Ups and downs of our national anniversaries

50th: This, in 1826, is the one everyone remembers because Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died coincidentally on the fiftieth anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. Their simultaneous deaths on the anniversary of nationhood were widely seen as a Providential endorsement of the Republic. 

The president at the time was John Adams's son, John Quincy Adams, who had failed to win a majority over Andrew Jackson in the Electoral College in the election of 1824. When the decision was passed to the House of Representatives, Henry Clay, a failed candidate and speaker of the House, threw his support to Adams. Adams, duly elected and sworn in, named Clay secretary of state, infuriating  Jackson and his supporters, and their repeated cry of "corrupt bargain" threw a shadow over Adams's single term. 

100th: Ulysses Grant was nearing the end of his second term as president in 1876. The national anniversary was also a presidential election year, in which the Democratic nominee, Samuel J. Tilden, won the popular vote, but a decision on disputed returns was turned over to an electoral commission, which determined that the Republican, Rutherford B. Hayes, was elected, with the apparent understanding that Republicans would end their support of Reconstruction and return control of the South to racist whites. 

150th: With the demise of the amiable doofus Warren Gamaliel Harding, Calvin Coolidge was president in 1926. President Coolidge spoke at the Sesquicentennial International Exposition in Philadelphia. The exposition was not a success, due in part to bad weather that year. Sales of the million commemorative half-dollar coins with portraits of George Washington and Coolidge that Congress had authorized were modest, and many were returned and melted down.  

200th: The president during the Bicentennial was Gerald R. Ford, who had become president with the resignation under fire of Richard Nixon. Ford's pardon of the disgraced Nixon was widely criticized and likely became a major factor in his failure to win a term as president in his own right in the fall election. 

250th: Donald J. Trump