"Not the True Centennial":The Politics of Erie Canal Celebrations, 1917–1926 Carol Sheriff1 (bio) New Yorkers recently celebrated, for the fourth time, the Erie Canal's groundbreaking. In 1817, on the Fourth of July, a crowd gathered in Rome, New York, to watch the ceremonial turning of the first spadeful of Erie Canal dirt. One hundred years later, even amid the somberness occasioned by the nation's recent entry into the First World War, a "monster" audience reportedly assembled in Rome to hear dignitaries, including New York's Governor Charles Whitman, extol the Erie Canal and its legacy, not just for New York, not just for the nation, but for the free world.2 For the sesquicentennial in 1967, tens of thousands of people attended a four-day affair in Rome that included a massive parade, fireworks, aerial tours of the canal, an elaborate reenactment of the 1817 groundbreaking, and the first-day [End Page 370] release of a commemorative stamp issued by the United States Postal Service.3 The recent bicentennial commemorations, in 2017, took on a more diffuse nature, including twenty-seven festivals and events sponsored by the New York State Canal Corporation and the Erie Canalway National Heritage Corridor; a new public-television documentary, "Erie: The Canal That Made America"; the official opening of the Old Erie Canal Heritage Park in Port Byron; exhibits at the New York State Museum and at smaller institutions throughout the state; a celebratory tour of canal towns by the Albany Symphony Orchestra; a speaker series funded by the New York State Council on the Arts and organized by the Erie Canal Museum in Syracuse; and numerous local public celebrations, including in the town of Rome, which staged a reenactment of the "first dig."4 Historical commemorations draw on the past for present-day purposes, and they tell us more about the era in which they take place than they do about the era that they are recalling. Previous celebrations hailed the Erie Canal as an unmitigated success, with far-reaching positive consequences.5 Last year's Erie Canal Museum-sponsored lecture series, by contrast, addressed how the Canal's influence on upstate New York's natural waterways had harmful consequences for the physical environment as well as for the Native peoples who considered those waters sacred. When inviting me to talk in the same series, the director of the Erie Canal Museum encouraged me to address "the good, the bad, and the ugly impacts of the Erie Canal" while explaining that she hoped the series would address "many [End Page 371] perspectives" on the Erie Canal and its legacy. Her invitation, coupled with an invitation by this journal's editors to write an essay related to the Erie Canal's bicentennial, prompted me to delve more deeply into not just modern-day commemorations of the Erie Canal but also earlier anniversaries, particularly the waterway's centennial, which New York celebrated in both 1917 and 1926. While anniversary celebrations by their very nature reflect the cultural imperatives of the era in which they take place, the centennial celebrations of the Erie Canal, particularly the 1926 celebration marking (one year late) the waterway's completion, emerged from a frank effort to garner support for the New York State Barge Canal, whose official completion took place in 1918. Like all historical commemorations, the Erie Canal's centennial revealed fissures within society, with different groups vying to give voice to their own interpretations of the past. In the case of the Erie Canal centennial, the most evident fractures occurred along geographic lines, and they generally did not reflect differences over how the Erie Canal's accomplishments should be remembered. Instead, the greatest tension emerged over when to celebrate the Erie Canal's completion. For individuals interested primarily in promoting the Barge Canal, the elaborate nature of the celebration mattered more than when it took place. For communities that owed their very existence to the Erie Canal, or that saw themselves as having contributed materially to its creation, historical accuracy (as they saw it) should be the guiding principle. Both groups, though, faced the same substantial hurdle: convincing elected officials, particularly those who remained...