Founding Myths

by Ray Raphael

  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.

  So how do we purvey the American Revolution to these ten-year-olds? We enlist the basic elements of successful storytelling: heroes and heroines, with an emphasis on wise men; battles that pit good against evil and David against Goliath; and, of course, happy endings.

  History aimed at children is dominated by the study of particular men and women who are portrayed as “special.” Although fifth-grade texts are structured around a narrative thread, their abundant minibiographies leave readers with a sense that history is some sort of amalgamation of the lives of memorable personalities. Over the past few decades, the choice of protagonists has changed: Abigail Adams is sometimes featured over her husband, John, and a Latino, Bernardo de Gálvez, now appears in nearly every text for young people. But the Founding Fathers, very wise men, still occupy a prime position. Schoolchildren learn that their nation, at its birth, was in trustworthy hands.

  Battles are the most concrete manifestations of historical conflict. Children, with their sense of well-defined “teams” and of definite winners and losers, intuitively understand them. The struggles between soldiers and civilians that continued throughout the war and daily shaped it, on the other hand, would be more difficult to grasp. Battles of the Revolutionary War have a particular appeal to children. Clever and dedicated to their cause, ragtag Americans, acting the role of David, outwitted and outfought Goliath, overconfident British soldiers dressed up in fancy red uniforms. “Discover how a few brave patriots battled a great empire,” beckons the cover copy of American Revolution, published by DK Eyewitness Books “in association with the Smithsonian Institution,” with an age range advertised as “8 and up.”10 Resolution is important for children, and this military conflict had the best ending possible: the birth of an independent nation, our nation.

  Through the study of history, young people learn about political processes, present as well as past. In California, students study state history in fourth grade, early United States history in fifth grade, ancient world history in sixth grade, not-so-ancient world history in seventh grade, and nineteenth-century United States history in eighth grade. Ninth grade is open, although many students opt to take geography or other electives. Sophomores study modern world history and juniors, modern United States history. Most states follow a similar pattern. By the time seniors get around to studying politics, government, and economics, they have been reading and hearing stories for seven years about individuals and social groups who struggled for power in the past.

  Along the way, students internalize a “grammar” they will use to decipher political events. All to
o often that grammar is individualistic, linear, and devoid of context. The History and Social Science Standards for the California Public Schools, for example, require teachers to “describe the views, lives, and impact of key individuals (e.g., King George III, Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams).”11 This directive assumes that individuals influence events but ignores a reverse truth, that events influence individuals. Such a skewed perspective hides real-life political processes. Students do not address hard but instructive questions embedded in authentic historical investigation: How do certain individuals come to represent groups and constituencies? How do some people gain access to positions of power, thereby determining the fates of others? How do people come together to resist domination and stand up for their own interests?

  History, if rendered responsibly, can direct and instruct students toward such high-level inquiry, but at what point can we start young people along that path? Even ten-year-olds can understand that during Revolutionary times, leaders did not act alone but depended on local committees and congresses. Samuel Adams and other Boston activists organized a local committee of correspondence. This group reached out to towns in the hinterlands, which then formed similar committees that communicated with each other, as the name suggests. They strategized. They organized. Even George Washington, the commander in chief, consulted his Council of War on significant military maneuvers. This shift in focus promotes a civics lesson appropriate for young children. It urges collective, spirited participation by the many, not dominance by the few. It demonstrates that leaders lead best when acting in concert with others. Why not teach such things early on, when students are beginning to look at the wider world and imagining ways to make it better? And why not confirm the original meaning of American patriotism: government must be based on the will of the people?

  Studying the revolutionary behavior of common citizens would also reveal some of the dangers inherent in majoritarian democracy, particularly the suppression of Tory dissent or the use of jingoism to mobilize support. Here is “bullying” on a grand scale. The forthright examination of human suffering in the American Revolution can counterbalance the unquestioning celebration of war. As students follow the conflicts in the 1760s and early 1770s, they can see how imperial suppression, intended to break the resistance, only increased it, and how peaceful resolutions broke down. These sorts of lessons reveal rather than conceal the dynamics of political struggle, both past and present. Individual protagonists can and will feed into this drama within the curricula, but they should not define it. Washington needed his soldiers as much as they needed him. Ten-year-olds or high-school students can readily comprehend that history—everything that happened in the past—is a team sport. No single player determines the outcome.

  HISTORY AND HERITAGE

  To tell historical tales uncritically, believing them to be literal representations of real events, is like treating paintings on a museum wall as photographic reproductions. Unless we acknowledge the hand and mind of the artist, we mistake fiction for fact. This can be dangerously self-serving. By choosing stories specifically tailored to make us feel good, we turn people who once lived and breathed, with their richly textured lives, into stick figures. We pay a high price for the illusion that we can bring the past to bay.

  Sometimes, this illusion is put to political uses. The hero-worship that passed as history in the early nineteenth century served the interests of a developing nationalism. The telling of history was itself of historical import: shared stories of the Revolution helped people feel like “Americans.” Today, the power of illusion is even greater. Storytelling has become a science, not just an art. Audacious professional marketers use sophisticated techniques to manipulate public opinion. The overarching reach of broadcast and electronic media makes these strategies particularly insidious. Contrived stories, self-serving interpretations of public events, are not just incidental—they are anathema to the functioning of democracy, which depends on the free flow of accurate and often complex information.

