Considering
it is such a little book (180 pages, paperback), I spent a lot of time with The
Ambiguity of the American Revolution, edited by Jack P. Green. I’ve written a bit about it already but have now finished the entire book and want to say more.
The book more than repaid the attention I gave it. An anthology published in
1968 by Harper & Row, Ambiguity was one of a series called “Interpretations
of American History,” put together by series editors John Higham and Bradford
Perkins. If all are as good as The Ambiguity of the American Revolution, the books as a group
would constitute a very well-rounded course in American history.
Jack
Greene’s volume presents changing views of the American Revolution, from
contemporary accounts to 1966, through representative excerpts of evolving
historical thought. In histories from the late 1700s, views divide naturally
into loyalist and patriot perspectives, with patriot histories emphasizing both
the conservative nature of the American Revolution and its heroic figures. By
the time of the late 1800s, a group of historians known as the imperial school
sought a more objective reading of the past – as Greene says, “less parochial
and less nationalistic.”
Herbert
Levi Osgood’s essay, “The Case for the British” (actually a review of Moses
Coit Taylor’s The Literary History of the American Revolution), argues that if King
George III had been “tyrannical,” Parliament was equally to blame but that it
did not suit the colonists’ cause to state a case against Parliament, since
there were no effective guarantees against legislative action from the home
country in their colony charters. “From a legal and historical standpoint...”
The colonists stood face to face with a power, possessed of
authority over them that was without legal limit, which had now resolved, if
possible, to procure from them a revenue.
“The
language of the early charters implied the right of the home government to tax
the colonists,” so that right was nothing new, and thus when new taxes were
imposed the Americans had to cite the king, not Parliament, as despotic. (The
king may also have had some hopes of reversing the political trend to recapture
monarchical power, but Parliament was not about to let that happen.)
During
the early 20th century, a new historical perspective emerged, as
scholars sought to fit the American Revolution into the tradition of European
revolutions in general, with “the same patterns of internal violence, class
conflict, and political and social upheaval.” This Marxist-influenced school
stressed economic interests. Arthur Meier Schlesinger writes that the American
moderates, “to their dismay,” realized they were outnumbered by radicals at the
First Continental Congress in Philadelphia. “Events had reached a stage where
the extremists in both countries [emphasis added],” Schlesinger writes, “were
in control.” Only war could settle the question now.
Over
and over among historians the same questions arise: Was the American Revolution
peaceful or violent? Radical or conservative? Inevitable or orchestrated? How
important was “equality” to the Founding Fathers? Was ours really a
“revolution” or something else?
The
1950s saw a movement, at least in the United States, back to an emphasis on differences between the American
Revolution and revolutions elsewhere in the world. An excerpt by Louis Hartz,
from his The Liberal Tradition in America (1955), takes the position that
Americans in truth rebelled against very little in their (primarily English)
legal and political tradition. The Americans did not throw over religion, for
example, or the idea of “natural law,” and they had little or no class
consciousness in the European sense. The Americans, he writes, were largely
content with their lot in life, here in “the most bourgeois country in the
world.” Elsewhere, revolutions were violent, bloody affairs. Not so in America.
Here’s
a fascinating little thought from Hartz that stopped me in my tracks:
American political thought ... is a veritable maze of polar
contradictions, winding in and out of each other hopelessly: pragmatism and
absolutism, historicism and rationalism, optimism and pessimism, materialism
and idealism, individualism and conformism. But, after all, the human mind
works by polar contradictions [emphasis added]; and when we have
evolved an interpretation of it which leads cleanly in a single direction, we
may be sure we have missed a lot.
I
have not discussed each author whose work is included in Greene’s anthology,
although each is worth reading, and the effect of going through the different
perspectives chronologically is an education in itself.
Along
with stressing the uniqueness of the American Revolution, historians of the
mid-20th century also came around full circle to a recognition of
the importance of ideas, seeing our country’s founding again, as did the early
patriot historians, in its most rational interpretation. Gordon Wood, of the
University of Michigan, appreciated the renewed insistence on ideas but was
also convinced there was more to the story and allows that ours was not a “typical”
revolution: Americans were not living under “tyranny” at home, and their
arguments, noteworthy for rationality and moderation, seem “peculiarly an
affair of the mind.” They revolted “not to create but to maintain their
freedom.” And yet.... And yet....
