Next year marks the United States’ 250th birthday and already plans are underway for the celebration, with the nonprofit America250 Commission https://america250.org/ charged with staging different events and programs to mark the occasion. (Each of the 50 states has also created its own commission, with plenty of cultural organizations contributing exhibits and performances.)
Though ostensibly bipartisan, America250 has come under the aegis of the Trump Administration, which wants to ensure that American history is portrayed in such a way that Americans don’t feel ashamed of their past. But Ken Burns – whose “The American Revolution” aired on PBS Nov. 16 through Nov. 21 and is streaming free there through Dec. 14 – has said in interviews that we owe it to ourselves to tell the truth about the revolution and let the chips fall where they may. Far from shaming us, Burns and producing partner Sarah Botstein have said, the revolution should inspire and enlighten us as ordinary citizens overcame seemingly insurmountable odds to buck the British Empire and create the world’s oldest modern democracy.
In telling that story in their thought-provoking six-part documentary, Burns, Botstein and David Schmidt pull no punches. Without photography, which helped make “The Civil War” so compelling, along with the “Ashokan Farewell” theme, the trio mixes paintings, both those of the day and marvelous modern interpretations, documents, maps, letters read by well-known actors and an ingenious impressionistic use of reenactments – the recurring image of Patriot women washing bloody clothes in a river, the bloodied water mingling with their bare legs and feet. is particularly haunting – to create a portrait of a brutal zero-sum game in which the Patriots went all in to secure their freedom.
Indeed, as Burns tells it, once the Patriots realized that economic freedom could only be achieved through political freedom, the fight became at once more existential and more visceral and emotional, with the focus of grievance shifted from Parliament and thoughtful arguments about taxation and overregulation to King George III and passionate charges of tyranny. It didn’t help the Loyalist cause that the British were the perfect villains – arrogant, entitled and clueless about the climate and geography of North America and. above all else, its people.
I once asked British historian Simon Schama – author of “Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution” (2006) – why the British lost North America. He paused, then said, “Because they never understood it, and you can’t hold what you don’t understand.”
This no doubt encouraged the British in what British-American historian Niall Ferguson once characterized to me as “gangster behavior” – strangling colonial cities and villages alike; leaving captives to rot in prison ships like the Jersey in the East River; dragging Patriot women, the backbone of the revolution as fundraisers, buttresses of industry and battlefield attendants, from their homes and gang-raping them in forests.
Far from being intimidated, the Patriots doubled down – conducting an eight-year (1775-83) guerrilla war against the British in which they used a violent climate and treacherous topography against them and harassed Loyalists and the neutral, pacifistic Quakers – tarring and feathering some, destroying homes and businesses, hounding the pro-British citizens into exile, all while controlling the colonies’ slave population and pushing farther westward the non-allied native peoples, who like the enslaved Africans often cast their lots with the British or the Patriots depending on what they saw as the advantage for themselves.
It is, in many ways, an ugly story and an ironic one. In throwing off one king, the Patriots cozied up to another, Louis XVI of France, for ships, arms, expertise and manpower. He and wife Marie Antoinette often get a bad rap. But whatever their shortcomings, which abetted the subsequent French Revolution, enough can’t be said about the contributions of the French and other European countries to the colonists in a conflict that Burns has characterized as both global and internal, with brother fighting brother, particularly in the South, in the United States’ first civil war.
Watching it play out again, I was struck by how much it tells us about the partisanship and savagery of our own time, for as Steven Spielberg’s film “Amistad” says, “who we are is who we were.”
Who are we as a people? We talk a lot about isolationism and not getting involved overseas, particularly in European conflicts — an approach that has bedeviled us on the world stage, particularly in Ukraine, the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Latin America. And yet, often you do something in life that only later you understand. In a sense, the American Revolution wasn’t about democracy, as the idea of one-person, one-vote regardless of race, color, creed and sex only came later. And it wasn’t just about liberation from Great Britain, tariffs and taxes. In the end, it might’ve really been about World War I and II.
When Gen. “Black Jack” Pershing arrived on the Champs-Élysées in Paris in 1917 with the U.S. Expeditionary Force, he said, “Lafayette, nous sommes ici” (“Lafayette, we are here”) – a reference to the tender, 19-year-old marquis who fought so valiantly for American independence and was like a son to Gen. George Washington, commander of the revolution’s Continental Army. It was a blood debt we Americans owed the French and the Allies, and a blood debt must be paid by the indebted in this world. It cannot be cancelled or transferred.
The American Revolution is about many things. But among them may be our rebelling against Great Britain only to return, independent and strong, when Britain, France and the rest of Europe needed us most.