A decade in the making, Ken Burns’s much-ballyhooed The American Revolution gives the viewer a fair idea of what to expect in its opening moments. By the time young Ben Franklin wandered down the streets of Philadelphia carrying his famous bread loaves, the narrator Peter Coyote tells us, the Iroquois nation had already established “a democracy that had flourished for centuries.” Franklin, soon to join the ranks of the Founding Fathers, foresaw a “similar union” for his own country, which implies that one somehow led to the other. This is, to say the least, far-fetched.
To suggest that the Founders—classicists to a man—somehow learned the arts of governance from the Iroquois and not from the Greeks, the Romans, and their own British forebears is about what you’d expect from this six-part series, which the historian Tad Stoermer wants no part of.
Brushing aside the predictable superlatives of less knowledgeable reviewers, the author of the forthcoming Resistance History of the United States subjects the miniseries to a tarring-and-feathering that is, for the most part, well-deserved. Stoermer, coming from the left of the political spectrum, calls Burns’s American Revolution little more than “nationalist propaganda with better production values,” the object of which, quoting Burns, is “to put the us back in the U.S.”
This is understandable enough in these fractious times and sure to appeal to a great many viewers who will go away feeling better about their country—and, more importantly, about themselves. Just as Burns brings in the Iroquois, he attempts to show that Franklin, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and the rest were themselves engaged in a comparably noble (if “flawed”) attempt to unify much of the American continent and the people who lived there, different and antagonistic as they could be. There were foundational principles at stake here and, if you don’t know the end of the story, they won. Hallelujah.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member