Founding Myths (41 page)

We owe our very existence, the stories said, to the wisdom and courage of a small cadre of leaders who worked closely together, as a separate and distinct group, to determine the fate of the nation. In fact, these men did not act in a vacuum. Outside official chambers, a
host of local activists, working in committees, tended unrelentingly to the business of the new nation. Meanwhile, poor men and boys of the Continental Army, together with countless local militiamen, repulsed British advances. The so-called founders
reflected
the fervor of the people—they did not create it. By ignoring or downplaying the widespread participation of ordinary people in Revolutionary affairs, stories that claimed to be patriotic subverted the very essence of popular sovereignty, the explicit reason for the nation's existence. Four score and seven years after the United States declared its independence, Abraham Lincoln gave poetic voice to this central theme by boasting that our original patriots had established a nation “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” When we say our nation was created by a mere handful of Founding Fathers, we lose a key component of this democratic trinity.

CONCLUSION: WHY WE TELL TALL TALES

D
espite advances in historical scholarship that show them to be mistaken or misleading, the fanciful tales featured in this book continue to anchor the telling of the American Revolution. They endure because they engage and excite and please, and a story, if it pleases, will generally trump hard evidence.

History, of course, can never adequately re-create the past. Back then, people didn't know how things would turn out; now, we do. Try as we might, we will always be reading history backward. This in itself places an impenetrable barrier between past and present. There are other barriers as well, differences in culture and circumstance. Added to all this, the sheer multiplicity of events, always chaotic, belies our attempts at neat packaging.

Inevitably befuddled, we unravel the tangle of the past by substituting a series of comprehensible stories that draw on important elements of traditional Western storytelling. The past has no beginning, middle, and end, but our stories must. The past has multifarious players, more than we can possibly meet, so we make the acquaintance of just a few, giving preference to heroes and heroines who embody virtue and represent our collective ideals. Documents abound, but these atomic elements tell us little until we organize them and assign meanings. As one philosopher of history put it, the past is “immense, sublime, and gone.”
¹
The stories we tell of the past, on the other hand,
are contained, manifest, and present. People in all cultures tell such tales. The problem lies not in the act of conjuring them, but in failing to acknowledge their purpose and limitations. In practice, they are subject to several common fallacies.

Individual agency
. Assuming undue agency for one's subject is the biographer's great temptation, and the historian's as well. Samuel Adams, it is said, single-handedly steered the United States toward independence—as did John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine. Each of these allegedly indispensable protagonists, in the hands of admiring authors, not only drives the story but
becomes
the story. The committees of correspondence, by definition collective endeavors, become “Sam Adams's committees,” and the Declaration of Independence “Jefferson's Declaration.” The fallacy of protagonist-as-primary-agent sustains historical mythologies while relegating great numbers of people and groups to the sidelines, or simply discarding them.

Presumed consistency
. In most textbooks and popular historical narratives, protagonists shape events more than events shape protagonists. For this to happen, a protagonist functions as an engine chugging through time, the track always straight. The inner Samuel Adams, hell-bent from the outset on separation from Britain, eventually achieves his goal. Any notion that his position
evolved
as he reacted to circumstances beyond his control would appear to negate the power of that engine. James Madison, so-called Father of the Constitution, envisioned that document and then made it happen; never mind that at the Constitutional Convention, the very model of a collective deliberation, Madison lost out on forty of seventy-one issues on which he took a stand, or that the Constitution he envisioned at the start—including an absolute federal veto over all state legislation—was very, very different from the one that emerged, or that by 1798 his view on federal versus state authority had turned upside down. To this day, scholars as well as laymen make free use of the term “Madisonian,” as
if it that denoted a consistent, unwavering philosophy that placed its indelible stamp on how things turned out.
²

Faulty representation
. Heroes and heroines, selected for their uncommon features, are marshaled forth to represent all the people, including those who are common, not special. History is supposedly revealed through stories of protagonists who are “giants” or “larger than life.” Their exploits are “amazing” or “unbelievable.” “Never before or since,” we like to say, “has there been such a man or woman”—and yet, strangely, we present these exceptional people as “representative” of historical movements. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson—we speak of these illustrious individuals as
the
Revolutionaries, and we use them as stand-ins for all the
other
Revolutionaries, although we have just proclaimed they are not like the rest.

Iconic events as protagonist-agents
. Special events subsume other events, in the same way that heroes and heroines subsume other characters. Three such events drive and define the traditional story of the American Revolution, but each in fact hides critical features:

       
•
   
The British never would have marched on Lexington and Concord unless the people of Massachusetts had shed British rule the previous year, yet the iconic tale of “the shot heard 'round the world,” which allegedly initiated the American Revolution, effectively conceals the revolution that happened before it.
³

       
•
   
Congress voted for independence on July 2, 1776, only because a groundswell of public pressure, including instructions by state and local bodies to declare independence, had made that move viable—yet the later event has subsumed the others, reversing cause and effect. “The Declaration launched a period of energetic political innovation, as one colony after another reconstituted itself as
a ‘state,' ” one recent college text states emphatically. In fact, Congress had requested the emerging states to form new governments back on May 10, almost two months earlier, and by July 2 several states were in the process of doing so. These were key steps in making the congressional declaration possible, not consequences of it.
⁴

       
•
   
The Battle of Yorktown proved to be pivotal, but only because other world powers, acting in various theaters across the globe, circumscribed Britain's options in response to this particular military defeat. When we isolate the Battle of Yorktown and treat it as the definitive end of the war, we lose the global context, critical to all international events. We do not see the elephant but only the tip of his tail.

