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| Loyalist Receiving His Due |
Like an aging whore performing a strip tease, the New Yorker believes there is something new to be seen in its unwanted exposure. I remember an interview with Jimmy Carter of nearly twenty years ago. In the discussion, Carter lamented the American Revolution and that he had lost the opportunity of becoming Prime Minister of South Canada.
According to the New Yorker, it is news that the Revolution was also a colonial civil war. They're also shocked, that as with all civil wars, it was often brutal. Another discovery by the New Yorker is that the Revolution took place in the context of the eighteenth century Atlantic world. One weird thing about this article is the Left's new found love affair with the British Empire. Why, we could have been India and experienced the delights of the Raj!
The quarrels that took place in New York and Philadelphia went on with equal ferocity, and much the same terms, in India and England, and though they got settled by force of arms and minds differently in every place, it was the same struggle everywhere. [Emphasis added]
To substantiate this drivel, the New Yorker relies on some academic whore's Yale dissertation turned into book form that should remain unread.
The article spends a great deal of time attempting to answer Mel Gibson's interpretation of the Revolution from the film The Patriot (seriously). Except for Gordon Wood, the article manages to not mention a single real scholar on the American Revolution.
For decades a cabal of America hating academics have been attempting to revive the Marxist Beard Thesis of the 1920s. In general, they have failed because the evidence to the contrary is too overwhelming for even the parasites of government classrooms to ignore. Charles Beard argued, poorly, that the leaders of the American Revolution were motivated by their own short-term gain. The Neo-Beardians have argued, equally poorly, that the Founders were "communitarians" who opposed Whiggish individualism. Apparently, they have now degenerated to the "argument" that the Revolutionaries were mean to their enemies and are personally responsible for the Cotton Boom that led to the increased use of slave labor. "We could be Canada," they lament. Ironically, Canada won't have them.
I recommend: for a good general history, The Glorious Cause by Robert Middlekauff.
Background and colonial society: The Americans: The Colonial Experience by Daniel Boorstin.
The war's first year and why George Washington was the Revolution's indispensable man: 1776 by David McCullough.
On the philosophy that animated the Revolutionaries: The American Revolution and the Politics of Liberty, Robert H. Webking.
For the best fictional work on the Revolution: the six volume Sparrowhawk series by Edward Cline.
P.S. Someone should inform the dolts at the New Yorker that the British supported the Confederacy during the Civil War. It is extremely unlikely that the Brits would have sacrificed cheap cotton for their textile mills in favor of principle in 1833. If the British attempted to end slavery in the southern colonies at that time, they would have had a war they could not win. Then, there would have been an independent Southern slaveholding Confederacy. Historical counterfactuals are hard - and largely conjecture.
Well,what can you say? It's The New Yorker. Its only value to me, when I bothered to open it, were some of the cartoons. Thank you, Mr. Grant, for mentioning Sparrowhawk. It has been in continuous publication since 2002, no thanks to the original publisher (now non-existent, it went bankrupt).
ReplyDeleteIt's a great series that deserves widespread reading. It's a crime that no major publisher has picked it up. The Ayn Rand Institute's refusal to promote your work demonstrates their core nature and real values - not good.
DeleteWithout the American Revolution, the eastern seaboard would just be another underpopulated commonwealth nation like Canada, Australia, New Zealand.
ReplyDeleteAlso, without the Revolution the British would have kept their North American colonies as an agricultural backwater. There may have been no industrial revolution in the United States. Then, who would have saved the Brits from the Germans, twice?
DeleteThank you for the article.
ReplyDelete" leaders of the American Revolution were motivated by their own short-term gain."
I once read a short book which, individual by individual, discussed what happened to all of the signers of The Declaration of Independence. (Sorry. I can't remember the reference.) Everyone who signed that document knew that they were putting their lives, and quite possibly the lives of their families, on the line.
The idea that they were motivated by the concept of 'shot term personal gain' is malevolent nonsense.