched on the Fourth of July and on Decoration Day, which later became Memorial Day. Veterans marched for decades after their war. Fraternal lodges, fire companies, trade unions and immigrant societies all had their own uniforms and banners and their own days to show them.

Some parades were history in themselves. In May 1865, just after the Civil War ended, the Union armies marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in the Grand Review, a procession that took 2 full days. On March 3, 1913, the day before Woodrow Wilson's inauguration, thousands of women marched in Washington for the right to vote, and the crowd that turned on them made national news. Returning troops after World War I and Charles Lindbergh after his flight in 1927 drew some of the biggest crowds New York had ever seen.

Circus parades are a lighter part of the story. When the circus came to town, it marched from the railroad yard to the show grounds with elephants, wagons, bands and a steam calliope at the end. It was free advertising and often the best show of the day.

The thing worth noticing is that the most interesting part of a parade photograph is often not the parade. Look at the crowd, the buildings, the store signs, the people hanging out of upper windows and the children perched on lampposts. Parade photographs are some of the best records we have of what a main street looked like on a given day, because the photographer was pointing the camera straight down it.