All events, iconic and otherwise, exist in webs, not in isolation. Stories that ignore such webs not only misrepresent history but blind us to the fluid and interconnected dynamics of how human societies function.

LANGUAGE THAT DECEIVES

The construction of our sentences, like the structure of our stories, leads to individualistic misinterpretations of history. Sentences written in the active voice require subjects, just as stories require protagonists. The problem is, we don't always know the exact identities of the subjects of our sentences. Composites suffice only for a while. So when we tire of saying “Republicans opposed” or “rebels demanded,” we turn to a slightly more personalized alternative: “Republican spokesmen opposed” or “rebel leaders demanded.” These subjects are still generic, but at least they refer to individual people rather than to abstract groups. We like that, and we revert to it unconsciously. It's a default mode in the writing of history. “Rebels” and “rebel leaders” are used interchangeably, as if there were no difference between them.

But the casual use of the term “leaders” has a perilous side effect:
if some are leaders, all the others become followers. A few important individuals make things happen, the rest only tag along; a few write the scripts, the rest just deliver their lines. Adopting and extending this default grammar, writers cast about for “leaders” to serve as subjects for their sentences and protagonists for their narratives. James Otis “persuaded” the Massachusetts Assembly to call for a Stamp Act Congress, a college text states. Taken as face value, this means that Otis actually convinced others to change their positions and vote his way, but we have no evidence this happened. Instead, “persuaded” is a linguistic convenience, linking Otis to the assembly's action in some generic way and claiming him as an individual agent. James Madison “devised the Virginia Plan, and he did most of the drafting of the Constitution itself,” the same text states. Even though the first statement is doubtful and the second demonstrably incorrect, this author believes that drafting the Constitution needs a protagonist and assigns the role to Madison, “generally known as the father” of that document.
⁵

If a leader is not immediately evident, authors often invent one. All American history texts, for instance, discuss a farmers' uprising they call “Shays' Rebellion,” which occurred in the wake of the American Revolution. Readers naturally assume that this rebellion was led by a charismatic individual named Shays, who held great sway with his followers. It wasn't that way. Daniel Shays, an unassuming character, filled an important role because of his military experience, but he in no way owned or even led the movement—in fact, he was not even active during the early stages of the uprising.
⁶
The appellation “Shays' Rebellion,” first used by authorities who opposed the uprising, belittles the significance of the insurgents themselves, steering us away from the people's real grievances. One recent text says that Shays “issued a set of demands” while the rebellious farmers “rallied behind” him, becoming “Shaysites” as if they belonged to some cult. Another states that “Daniel Shays organized protestors,” whom it characterizes as “Shays' supporters.”
⁷
The rebels never thought of themselves as “Shaysites” or “Shays' supporters.” They called themselves “Regulators” because they hoped to regulate the functioning of government.
⁸

In this manner, storytellers turn history on its head. Since each sentence needs a subject and each tale a protagonist, groups are signified and subsumed by their alleged leaders. The famous founders, we are told,
made
the American Revolution. They dreamed up the ideas, spoke and wrote incessantly, and finally convinced others to follow their lead. In this trickle-down telling of history, as in trickle-down economics, the concerns of the people at the bottom are addressed by mysterious processes not often delineated. Supposedly, hundreds of thousands of Revolutionaries risked their lives on behalf of independence simply because they had been told by others to do so. They were not agents acting on their own behalf.

When this process is spelled out, it fails to convince. One proposed model breaks down all of humanity into six groups: Great Thinkers, Great Disciples, Great Disseminators, Lesser Disseminators, Participating Citizens, and the Politically Inert. Ideas filter down from one group to the next until they finally reach the bottom. In the American Revolution, the Great Thinkers were the philosophers of the European Enlightenment; Great Disciples included men like Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Paine; Great Disseminators were regional political organizers like Samuel Adams and Patrick Henry; Lesser Disseminators were the leaders of politically active groups such as the local committees of correspondence; Participating Citizens were the members of those groups; the Politically Inert were all the people who started out as neither patriots nor Tories. Ideas, like military orders, supposedly drifted down this chain of command until enough people were willing to engage in revolution.
⁹
There is no provision here for any movement
up
the ladder. The people themselves, in whose name the Revolution was fought, were no more than passive receptors. Dissemination theories such as this, when laid bare, appear ludicrous, but they buttress much of the prose in textbooks and popular histories. A few gifted historical actors convince others what to do, and that is how history happens.

THROUGH THE EYES OF A CHILD

The simplistic model—a few individuals make history happen—works well with children. Fortuitously, that is the primary audience for stories of our nation's founding. What most Americans know about the Revolution they learned in the fifth grade, for at no later time do students undertake an in-depth study of the subject in the majority of public schools. Because most middle-school and high-school curricula focus on more recent events, they require no more than a cursory review of Revolutionary history.

This quirk in curriculum is fortunate in some ways, unfortunate in others. On the one hand, fifth graders are at the peak of their learning curve. Ten-year-olds read and converse intelligently, they are delightfully curious, and they are not yet distracted by the trials of pubescence. On the other hand, these young students have little worldly knowledge. Few can compare the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Russian Revolution or understand the complex struggles for power that dominate political affairs, past and present.