Beaches, barbecues and flags as big as baseball fields. Fireworks as loud as thunder lighting the nighttime sky. Hot fun, as Sly & the Family Stone would say, in the summertime.

Friday was the 232nd anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. Celebrations were ubiquitous. HBO offered a marathon telecast of its John Adams series. Bands of wildly varying quality, from one coast to the other, let loose with “The Star-Spangled Banner,” “America the Beautiful” and “The Stars and Stripes Forever.”

It was a July Fourth like many others. There was nothing overt to signal anything was wrong. The Red Sox had traveled from Boston to play a weekend series against the Yankees in the Bronx. In Washington, the National Independence Day Parade made its way along Constitution Avenue.

And yet, there was an undercurrent of anxiety in the land. Vacations have been curtailed because of the price of fuel. Since the holiday fell on a Friday, the monthly unemployment numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics were released a day early, on Thursday. They weren’t good. The Times summed things up with a Page 1 headline:

“Outlook Darker as Jobs Are Lost and Wages Stall.”

The high and the low were being buffeted. The bad news bears were loose on Wall Street, and the prospects for the summer employment of teenagers were abysmal. The national employment rate for teens in June was the lowest in 60 years.