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Back in January 2016, the New Yorker published a cover showing America’s most famous presidents recoiling in horror at the image of Donald Trump on the TV screen:
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The cover was widely mocked by liberal commentators — not because of its attack on Trump but for suggesting that the depicted presidents represented a moral standard worthy of our praise and respect.
"What is distasteful about Trump is not that he offends old-fashioned American values," wrote Mother Jones’s Tim Murphy in one typical reaction. "Trump is distasteful because he taps into certain old-fashioned American values — nativism, brash tough talk, slow-burning authoritarianism; family dynasties — that have played a not-inconsequential role throughout our history."
The criticisms extended to several eras of American presidents. But it was also symbolic of the modern left’s drift from the legacy of the Revolution in particular, and toward its fundamental break with the traditional heroes of our national pantheon.
Over the last generation, liberals have become increasingly emboldened in their denunciations of America's founders, says Yale historian Steven Pincus. The American left stands poised to throw the Revolution overboard, to dismiss the spirit and legacy of 1776 as merely the cause of a racist, sexist, hypocritical aristocracy we should firmly reject.
They’d be wrong to do so. The modern left may have fallen out of step with our revolutionary heritage. But it should reclaim it: For all its warts, the Revolution really did unleash an egalitarian vision of America that frontally assaulted economic and social inequality. It’s a tradition liberals should celebrate and cherish, while expanding and enlarging its scope and ambitions.
The bottom-up radicalism of 1776: a true "political revolution"
The American Revolution ushered in a movement that tore down systems of privilege in favor of more egalitarian ways of organizing society.
The Revolution ended structures of primogeniture and challenged the idea of a landed gentry. It made popular sovereignty an inviolable promise of American government, at least in principle. It helped ignite popular movements not just in America but across the globe.
The definitive version of this interpretation comes from The Radicalism of the American Revolution, a 1991 book by Brown historian Gordon Wood. The Revolution, Wood writes, "was as radical and as revolutionary as any in history," destroying beliefs about the superiority of the wealthy that had stood for centuries:
[The Revolution] brought respectability and even dominance to ordinary people long held in contempt and gave dignity to their menial labor in a manner unprecedented in history and to a degree not equaled elsewhere in the world. The Revolution did not just eliminate monarchy and create republics; it actually reconstituted what Americans meant by public or state power and brought about an entirely new kind of popular politics.
The Revolution did not merely create a political and legal environment conducive to economic expansion; it also released powerful and popular entrepreneurial and commercial energies that transformed the economic landscape of the country. In short, the Revolution was the most radical and most far-reaching event in American history.
Wood’s book produces an exhaustive chronicle of just how massive the Revolution’s social and economic changes were — the explosion of popular religion; the wrenching of a culture from a monarchy to a republic; the sudden growth of public education for boys and girls.
The most prominent figures in the revolutionary story — the politicians we remember — were indeed wealthier and more vested in protecting their economic self-interest than the modern left would like.
But the Founding Fathers are just one small part of the Revolution’s story. This is what the American left has forgotten most fundamentally about the American Revolution: that its foot soldiers were anything but aristocrats.
"I was part of the civil rights movement, and when I look at the early days of the Revolution I see the same thing: a sweeping, widespread, town-by-town popular uprising," says Ray Raphael, author of The Spirit of '74: How the American Revolution Began, about the Massachusetts farmers who began the movement. "When people say the Revolution is a pile of shit because it was all elites, they’re missing this was really a bottom-up revolt."
More than 90 percent of people in Massachusetts were behind the Revolution, and Raphael notes that the exception was largely gentry tied through patronage or business to the crown. The leaders at the convention were slow converts to the revolutionary cause, spurred on by overwhelming populist sentiment.
"It was the most ground-up expression of democracy you could imagine. That’s part of the Revolution," Raphael says. "You don't want to turn your head on that."
Why the left has rejected this version of the Revolution
I should acknowledge the strength behind the most basic objection to celebrating the Revolution: Many of the founders were racist, sexist colonizers determined to wipe American Indians from the continent.
Those charges are true. No one should ever forget that while opposed to slavery as a matter of principle, many of the founders created commercial fortunes by owning other human beings.
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That part of the founders’ story has been erased far too frequently throughout our history. And that’s why it’s understandable that many on the left have overcorrected by saying July 4, 1776, must be understood primarily as an affirmation of that part of their world:
- "Our Founding Fathers fetish is strangling America: The disastrous consequences of our childish hero-worship," writes Elias Isquith in Salon.
