The American Revolution in American History

“What memory is for individuals, history is for civilization. Without reference points provided by historical memory, we soon forget who we are, and we perish” (p. 111). Unfortunately, America has been losing its historical memory. Providentially, this year marks the 250th anniversary of its founding, so many Americans are taking time to take stock.

The American Revolution in American History, the last in an excellent eight-volume series on the American Revolution published by the American Enterprise Institute, considers “how generations of Americans have defined, debated, and drawn on the memory of the American Revolution to shape civic education, inform American culture, and fashion a shared identity in a pluralistic nation” (p. iv). It features five essays—by historians Richard Brookhiser, Allen Guelzo, Jane Kamensky, Rita Koganzon, and Wilfred McClay (who is quoted in this review’s opening line and whose ​Land of Hope I reviewed six years ago).

Richard Brookhiser notes that the critics of the American Revolution are no longer Tories but leftists—such as the easily debunkable ​Howard Zinn—“yet there are reasons to think the Revolution is well remembered” (p. 6). His musings on today’s views of the American Revolution focus on popular histories; on the dramas 1776—which won the 1969 Tony Award for Best Musical and was made into a movie—and Hamilton; and on Emanuel Leutze’s painting “Washington Crossing the Delaware” and Jonathan Trumbull’s “Declaration of Independence” (which graces the Capitol Rotunda and the back of our $2 bill).

The film version of 1776 also features in Jane Kamensky’s chapter, “The American Revolution at the Movies.” She doesn’t like it much—“1776 is imperfect as both play and cinema. It’s talky, with a great deal of debate and much less singing than a typical musical. . . . It has pacing problems. . . . The cast . . . represents only the merest sliver of the 2.5 million people of the rebellious 13 colonies, all of whom, in their varied and often opposed ways, were founders of the United States” (p. 35). The fact that its cast represents the delegates who actually assembled in Philadelphia—and that the dialogue and lyrics draw on their letters and memoirs—works to make the play/movie more authentic, as I see it. Oddly both Kamensky and Brookhiser glide over more troubling historical inaccuracies of 1776. This includes the mis-portrayals of characters like John Dickinson and Richard Henry Lee (who comes across as a yahoo, rather than a polished aristocrat) and mischaracterization of opposition to Jefferson’s anti-slavery clause in the Declaration’s initial draft. Jefferson’s ​original draft said that George III “has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating [its] most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere.” The movie’s crucial scene invents a Southern walkout over this passage, but its deletion was almost universally backed, and our independency didn’t swing on the issue as the movie implies. Perhaps Kamensky didn’t think there was the need or enough space to briefly mention these significant problems—good history, foremost, must be accurate—yet she found the space to mention—in the essay’s first paragraph—that “not to be overlooked” is a pornographic movie that “appears to have been the only theatrical release sort of about the founding to debut in the nation’s bicentennial year” (p. 25). Surely, this should have been overlooked in her essay.

All in all, Kamensky concludes that “movies about the beginnings of the United States have been, almost without exception, stinkers” (p. 25). She recounts numerous examples to demonstrate this point and concludes that it is largely the audience’s fault. We don’t know enough history: “Feature-film directors force themselves to teach—to act as documentarians—in part because it’s impossible to presume common knowledge of a complex, long-ago conflict, especially when the instructional energies devoted to it have been scant. High school American history surveys blow by the Revolution in a couple of weeks at most” (p. 29).

Rita Koganzon addresses this exact point in her essay, “Teaching the Revolution.” She focuses on a small selection of books, which “have transcended regional and sectional boundaries and encroached on the national consciousness,” over the past two centuries. In the 1800s, children learned about the American Revolution from The Columbian Orator and McGuffey’s Eclectic Readers. In them “historical figures, particularly George Washington and a handful of other heroes of the American Revolution, were described not only in terms of their roles in political events but as exemplary individuals . . . whose virtues were demonstrated by their public and private speeches, These speeches were to be objects of imitation for pupils, who would learn to read and speak by emulating the great rhetoricians of the past and, in the process, imbibe the virtues that their speeches extolled.” (p. 83). However, by the beginning of the twentieth century, textbooks took on a more “detached and scientific character. . . . This shift . . . entailed a reversal in the books’ approach toward the Revolution, which went from a triumph to, at best, a salutary but fumbling step toward gradual progress that would only reach it full potential” much later (pp. 83–84). In recent years, “these trends had come almost full circle, with texts like The 1619 Project that rejected the founders outright and raised protest and resistance against government, rather than personal virtues or social reform, to the highest form of citizenship” (p. 84).

