Streetwise Professor

An X follower (@bigwheels89) asked me to post on Ken Burns’ new The American Revolution-An Intimate History documentary. I was planning to anyways, but the nudge got me over my usual tendency to procrastinate. So here it is.

Overall summary: decent–not great–with high variance and frequent eye roll triggers.

To start on the positive. The coverage of the military campaigns was very good . The animated maps in particular were very informative. The war was not characterized by a lot of battles–with the combat in the north being pretty much over by summer 1778 and concentrated in 1780-1 in the south–and the documentation on them is much thinner than for the Civil War, but the documentary succinctly summarizes the major engagements.

One interesting military-related discussion was that relating to the differences in the socio-economic composition of the American army between the ~1775-7 period and the post-1777 years, with the army of the former period having more high status, prosperous men, and the latter being dominated by the economically marginal. My family provides an illustration, with one direct ancestor joining the Virginia Continental Line in February 1776 and another joining the Maryland Continental Line in 1778. The former was a descendent of people who had come to the colonies in the 17th and early-18th century, and who owned property. The latter was a late immigrant (1775) who came as an indentured servant.

Visually, the film is quite striking. This is not a surprise, given Burns’ expertise in the medium. But he deserves extra credit here because he lacks the extensive photographic record of the Civil War, which makes finding the right images far more challenging.

Now for the not so positive. Again not surprisingly Burns constantly genuflects to leftist political pieties, especially relating to race and sex. In so doing, he gives a distorted, and indeed biased, depiction of the remarkable people and events of this remarkable revolution.

And he does so right from the get go, with a recitation of the ludicrous myth that the Iroquois Confederacy was the inspiration for the collective American revolt against Britain and the model for American democracy.

Insofar as democracy is concerned, (a) all colonies had some form of self-government dating back to their founding, and didn’t need instruction from the Iroquois, and (b) the Iroquois Confederacy was a pact between different tribes which were not themselves democratic. It was not a model for a confederacy of independent republics.

With respect to providing a model for the United Colonies and/or United States, it’s hardly as if the Iroquois were the only, or even primary, example of a confederation of league of independent states who united in a common cause without sacrificing their sovereignty. The very words “confederation” and “confederacy” make this clear, both being derived from the Latin confoederatio. If it’s Latin, it’s an old idea. The Old Swiss Confederation dates from the 1350s. And the history of Europe is sprinkled with various “leagues” (another meaning of confoederatio). Hell, there were obviously famous leagues in ancient Greece (e.g., the Delian League).

Burns quotes a Benjamin Franklin reference to the Iroquois Confederacy to support his claim. But Franklin’s statement was pretty snarky, basically saying “look, you idiot Americans, even savages can do it–why can’t you?”

Indians play a prominent role in the documentary beyond their supposed inspiration of ‘Merica. This is reflective of historiography of the last 40 odd years, which does elevate the importance of Native Americans. That is largely justified, but one can go too far, and I think Burns does here. For example, he hypes the importance of the Proclamation of 1763 and the Quebec Act, which put trans-Appalachia off limits to American settlers. Yes, it was an irritant to the colonists, but it was just one such and arguably one of the least important.

As the documentary makes clear-and everyone with the slightest knowledge knows, Massachusetts, and particularly Boston, were the epicenter of the Revolution and that events there were the primary driver of the independence movement. Boston’s ferment had virtually nothing to do with Indian lands in the West. The Revolution started in one of the eastern-most, most oceanic world-facing colonies. The main Native American shading of Boston’s revolutionary fervor was that the participants in the Tea Party dressed up (badly) as Indians.

And of course there is an obsession about race. Again, the black experience and black contribution to the Revolution were traditionally underplayed, but Burns goes overboard in trying to make up for that.

Yes, it’s good to inform people of the fact that up to 10 percent of the Continentals were African American. But the repeated reminders (e.g., in the part about the Marblehead Regiment (14th Connecticut Continental Line) rowing Washington’s beleaguered army from Long Island to Manhattan after the disaster at Brooklyn Heights) are an irritating narrative tic.

As is Burns’ apparent conviction that it is necessary to remind the viewer after every quotation from an American speaking about “liberty” or “freedom” that this did not apply to “enslaved people.” (Eschewing the word “slaves” is itself a PC tic).

Yes. We know. We’ve known for a long time. Hell, they knew it at the time. Saying it once or twice is perfectly fine but the now-for-a-word-from-our-sponsor regularity is unnecessary and annoying.

It also obscures the fact that the colonists’ desire for self-government and individual liberty was sincere, genuine, strong, and almost unique in the world. And if it was tinged with hypocrisy, so be it: what human endeavor is not? And what’s more, a necessary condition for eliminating human bondage is a belief that “all men are created equal.” Without that belief, embodied in the Declaration of Independence, the political dynamic that eventually ended slavery would never have played out.

That is, by obsessing on the hypocrisy Burns denigrates the ideal that (some) Americans were hypocritical about. It thereby obscures the truly remarkable and world-changing nature of the Founding and the Founders, their beliefs, and their actions. The perfect is the enemy of the good, and by hyperventilating over imperfection Burns buries the good.

Along these lines are the repeated references to Lord Dunmore’s proclamation freeing slaves that fled their masters. Burns insinuates that this put the British on a higher moral plane than the Americans.

Hardly. Dunmore’s act was hardly in conformity with, say, Kantian ethics. He was using blacks as a means to achieve his own and his government’s ends. It was pure military expediency with no moral element at all (as Dunmore’s previous acceptance of slavery demonstrates). The persistence of the even more brutal slavery in the British sugar islands further demonstrates that the British could claim no moral superiority over the Americans. Yes, some blacks benefited (though as Burns does note most did not, either dying from smallpox and other diseases or returning to slavery), but this was clearly an unintended consequence of the act.

It would have been OK if the film had checked the diversity boxes and moved on. But too often the diversity boxes overwhelm the truly important narrative.

The Revolution was truly an epochal event. It produced a nation and a government that like all human endeavors were imperfect, but which represented a stunning advance beyond anything seen on earth before. No successor revolution produced anything so remarkable. Indeed, the two most prominent–the French and the Russian–are most notably for the political chaos they unleashed, and the rivers of blood that they caused to flow.

Burns should have taken his cue from someone he claims to admire–Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln was acutely aware of the fundamental defect of the founding, and spoke about it often and eloquently. But he also admired intensely the Founding, the Founders, and the foundational document of the Revolution–the Declaration of Independence–written as it was by a slaveholder.

Lincoln knew that the ideal at the heart of the revolution was universal and eternal, and that much of American history up to his day was devoted to trying to realize that ideal. That is why he spoke of forming “a more perfect Union.” That framing acknowledges imperfection. But that involved living up to the ideals of the Revolution–which were unique in human history.

That is, Burns’ documentary is severely undermined by severely misplaced emphasis. He underplays what is truly revolutionary about the Revolution, and overplays the all too human behavior of those who made it. The Founders–and we–deserve better.