Empire of Reason: Ratification of the Constitution in New York

Empire of Reason (1988): Ratification of the Constitution in New York

Robert Goldstein and "the Spirit of '76"

The Revolution:
Sweet Liberty: The Bitter Irony

Where the patriots eventually caused too many disasters for Britain and eventually persuaded King George to let them go, literature has been kinder to the Patriots than the box office. Even The Scarlet Coat (Redcoat) which takes a view of the Andre Affair sympathetic to the British followed in a tradition of box office disasters. Where American literature even before James Fennimore Cooper produced notable pieces of fact and fiction about the conception of the nation, the theatre until the time of the Patriot (2000) produced few successes in turning the icons into flesh and blood and retrieving them from shadowy myths.

Robert Goldstein, the father of all American Revolution films, came to a sorry end in the holocaust, but not before he was jailed exiled and then ignored by the country whose heritage he sought to preserve

see The Tragic Odessey of Robert Goldstein

Can politicans and luminaries do anything productive?

Definitely The Last in the Series
An Empire of Reason:
A Film by Muffie Meyer and Ellen Hovde

Little known Empire of Reason presented the battle for ratification of the Second Constitution in surreal achronicalism: reading the history into the era of television coverage.

Contemporary local pols (Mario Cuomo, Ed Koch) played the parts of their predecessors as they carried the debate in broadsides broadcast across the boob tube. There's even some cute commercials hawking the Greatest Hits of the Revolution and promising to take money from New Jersey on par for the then famous price of $9.99. Every true patriot would enjoy this platter.

Walter Cronkite returns to the small screen as anchorman of CTN (Contintental Television Network) nightly news. Al Roker then grossly overweight covered the weather desk, giving the Anti-federalist Democratic-Republicans the grim news: an early snow fall had kept down their voting power upstate.

Yet the Democratic-Republicans do not lose heart easily in demanding a Bill of Rights be attached to the new Constitution. They have a powerful voice in Governor George Clinton who will preside over the convention. Ultimately, the new Constitution would carry when New York City threatens to seceede from the state and deliver a seperate ratification to the US Congess.

George Clinton: Yeoman Politician of the New Republic

Despite imaginative and playful mixing modern communications into the late iron age of the Young Republic, the explanation of the point of controversy in the battle for ratification of the Second Constitution is done with some measure of historical accuracy and emphathy for the events and personalities.

Following the Revolution, the country descended into a state of near chaos and occasional civil war. The sugar coated term "critical period" masks a time of strife and continual border wars with Indians incited by Red Coats who refused to leave territories ceded by the Crown to the new Republic.

The country survived because three of the most pivitol states were run by strong minded governors: Clinton in New York, Hancock in Massachusetts and Henry in Virginia. All three had been among the most radical firebreathing patriots in the agitation that led to revolution. All three opposed the Constitution principally because it lacked the Bill of Rights they had started the Revolution to obtain.

Governor Clinton, the first governor of the state after independence, had an impressive career as a general in the Revolution holding the southern front in the Hudson River Valley Triple Campaign, the British invasion of New York State in 1777. Clinton's defense of Forts Clinton and Montgomery persuaded the British commander Sir Henry Clinton to abandon the thrust northward to relieve Burgoyne. As Governor of New York George Clinton secured the state's borders and prevented Shay's rebellion from seeping into the state.

By contrast, neighboring Pennsylvania, though insufferably run with Quaker regularity, could do little to stem the Red Coat inspired massacres reported in Western Pennsylvania. The Quakers lacked the stomach for reprisals.

It is not easy to see Clinton's resistence to the Second Constitution to be stubborn or ill-conceived. The historical evidence seems to support the claim that the civil strife of the Critical Period was subsiding by the time the second Constitution was proposed.

Empire of Reason in its attempt to breath life into the powdered wigs and frock coats does show some things never change. At the time of Ratification, the mayor of New York City answered demands for a trash collection by running garbage-eating pigs through city streets.

The film, occasionally shown on PBS, received favorable reviews in local newspapers but is only available through Icarus Films of Brooklyn NY at a rather high price for an hour long film not in much demand:

Sale/video: $285 Rental/video: $75

At those prices I do suppose money from New Jersey is accepted.

jd collins is managing editor of Fullosia Press

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