As representative of the Cold War era, Koganzon uses Thomas Bailey’s The American Pageant, which was first published in 1956. The book “appended many flattering adjectives to revolutionary leaders (‘George Washington was a giant among men; Benjamin Franklin was a master among diplomats,’ reads one characteristic line),” but there was not much depth to these characterizations (p. 95). Koganzon argues that textbooks of this era adopted the “unfinished nation” paradigm, which “has the advantage of allowing textbook writers to account for recent or current injustices with optimism. Things might not be perfect yet, but they are ever on a trajectory toward improvement. The cost of this framework, however, is that it always entails a faintly patronizing attitude toward a benighted past, limiting even writers who might wish to depict the Revolution and its leaders as exemplary” (p. 95).  I sensed this attitude, too, when I read Bailey’s book in AP History in the late 1970s—or maybe it was just the judgments of my teacher, who I greatly respected. However, when I reread Bailey’s chapters on the American Revolution, I didn’t find any this patronization. In fact, his summary of the War for Independence says that “the brutal truth is that only a select minority of the American colonials attached themselves to the cause of independence with a spirit of selfless devotion. These were the dedicated souls who bore the burden of battle and the risks of defeat; these were the freedom-loving patriots who deserved the gratitude and approbation of generations yet unborn. Seldom have so few done so much for so many” (Thomas Bailey, The American Pageant: A History of the Republic, 2nd ed. [D.C. Heath, 1961], p. 102–3). These are stirring words. In addition, Bailey lauds Washington’s moral character—just as nineteenth-century textbooks had done. The “distinguished Virginian was gifted with outstanding powers of leadership and immense strength of character. He radiated patience, courage, self-discipline, and a sense of justice. He was a great moral force rather a great military mind” (p. 104) not merely the “giant among men” that Koganzon cites. In hindsight, it was good to have grown up during the Cold War—as I did—knowing that adults recognized the righteousness of our cause and heritage as our nation faced an “evil empire.”

I do not mean to criticize Koganzon in any way. She understands the villainy of the 1619 Project, which “obliquely recovers McGuffeyan personalism and concern with individual character, but only for negative ends—to tear down one pantheon of  . . . heroes, without replacing it with others. . . . This is a perverse kind of personalism, in which only villains [like Jefferson, the enslaver] have agency and everyone else is ground down beneath the behemoth structures and systems that move political events” (p. 97). As it is, American students are dispirited by a “rudderless liberalism of the ‘unfinished nation,’ whose completion is anyone’s guess” (p. 100).

Allen Guelzo, in “Americans and Their Revolution: The First 100 Years,” argues that perhaps modern “skepticism about the Revolution is the product of living in skeptical times, when institutions and narratives of every sort have surrendered much of their persuasive power to arguments that reduce all human events to unpleasant questions of power” (p. 48). As he documents, this was not Americans’ attitude in the nation’s first one hundred years. They “largely treated the Revolution as a glorious event worth commemorating through public celebrations, monuments, primers, and political rhetoric” (p. 49). The very “sameness” of their public meetings, processions, and celebrations “was a statement of national solidarity” (p. 56). In the most general sense, “no one dissented from the view that Revolution was fundamentally good” (p. 57).

The collection closes with Wilfred McClay’s gem, “How to Think About America’s 250th Birthday.” His central point (which he credits to a friend) is that “if our children are taught that they live under a bad regime, it does damage to their souls” (p. 109). Consequently, history is “soulcraft.” Public choice economists rightly strip away the idealized view that politicians and bureaucrats are selfless public servants—“politics without romance,” as James Buchanan put it. But “history without romance” is deadly. It is sterile, cynical, and indeed soulless. There’s an optimal amount of “romance” in history, and these essays help explain why. Much of the “romance” surrounding the founding is useful and necessary—and true. It promotes the ideals that lead us in the right direction and make our lives worth living.

However, the study of history is not soulcraft alone. It is also statecraft. Calvin Coolidge’s address commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Revolution, is worth quoting—and is quoted twice in The American Revolution in American History:

About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning cannot be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction cannot lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.