  Although we must always remain vigilant, some stories are more suspect than others. As a rule of thumb, the better the story, the more we should be on guard. Certain tales play so well they demand to be told, regardless of the evidence. So it is with traditional stories about the American Revolution, which appear immune to critical complaint. Some are contradicted by hard evidence: Paul Revere did not wait to see whether one signal lantern or two would flash from Old North Church. The stirring call to arms that ended with the phase “Give me liberty, or give me death,” although inspired by Patrick Henry, was conjured decades later by someone else. Thomas Jefferson did not gather the ideas for the Declaration of Independence “from deep inside himself.” Other stories fall short because they lack perspective and mask key events. Common farmers in Massachusetts had already shed British rule before Lexington and Concord. The war did not screech to a halt at Yorktown. David did not lick Goliath all on his own. And yet, whether true or not, traditional tales such as these have been certified by ceaseless repetition. Collectively, the litany is our identifying American story, our heritage.

  But heritage is not history, even if they sometimes overlap. Heritage places the past in service of the present; history receives the past on its own terms. History looks beyond traditional stories and seeks only primary evidence, contemporaneous to the times being studied. Heritage embraces stories of later derivation because others have done so before us. Such tales, even if only imagined, provide continuity to our national narrative, one generation to the next.

  Heritage has critical importance and is essential to human society. Others before us have shaped the world we live in now, and we must appreciate that as we take our own place in the grand sweep of events. In many ways we belong to the past, to our heritage—yet the past does not belong to us. We don’t own it. To own something is to control it, and we cannot control what actually happened in a time gone by. Nor should we pretend that we can by substituting an imaginary past that is more to our liking.

  Although facts sometimes challenge heritage, evidence-based history is not for that reason unpatriotic. The Revolutionary Generation did in fact create a nation. To discover just how people pulled that off, we do best to consult original, contemporaneous sources and build our narrative upon these alone. The highest honor we can give to Revolutionary Americans is to try to understand them on their terms, without undue intervention from other Americans who lived between then and now. This requires constant attention. Unless we examine the distortions passed on by previous renderings of our national narrative, we will not discern how these might be clouding our vision today. Those who do not learn from the mistakes of history-telling are doomed to repeat them.

  AFTERWORD: WHICH MYTHS PERSIST—AND WHY

  Ten years have passed since the initial publication of Founding Myths. Much can change in a decade—or not. Today, in current renditions of our national narrative, does Paul Revere still wake up those sleepy-eyed farmers? Does Molly Pitcher bring water to thirsty soldiers and fire the cannon of her fallen “gallant”? Does Thomas Jefferson find the ideas for the Declaration of Independence “from deep within himself?” Have such tales remained fixed in our historical imaginations, or do we now pay closer attention to the historical record?

  Story by story, the answers are mixed. By comparing school textbooks published from 2001 to 2004 with those published from 2011 to 2014, we can get some sense of which tales show the greatest resiliency and which are more malleable. These answers, in turn, can provide insights into why some mythologies stand firm in the face of countervailing evidence while others cede at least some ground.

  Let’s start with the tales that show some indication of weakening. Today, more attention is being paid to enslaved people who sought their freedom by fighting with the British, undermining the myth of the patriotic slave in the Deep South. So too with Nat
ive Americans: nearly all texts now mention that more sided with the British than with the Americans, and often they explain why. Women are presented front and center more than ever. One college textbook, for instance, features letters written by five women during the Revolutionary War but not a single letter from a male Revolutionary soldier.1 Louisiana governor Bernardo de Gálvez, meanwhile, is a fixture in nearly every text, giving the narrative a Latino protagonist.

  These changes are not just happening of their own accord; constituencies are pushing for them. Concerted action on the part of specific communities is the clearest path to changing the historical narrative in our textbooks. Conversely, mythologies that remain unchallenged by any particular constituency are less likely to give way. Even if backcountry patriots in the South were as brutal as Tories, no current backcountry Tory constituency demands equal treatment.

  Without a constituency, can evidence alone provide the thrust for change? The short answer: yes, but only occasionally, and even then the myth will often find ways to adapt and survive.

  Take Molly Pitcher, a clear fabrication. Word is getting out, and our favorite Revolutionary heroine appears less often than she did a decade past—but she does surface still. Some texts, unaware of research that lays the myth bare, carelessly repeat the tale verbatim, while several others, knowing better, have devised ways to feature Molly nonetheless. With a wink and a nod, they offer a sweeping qualifier—“reportedly,” “allegedly,” “according to legend,” “according to tradition,” or “the story goes,” open invitations to repeat the tale without making any claim to authenticity. This classic textbook hedge allows the “legend” or “tradition” to continue intact, immunized against any and all evidence to the contrary. Never do we see the more honest formulation of what these texts are actually saying: “There is no historical documentation for this story, but we are passing it on nonetheless because it’s just so good and it meets our need to feature Revolutionary women.”