Founding Myths (43 page)

Many college texts, on the other hand, acknowledge the state and local declarations in favor of independence during the spring of 1776, responding to recent research. According to one, Jefferson “drew on language used in the dozens of local ‘declarations' written earlier by town meetings, county officials, and colonial assemblies. The Virginia Declaration of Rights drafted by Mason in May 1776, for example, claimed that ‘all men are equally free and independent, and have certain inherent natural Rights.' ”
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And another: “Many years later Jefferson insisted that there was nothing original about the Declaration of Independence, and he was not entirely wrong. The long list of accusations against King George, which formed the bulk of the Declaration, contained little that was new, and even some of the stirring words in the preamble had been used by the radicals time and again.”
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While new evidence has broadened the Jefferson story at the college level, not one of the textbooks I surveyed mentions that the town meeting in Worcester, Massachusetts, pushed for independence a full twenty-one months before the congressional Declaration
and eighteen months before the rash of declarations starting in April 1776.
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Why not? Unlike the ninety declarations uncovered by Pauline Maier (see
chapter 6
), this one is an outlier. It precedes by far the iconic Declaration and does not fit neatly within the traditional storyline. Although the evidence is conclusive, contained within the Worcester Town Records housed in the basement of Worcester City Hall, evidence and the historical significance of events do not guarantee that those events will make their way into a textbook.
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Even if a constituency emerges to push Worcester's declaration into the story, obstacles will emerge. This document, along with the 1774 revolution that drove it forward, turn the story around, making any rewrite arduous.

If evidence can be inconvenient, the absence of evidence can be very convenient. A case in point: the “Liberty or Death” speech, drafted by William Wirt but attributed to Patrick Henry. Those words have become an irresistible motto that will not be readily relinquished. To admit that William Wirt conjured his hero's speech forty-two years later would be to concede too much. Henry himself has to have delivered that memorable pronouncement or it is not worth celebrating. A too-much-to-lose mythology, Henry's authorship remains impervious to deconstruction or dismissal.

Two other myths have proved surprisingly durable. One features Samuel Adams as the flaming rabble-rouser, and the other the final battle at Yorktown, in which David finally bests Goliath. For very distinct reasons, I expected that each of these would give some ground, but their grip on our national narrative remains as strong or stronger than ever.

The increased attention to popular protest in the Revolutionary days, I conjectured, would lead people to question the top-down dynamic that underlies the Sam Adams mythology: Adams calls the shots and the people do his bidding. Instead, while devoting more attention to popular movements, authors feel an even greater need for decisive protagonists to drive such stories. Waving the banner of a popular movement, Adams consequently leads the pack
more
often rather than
less so. Only a handful of upper-level texts treat him as more than a caricature “firebrand.”

I also conjectured that the scholarly community's focus on the “Atlantic World” during Colonial and Revolutionary times would raise awareness of Britain's global perspective following the defeat at Yorktown. Just a short passage could summarize Britain's options at the time: with the empire threatened on many fronts, a strategic retreat from America appeared the best way to preserve what was left. Very few texts follow this route, however (see
chapter 13
). On one level, this can be explained by the continued demand for tidy endings; a major battlefield loss seems a natural conclusion to a war. But that goes only so far. Yorktown was indeed a pivotal event, but why did this particular defeat lead to an end of the war while the surrender at Saratoga, of similar proportions, did not? The answer to that question would require some attention to Britain's global situation—yet to feature the global context would take America out of the driver's seat, so the question is not asked. Keeping the United States in command of its destiny is an intrinsic component of the traditional narrative. We must remain the protagonists of our own story.

SAME AS IT EVER WAS: IMPEDIMENTS TO CHANGE

Constituent pressure is the surest path to a reconsideration of mythologies, but
who
, exactly, would want to nudge our heroes, heroines, and iconic events aside—and why? In the words of a critic who objected to my deconstruction of the Molly Pitcher tale: “Myth or not, it's still a nice story which does no harm to anyone. Why not just let it alone?” Here is the default rationale for orthodoxy. Traditional stories are, in fact, our tradition. Having invested in them for all these years, we don't
want
them to change. Familiar and comfortable stories have always held sway, yet today the forces of inertia are buttressed by the realities of twenty-first-century media and the move toward uniform standards in education.

Textbooks and tests.
Elementary, middle-school, and secondary texts thrive on tradition. Because these texts require approval by public bodies, publishers must satisfy a broad cross section of citizens, including many who cling fast to the stories they already know. Authors are selected more for their writing talents than for their familiarity with the latest historical research, and editors and publishers have their say as well. Textbook professionals, not people with expertise in the field, typically design timelines and review questions. Such aids are geared to standardized tests, and standard, in history, translates to traditional. For more than a decade we have witnessed a national crusade for excellence in education, but so-called “excellence” is based on historical narratives all Americans should presumably know. Testing reflects this:

       
•
   
“Who exhorted the Boston crowd?” Better say Sam Adams, not Ebenezer MacIntosh, Thomas Young, or William Molineux, actual street leaders at the time.

       
•
   
“Who wrote the ‘Give me liberty, or give me death' speech?” William Wirt will not be listed as a multiple-choice option, so you might as well go with Patrick Henry, even if you suspect otherwise.

       
•
   
“Where and when did the Revolution start?” Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775—no matter that Massachusetts patriots had already overthrown British rule the previous year.

       
•
   
“What was the coldest, hardest winter of the Revolutionary War?” If you choose Morristown in 1779–1780 you will be marked wrong, although of course you are correct.

