By Niraj Chokshi

New York Times

The spectacular — and fatal — show began with a flicker.

Winifred Duncan, a clerk at the S.S. Kresge store near Cleveland’s public square, was showing 4-year-old James Parker and his mother a sparkler on the morning of July 3, 1908.

The device, she assured them, was harmless. Moments later, a spark jumped to a nearby flag. Within seconds, a flame had reached and ignited the store’s larger fireworks.

“With a rattling roar the skyrockets, torpedoes and candles were set off, carrying the flame to every part of the store,” The Marion Daily Mirror reported the next day.

Seven people, including the young Parker, died in the fire, while dozens more were injured, according to John Stark Bellamy II, a former history specialist with the Cuyahoga County Public Library who documented the events in the book “They Died Crawling.”

It was “Cleveland’s saddest Fourth,” Bellamy writes.

But the 1908 Kresge fire also belongs to a long-standing and macabre U.S. tradition: Independence Day celebrations marred by discord, injury and, sometimes, death.

“It was total mayhem in the run-up up to the Fourth — and including the Fourth — every year,” Bellamy said of the holiday celebrations at that time. “Generally, what you would find on July 5th was things that looked like casualty lists of all the people who had their hands blown off.”

Though less common now, thanks to legal prohibitions and safety measures, fireworks mishaps and tragedies remain a feature of the annual holiday. And some experts have been disturbed by a growing movement to relax legal restrictions.

Just last year, the New York Giants defensive end Jason Pierre-Paul seriously injured his right hand while handling a firework, a story he shares in a new video released this week by the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which has regulated the sale of fireworks for decades.

In the month around July Fourth, an average of 230 people end up in emergency rooms each day with fireworks-related injuries, the agency reports.

In 2014, the safety commission recorded 11 nonoccupational fireworks-related deaths, according to a report issued last year.

Four people died that year in house fires started by fireworks; seven died following direct impact from the explosive devices. From 2000 to 2014, there were an average of 7.1 fireworks-related deaths each year.

But the risks are nothing new. From the start, the festivities incorporated dangerous elements.

John Adams set the tone in a letter to his wife, Abigail, on July 3, 1776.

In it, he envisioned dazzling annual celebrations to mark the Continental Congress’ July 2nd approval of a resolution declaring the nation’s independence from the British crown.

“It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more,” he wrote.

And so it was. As early as the following year, celebrations featured 13-gun salutes, bonfires and fireworks.

But, eventually, the Fourth would also become associated with mayhem.

In 1865, The New York Times wrote of “gangs of young men” roaming the streets with firearms, scaring the public and injuring themselves.

“That sundry of these reckless youth should have blown off their fingers and mutilated their hands was to be expected and perhaps pleasureably anticipated,” The Times reported, scornfully.

Such injuries soon became the norm in many parts of the country.

“The usual amount of accidents and incidents which always accompany the celebration of the Nation’s Birthday occurred yesterday,” The Cincinnati Daily Star reported on July 5, 1877.

A 17-year-old boy accidentally shot off his left pinkie; another boy lost his hand in an explosion; a 13-year-old girl died from an accidental gun discharge.

In 1880, several children suffered injuries in Washington, D.C., according to The Evening Star. A 4-year-old nearly lost his eye; a 12-year-old saw his hand “badly shattered.”

The long list of accidents in 1891 in one corner of Pennsylvania led a Pittsburgh Dispatch reporter to wonder in the course of writing whether it is worth celebrating the holiday “with such violent explosives.”

Around the turn of the 20th century, efforts to rein in the bloody holiday gained momentum with calls for a “safe and sane” Fourth.

The Omaha Daily Bee in 1893 lamented the “series of distressing accidents” and “spirit of recklessness” surrounding the celebrations.

The Vermont Board of Health formally warned the public in 1905 of the dangers of using explosives to celebrate the Fourth, the Windham County Reformer wrote that year.

The American Medical Association began collecting data on the issue. It documented more than 1,500 deaths and more than 33,000 injuries connected to the holiday from 1903 to 1910, according to news reports of the time.

In the end, individual accidents and larger tragedies like the one in Cleveland helped to accelerate the movement.

Within days of the Kresge fire, the Cleveland City Council approved an ordinance — possibly the nation’s first — banning the sale or possession of fireworks within city limits, according to Bellamy’s research.

“This landmark legislation and the tragedy that precipitated it were important milestones in the movement, ultimately nationwide, to end the annual toll of deaths and injuries due to fireworks,” he wrote.

By 1910, similar policies were in place in Baltimore; Washington; St. Petersburg, Florida, and several other cities. A year later, President William Howard Taft visited Ohio and endorsed the idea, helping to mitigate the unfortunate side effects of Independence Day injuries.

© 2016 The New York Times Company