Class News

Tim Breen ’64 writes an opinion piece in The New York Times

George Washington Would Hate Trump’s July 4 Parade

The men and women who fought in the American Revolution despised pageantry and personality cults.

by T.H. Breen

Mr. Breen, a professor at large at the University of Vermont, is the author of the forthcoming book The Will of the People: The Revolutionary Birth of America.

July 3, 2019

President Trump has invited the American people to what he claims will be the biggest and best Fourth of July celebration in the nation’s history. Influenced by the huge nationalist displays he witnessed in Europe, Mr. Trump promises “a really great parade to show our military strength.” And he will treat the country to a “major fireworks display, entertainment, and an address by your favorite President, me!”

All Americans should be appalled. Even during an era of extreme hyperbole, the unabashed narcissism driving the parade plans is astonishing. It runs counter to the explicit aims and faith of the ordinary Americans who founded the United States.

The focus on a single leader — on the construction of a cult of personality — would have incensed the men and women who sacrificed so much to create a new nation. As Capt. Joseph Bloomfield explained to a company of New Jersey troops preparing to fight in the Revolutionary War, the American states had “entered a new era of politics.” He warned the soldiers to be on guard against the rise of an “aspiring Demagogue, possessed of popular talents and shining qualities, a Julius Caesar, or an Oliver Cromwell” who “will lay violent hands on the government and sacrifice the liberties of his country.”

At a moment when exclusionary forms of national identity are on the rise, we should remember that the ordinary people who suffered so much during a long war believed that their sacrifice legitimated a system of government in which ordinary people like themselves had a meaningful voice. There would be no more doffing the cap to noblemen. No more claims to special privilege. In the independent republic all citizens would be equal under the law.

There were obvious exceptions, of course. Native Americans and African-American slaves were excluded from the new political regime. But for all that, we can understand the Rev. Zabdiel Adams’s pride when he said, “We have at present a happy constitution of government framed by wise men and accepted by a majority of people at large” and that “we shall doubtless taste the sweets of that liberty” for which “we have bled at every vein.”

Adams provides an excellent guide to the hope and expectations of the people at large. On April 19, 1783, he delivered an extraordinary anniversary sermon in Lexington, Mass. Many men and women in the congregation had watched as their relatives were shot and killed during the famous battle in that town eight years earlier. Giving meaning to their experience, he encouraged forgiveness, rather than bluster and pomp. Adams urged them to distinguish between pride in their revolutionary achievement and the poisonous spirit of resentment that invited violence against former enemies.

Before Congress issued the Declaration of Independence, the American people had already taken charge of the revolution. Filling the vacuum left by the retreat of British officials to the security of major port cities, the members of local committees — most of them elected by their neighbors — gathered weapons and enforced a boycott against imported goods. Their efforts on the local level helped mobilize broad support for a system of government based on the will of the people.

Throughout the country, these new men came forward, many without previous political experience. When the war seemed to be going badly, the committees maintained public order, regulated prices and wages during a period of hyperinflation, and exposed profiteers who viewed the revolution as a chance to line their pockets. Repeating appeals for unity — calls to sacrifice for the common good — the committees articulated and enforced the interests of the communities from which they sprang.

Sustaining resistance to Britain brought forth a conviction that Americans were fighting for a government of the people. As Mercy Otis Warren, a contemporary historian of the revolution, noted, massive participation “produced unanimity and energy throughout the continent.” As she explained, “thus, as despotism frequently springs from anarchy, a regular democracy sometimes arises from the severe encroachments of despotism.”

Ordinary revolutionaries knew what kind of civil society that they wanted to create. As the Rev. William Gordon observed in 1774, when peace eventually returned, the United States would recover prosperity and soon “become far more glorious, wealthy, and populous than ever,” because of “the thousands and tens of thousands that will flock to it, with riches, art, and science acquired by their foreign countries.”

He declared that “the surviving inhabitants and their posterity together with refugees, who have fled from oppression and hardships, whether civil, or sacred, to our American sanctuary,” will “daily give thanks to the Sovereign of the universe, that this general asylum was not consumed.”

The preservation of a refuge for liberty is not something we can take for granted. The sirens of racial supremacy and festering resentment tempt us. They threaten our own revolutionary heritage. George Washington understood the danger. During his first term as president, he warned against the rise of “political Mountebanks” — demagogues who “miss no opportunity to aim a blow at the Constitution” and “paint highly on one side without bringing into view the arguments which are offered on the other.”

How we give voice to a shared sense of national purpose remains a challenge. If Americans are now swayed by military parades and pageantry, if we defer to a few rather than to one another, if we put ideology or party ahead of the rule of law and community, we keep no faith with our revolutionary forebears. If we betray our original founding principles, the fault lies not with the original revolutionaries but with us.