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American Revolution

5 min read

Part of History and the Founders.

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Every episode (6)

Who argued it

Harlow Giles Unger ×2 · C. Bradley Thompson · Ray Lorber · Thomas Fleming · Jerry Hurwitz

Founding Fathers · Declaration of Independence · Executive Power · Libertarianism

Background

History removed from the curriculum

Bob Zadek opened a “Best of” episode by describing a North Carolina curriculum decision: the state’s Chief Academic Officer, Rebecca Garland, held that no history should be taught prior to 1877 in the high school curriculum. Zadek listed what he said would therefore go untaught — the American Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, the Civil War, the War of 1812, and the writing of the Constitution — and said Garland’s stated reason was that students could not relate to the material. He framed the change as a removal of the nation’s founding history from the schools. Best of: Changing the Face of History (2010)

The Society of the Cincinnati

In an episode on George Washington, Zadek described the Society of the Cincinnati as one of the oldest organizations in America, founded in 1783 by veterans of the American Revolution, with membership restricted to descendants of veterans. His guest, historian Thomas Fleming, corrected the detail: membership is limited to descendants of officers, with only one officer descendant per family, and the society is divided by state like the thirteen original states. Fleming said he became an honorary member during the Bicentennial after giving many speeches, and that he is the George Washington scholar for the New York State Society of the Cincinnati. George Washington Was Our Guest (2011)

Zadek asked whether Washington had been uncomfortable participating in the society. Fleming said he had been, because Ben Franklin and others, including Jefferson, thought it would become the foundation of an American aristocracy and undermine the Revolution; Franklin wrote a satire of it. Fleming added that the society gives money for causes connected to teaching American history.

Money, corporations and the Founders

Asked how the Founders viewed corporations and their participation in politics, Fleming said there were not enough corporations in the first ten years of the Republic to make much difference. Wealthy men and bank controllers such as Robert Morris of Philadelphia faced no bar to running for office or supporting candidates with money, which Fleming described as part of their rights as citizens. He said the Founders did not get into the corporate issue to any great extent, but held a strong sense of ongoing conflict between rich and poor. George Washington Was Our Guest (2011)

Fleming credited Jefferson with the point that all the people should feel they were participating in politics, the basis of his political party, and described a tradition after 1800 of fighting and defeating the rich in American politics. He cited the first stock market crash in 1792, when a man named Duer tried to corner the market in shares of the Bank of the United States and lost his shirt; Jefferson, then Secretary of State in Philadelphia, was ecstatic and wrote in a letter that there was not a single man in New York who was not bankrupt. Fleming called the conflict between wealth and non-wealth rooted partly in the temperaments of the Founders, certainly between Washington and Jefferson.

The Revolution as a revolution in minds

C. Bradley Thompson told Zadek that as a seven-year-old in Ontario he read The How and Why Wonder Book of the American Revolution and knew he was an American born in the wrong country. Offended by a Harvard professor’s book on the Declaration of Independence, he began his own book on the Declaration, then read John Adams’s description of the American Revolution not as the war but as a revolution in the minds of the people in the fifteen years before Lexington and Concord. He broadened the project into America’s Revolutionary Mind: A Moral History of the American Revolution and the Declaration That Defined It, treating the Revolution’s deepest causes as moral. C. Bradley Thompson on America’s Revolutionary Mind (2019)

Invoking the Revolution abroad

Vít Jedlička, discussing the founding of Liberland, said the flag was planted on April 13, Thomas Jefferson’s likely birthday, to appreciate Jefferson’s involvement in the American Revolution and to invoke its spirit, calling the Declaration of Independence a great document. He described Liberland as a modern-day tax exodus or a new kind of Tea Party movement creating a new country in Europe, and said its constitution was being drafted with blockchain-based smart contracts. Founding the Free Republic of Liberland (2021)

Across episodes

The Revolution recurs as a usable past rather than a settled subject: Zadek treats its removal from North Carolina classrooms as a loss, Fleming and Thompson treat it as a moral and intellectual founding, and Jedlička treats it as a template for a new country. The episodes show no development between the earlier and later treatments; each episode presses the Revolution into a different argument.

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