And
yet there was all that flaming rhetoric, “so grandiose, so overdrawn.” Was it
mere propaganda on the part of the revolutionaries? Wood proposes to take the
ideas of the American Revolution seriously but, instead of speculating on
hidden motivations, to take inflammatory rhetoric as a sign that there was something “unsettled” in the
apparently peaceful, orderly American colonies.
[T]here is simply too much fanatical and millennial thinking even
by the best minds that must be explained before we can characterize the
Americans’ ideas as peculiarly rational and legalistic and thus view the
Revolution as merely a conservative defense of constitutional liberties.
As
a whole, he writes, the ideas expressed by the Americans of the 1770s form what
he calls a “revolutionary syndrome,” similar to ideas in 17th-century
England and 18th-century France:
... the same general disgust with a chaotic and corrupt world, the
same anxious and angry bombast, the same excited fears of conspiracies by
depraved men....
The
social situations were vastly different, the modes of expression surprisingly
similar, indicating
... a people caught up in a revolutionary situation, deeply
alienated from the existing sources of authority and vehemently involved in a
basic reconstruction of their political and social order.
But
why would two such different social situations (American as contrasted with
French, with Puritans in 17th-century England, with Russia, with
China) give rise to a “revolutionary situation”? Social stresses, Wood speculates,
may have been much more subtle in the colonies but must certainly have been
present. From there he looks at
the case of Virginia and a crisis within the ruling plantation elites, their
decline “already felt if not readily apparent.” Rising anxiety over their role
coincided with “mounting costs of elections and growing corruption in the
soliciting of votes.”
When
Americans spoke or wrote, then, of “tyranny” and “corruption” and fears for
their “liberty,” their sense of oppression and injury was strong, even if
misplaced. Something was going on, changes were afoot, and they feared what
might come next.
Here
are some lines that can perhaps shed light on our own time:
For the ideas, the rhetoric, of the Americans was never obscuring
but remarkably revealing of their deepest interests and passions. What they
expressed may not have been for the most part factually true, but it was always
psychologically true. In this sense their rhetoric was never detached from the
social and political reality....
Was
there a design to “reduce them under absolute despotism”? They felt it so and
feared it. They lived under liberty but were afraid of losing it. Their anxiety was real.
In
each period of historical writing, across the different points of view, there
are important insights to be found. It was the editor’s hope that a careful
survey might lead to a new perspective that would
...identify and describe the dominant thrust of the Revolution and to
understand the relationship between that thrust and the many peripheral and
seemingly incongruous tendencies that existed simultaneously with it.
Perhaps
if we can evaluate our nation’s beginnings without entirely dismissing any
point of view, if we can allow for all the “polar contradictions” with which
our minds – all
our minds -- work, we can begin to return to a civil national discourse with
our fellow Americans. I do not mean, however, to underestimate the
difficulties. One that stands out is the increasing gap between rich and poor
as the “middle” migrates ever downward.
Here
are some of the things that some Americans fear -- and my (incomplete) list is
intentionally jumbled rather than divided into an overly simplified “two
sides,” rank-ordered table:
Some
of what Americans fear:
·
falling
into poverty
·
social
violence
·
declining
support for education
·
loss
of religious freedom
·
police
violence
·
religious
or racial discrimination
·
foreigners
·
job
loss
·
losing
jobs to foreigners
·
financial
collapse
·
bankruptcy
·
loss
of privacy
·
losing
jobs to technology
·
terrorism
·
erosion
of civility
·
erosion
of respect for truth
·
confiscation
of guns
·
loss
of health
·
degraded
environment
·
loss
of community
·
neighborhood
conflict
·
loss
of American prestige
·
loss
of basic freedoms
·
government
surveillance
·
corporate
takeover of government
·
natural
disasters
·
civil
war
·
civil
chaos
Unsettled
times? Widespread anxiety? Even those now supposedly “in power” exhibit
resentment nourished by insecurity. I think again of those “polar
contradictions” that Louis Hartz found in American thought:
...pragmatism and absolutism, historicism and rationalism, optimism
and pessimism, materialism and idealism, individualism and conformism...
Where
are we now, I wonder? Anyone certain of being absolutely right and having all
the answers is doubtless guaranteed to be missing a lot of what’s going on, to paraphrase Hartz.
But
then, there’s no way we can take a “long view” of the time in which we live.
That will be the future’s task. So
what is our job now, as Americans? How do you see it?
