I am in the minority — I didn’t think that Ken Burns’ Revolutionary War was not good. And I really regret this, because Ken Burns is really fantastic.
American Revolutionary War was not the battlefields (mostly), rather Revolutionary War was intellectual connections to English rights of man, and the the Stamp Act, Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, the taverns debates about Americans’ rights of freedom, the rights of women, … I thought that should have started on 1720 (or further back) — the religious debates and the nascent political rights, and then go to French Indian War, that Stamp Act (and associated Acts), and so.
Tad Stoermer has a similar viewpoint; similar but not the same. Also, the guests were terrific, particularly Alan Taylor, Annette Gordon-Reed, Kathleen Duval, Bernard Bailyn, and Gordon Wood. Obviously.
Update: Jack Rakove, What’s Wrong with The American Revolution by Ken Burns, Washington Monthly.
Getting all censorious now, are we…? I will re-post my comment.
Burns’ work is mostly superficial propaganda. Stoermer’s claims are, in turn, largely exaggerations and distortions.
How to tell? Even Burns shows that the supposed ideological revolution (1760-1775) wasn’t adopted by the majority of the population. It just wanted to live quietly and peaceably, and it largely didn’t participate in the war. More than that, a sizeable portion of the population remained loyal. If you want to tell a story about the “transformation of political consciousness,” then you’ll have to confront the fact that this simply wasn’t true for a great many people in the colonies, and not just regarding the self-identifying Loyalists.
Burns’ work suggests that only perhaps a third or so of the population had had the supposed revolutionary intellectual break, to varying degrees, which Stoermer insists upon. Even then, Burns is probably right that, had Westminster actually acquiesced to the dissenters’ terms circa 1774, there would have been no war, i.e., there would be taxation with representation. (Burns should have also said more about why the hated taxes were really levied, namely England’s financial coffers after the Seven Years’ War…) So, without the war, what becomes of the intellectual revolution? Does it wither away after a generation? Does it get heavily moderated and absorbed into the English reforms of the 19th century? Either which way, Stoermer is and must be wrong about the importance of the wars and battles — especially since it hardened some people’s ideological commitments. Without a war, there’s no reason to think the supposed ideological revolution succeeds or persists.
Another important aspect of Burns’ work is showing that, from the very outset, the organizers of the revolution had a racist imperialist program in mind. At no time did they really believe in the espoused rights for others—especially the people whose land they stole. (The “transformation of political consciousness” sure seems to not have stopped any enslaved black person from doing their best to get to British forces to escape the Patriots.) The two, the rhetoric and the imperialist program, are inseparable. To make a proper account of things, you’d have to confront some ugly facts about the CLAIM of “transformative political consciousness” not actually being anything quite like Stoermer insists it was. This was not simply a failure to appreciate the import of newly adopted radical ideas; it is instead to confront scholarly exaggeration of the belief in, commitment to, the rhetoric used to publicly rationalize an independence movement to create a new separate empire.
Relatedly, what Burns’ documentary understates is the Framers’ rejection of democracy. Not just a republican form of government as a check on democracy, but a republican form of government as an alternative to democracy. This is something propagandists continue to intentionally muddle unto this day. (It may involve some of the same folks who intentionally misuse the term “fascism” today, too.) More could also have been said about the anti-democratic institutional forms that John Adams and other Framers like him would have constructed had they gotten their way. So, Stoermer is correct that Burns focuses too much on the war and not ideas, but he himself exaggerates the radicalism of those ideas—ones that would not have been radical to many/most Dutch or Swiss people at that time.
I did appreciate the documentary’s hinting at the Patriots’ authoritarian treatment of the Loyalists (false accusations, unjust and torturous imprisonment, usurpation of property without just compensation). And, of course, the classic chestnut, the policing of thought and speech. It gave the viewer a sense that some of the patriots were closer to the Jacobins than might have otherwise assumed in terms of their totalitarian tactics, aspirations, and actions.
It was also extremely annoying to have the narrator harp on about the “occupation” of the several states in the latter episodes. It was an independence movement, fought by only a portion of the population (the dregs of society and immigrants after middle class and upper-middle class idealists/ideologues had decided it wasn’t for them after the first year or so), against the legitimate sovereign. But you can’t unjustly “occupy” what is rightfully yours — unless you want to say that it rightfully belonged to no Europeans, and that American Patriots “occupy” stolen land unto this day. The Loyalists were loyal to the legal owner of the lands.
And don’t kid yourselves: as has been pointed out repeatedly since it occurred, this was an independence movement, not a full revolution. The laws mostly stayed the same. The “revolutionary” ideas mostly came from England. The core political and legal concepts, the political ideals, the basic morality and customs of the people, and the religions remained the same. It was largely the playing out of Anglo-Protestant ideas and ideals. Stoermer’s insistence upon Bostonians and New Englanders fighting for their “rights” and abuses thereof (reliant upon a British legal frame, upon a British conceptual frame, etc.) belies his lack of understanding of how NON-revolutionary their stance was. Hell, the colonists even had considerable members of Parliament and the English populace agree with them in this regard…
Today, that conceptual frame, that cultural substratum, is consciously being eviscerated by certain forces in society — and certainly not by the political right, despite efforts to delegitimize it as fascist and worse. The agents behind this effort assume that, out of the vacuum, a greater effectuation of liberty and equality will arise, rather than their collapse and abandonment. They gamble with the lives of hundreds of millions (let alone the billions outside the United States) without due consideration of the means or the consequence, let alone the legitimacy (anti-democratic, in fact, ironically enough) of their actions. If the “ever-perpetual” American revolution fails now, such folks will have only themselves to blame for choosing authoritarian social re-engineering instead of liberty. Of course, lovers of (real) liberty, lovers of responsible and legitimate forms of government, and lovers of rights around the globe do not need American “progressives” like Burns or Stoermer telling them how to think or live. And they probably shan’t listen to them ever again anyway.
*censorial