Some authors and editors might question the narrative they are expected to produce, but they hesitate to put themselves too far ahead of the curve. Caught in the crossfire between story and evidence, they
split the difference to satisfy both masters. “Reportedly,” “according to tradition,” and related terms are the most obvious hedges, but there are others, chief among them the passive voice: “became known as,” “was heard to say,” and so on. Texts written for older students also evidence such practices, although perhaps not as often. One college text, excellent in many other ways, describes the crowd actions in Boston in 1768: “ ‘Let us take up arms immediately and be free,' Sam Adams was heard to say; ‘We shall have thirty thousand men to join us from the Country.' ”
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The key question masked by “was heard to say” is: by whom? In this case, by Richard Sylvester, trying unsuccessfully to frame Samuel Adams.

Publishers, for commercial reasons, release new editions every few years, but their revisions are generally minimal. One popular title—
American Pageant
, first published in 1956—is now in its fifteenth edition. For the first time, the original author, Thomas A. Bailey, no longer appears on the cover or the title page, but the overwhelming majority of the text for the Revolutionary Era is reprinted verbatim, just as he wrote it in the middle of the past century. In three chapters covering the Revolutionary period, the only difference in the central narrative between the fourteenth edition, published in 2010, and the fifteenth, in 2014, is the addition of one short paragraph (fifty-six words) on “women's role in the Revolutionary War.”
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Internet.
Increasingly, the Internet is not merely supplementing textbooks but replacing them. In theory, the Net's immediacy would encourage newer, more accurate renditions of history. In practice, repetition is rewarded and old stories frequently prevail. If you search for “Molly Pitcher,” some half-million results appear. Most people will select from the first page, where the myth is immediately confirmed. The Internet's Free Dictionary states flatly: “Noun 1. Molly Pitcher—heroine of the American Revolution who carried water to soldiers during the Battle of Monmouth Court House and took over her husband's gun when he was overcome by heat (1754–1832).” This is followed by a link to Mary Ludwig Hays McCauley.
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Wikipedia
backs off just a tad—“Molly Pitcher (1754–1832) was a nickname given to a woman said to have fought in the American Battle of Monmouth, who is generally believed to have been Mary Ludwig Hays McCauley”—but it includes two mid-nineteenth-century graphic illustrations, a photograph of “Molly Pitcher Spring,” and several citations to children's biographies that affirm and appear to validate the standard story.
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Scrolling down a Google search, and on the next few lists of ten, we find several commercial establishments (mostly inns and alehouses), the Molly Pitcher rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike, a horse race, and some grade-school student papers. Not until far down, after several groups of ten, do we begin to see an occasional article that discusses the myth and how it came to be.

The Internet lends its digital wealth to anybody with a point to prove and the time to mine for supporting material, to be manipulated as one pleases. All sources are treated as equal, whether they are contemporary documentation or the distant memories of aging men and women, often influenced by intervening events. In this manner, statements by the founders rendered in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, after several mythologies had already taken root, are treated as trustworthy, even if contradicted by hard contemporaneous evidence.
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The Internet didn't initiate this flimsy method of historical research, but by making the practice so much easier, it facilitates the spread of the misinterpretations the mythologies produce.

If the Internet is an agent of orthodoxy, it is also an agent of change. A generation ago, scholars needed a major research library to access published historical records that are now available electronically. The Internet has expanded the field of “
public
ation”—that is, making source materials available to the public. Not so long ago, documents needed to be set in print in order to be read outside their respective repositories; in the mid–twentieth century they could be photographically reproduced and shipped to research institutions; now, they can be scanned and accessed from any computer across the globe. This greatly facilitates the research necessary to correct historical mistakes.
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On the one hand, easy access to information has fueled history's many partisans. On the other hand, it has enabled amateurs to become true scholars. Some of the best historical research in Revolutionary Era history is now conducted by people with no university affiliation. This has taken popular narratives of the Revolution to a new level, more firmly rooted in contemporaneous documentation.
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NEW DIRECTIONS?

Back to the source.
In educational circles, the Internet is beginning to transform the very nature of textbooks. Previously, school texts provided a running narrative, to be swallowed whole by their readers; now, that narrative is often accompanied by links to digital documentation. Because texts are reissued every few years, they are synchronizing swiftly with electronic media. Documents are moving front and center, with students themselves helping to create the narratives.

The new Common Core State Standards, adopted by forty-five states at this writing (although opponents in a few states are trying to stop their implementation), are overwhelmingly text centered. For a generation, innovative history educators have been featuring what they call “DBQs,” or document-based questions, to increase critical thinking and interpretive skills, and Common Core is establishing this approach as the professional standard. Fifth graders are being asked to “analyze multiple accounts of the same event or topic, noting important similarities and differences in the point of view they represent.” Middle-school students are expected to “identify aspects of a text that reveal an author's point of view or purpose (e.g., loaded language, inclusion or avoidance of particular facts).” Finally, juniors and seniors in high school must learn to “evaluate authors' differing points of view on the same historical event or issue by assessing the authors' claims, reasoning, and evidence” and “corroborating or challenging them with other information.”
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Such skills are critical to establishing historical literacy, yet the rise
of document-based learning does raise questions. How are documents selected? Are narrative accounts in textbooks subject to examination? How deeply do the DBQs penetrate? And perhaps most critically, how is the context of each document presented? Without context, we cannot understand texts, but without texts, we will never be able to establish context. This conundrum, fundamental to the practice of history, comes to the fore with document-based learning.
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