- "Forget the Founding Fathers," says Barry Gewen in the New York Times Book Review, in a summary of the major academic research. "The God-given or nature-given rights they claimed for themselves included the right to hold Africans in bondage. "
- "The American Revolution was a mistake," added Vox’s Dylan Matthews in a piece echoing similar themes.
- "The typical strategy of those on the left now is either to ignore the Founders — on the grounds that they don't do elite history — or to point out their hypocrisy — Jefferson, Madison and Washington owned slaves," writes Pincus, the Yale professor.
It’s important to denounce the founders for their racism and acquiescence to slavery. That’s obviously correct and necessary.
The problem is that by applying 21st-century views on race and gender to an 18th-century context, we risk missing the real legacy of the Revolution. The founders were indeed racists by any modern standard. But even within its own time, the Revolution was a force for both racial and economic equality — and can remain the blueprint for those goals more than 240 years later.
The spirit of '76 was the greatest force for emancipation until Lincoln
When the Revolution began in 1776, slavery was legal in every colony. Only Pennsylvania even had an abolition society. Slavery had existed on American soil for two centuries without being substantially challenged by whites.
The American Revolution changed that. Pennsylvania’s emancipation act of 1780, the first of its kind, was written by revolutionary leaders and explicitly cited the fight against British rule as its inspiration. Similar Northern emancipation acts followed: in Massachusetts and New Hampshire in 1783, and then in Connecticut and Rhode Island the next year.
"Politicians, preachers, and propagandists unfurled the rhetoric of natural rights," Paul J. Polgar, a historian at the College of William & Mary, wrote in a 2011 essay for the Journal of the Early Republic, "and the immediate post-Revolutionary period witnessed the emergence of abolition societies as far south as Virginia."
"Slavery was legal in every colony, and the Revolution led directly to the abolition of slavery in the northern United States," says Mary Beth Norton, a professor in Cornell’s history department, in an email.
Even the elites in Philadelphia got swept up by this sentiment. The Declaration of Independence, which has so completely conquered the American imagination that it appears bloodless in a modern context, reflected just how powerful those ideas proved.
"The philosophy of the Declaration of Rights not only preached revolution, it preached the universal revolution," writes Carl Becker in his 1922 book, The Declaration of Independence. "Declaring that the inalienable rights were the same for all men and the only sure foundation of political institutions, it implied that the institutions proper to one people were so to all people."
Despite the revisionist attempts of Confederate reactionaries, Becker writes, the declaration's sweeping odes to equality were meant to apply to both white and black Americans.
"It taught that beneath all local and temporary diversity, beneath the superficial traits and talents that distinguish men and nations, all men are equal in the possession of a common humanity," Becker says.
Every major movement for American progress has cloaked itself in the founders’ rhetoric
Abraham Lincoln once remarked, "I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence."
He’s hardly alone. Indeed, nearly every major movement for social, economic, or racial equality in America has cloaked itself in the rhetoric initially established during the revolutionary era. The modern American left that wants to distance itself from the Declaration of Independence is also thus breaking with:
- Frederick Douglass and the early abolitionists, who spoke about their mission as fulfilling the Revolution’s promise of racial emancipation. ("In justification of their revolt against the established regime, the abolitionists naturally turned to the Declaration of Independence," Becker writes.)
- The Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 — the launch pad of the women’s rights movement in America — where Elizabeth Cady Stanton authored the "Declaration of Sentiments." A huge chunk of it is directly lifted from the Declaration of Independence, and the Seneca Falls delegates explicitly talked about their mission as an extension of the Continental Congress.
- Eugene V. Debs, the most successful socialist presidential candidate not from Vermont, who also worked within the framework established by the revolutionaries. "I like the Fourth of July. It breathes the spirit of revolution," Debs said.
- Martin Luther King Jr., whose lavish praise of the American Revolution is even more over the top than mine.
- Revolutionary, egalitarian movements in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries in France, Latin America, Haiti, communist Vietnam(!), and Hungary that have explicitly cited the American Revolution’s egalitarian aims as inspiration.
I could go on, but the pattern here is clear: The path to progress has come not from rejecting the declaration and Revolution — but by broadening its scope to those the founders wrongfully neglected.
