"A Republic, if you can keep it," Franklin announced to the crowd gathered outside Independence Hall when the Second Constitution was finally framed after long debates. Yet the story leading up to that dramatic moment
has never received the full attention it deserves from the silver screen. Robert Goldstein, the pioneer who blazed the trail in the theatre for the Revolution was hounded, jailed and ultimately delivered
up to the country's enemies.
For the portrayal of the seminal event to evoke such a violent reaction from the government the Revolution inspired and created, the birth of the nation must have been a moment fraught with complexity and confusing contradictory emotions.
Americans tend to use easily digestible catch phrases to explain their position on a complex event to avoid critical reasoning. However the more perceptive on either side of an event often find that, after skeptically probing underlying assumptions, the same reasons lead them to opposite conclusions. So found Kenneth Robert's character Oliver Wiswell in the novel of the same name the American Tory who agreed with almost all the grievances the colonials had with Britian, yet fought for Britain in the American War.
The easily digestible catch phrases work well with the Wars which receive the most attention from the screen. Kenneth Robert's Oliver Wiswell tramping the South in the wake of Cornwallis' Army came to the belief that Whigs simply easily distractible by catchy slogans. In times and wars which followed, sloganism facilely converts the ever very popular Second World War into a syrupy melodrama and the Civil War into a drawn out Southern tragedy. The First World War despite intensive government efforts to rally the populus was never very popular. Efforts to dramatize it have never proven successful.
Yet the major hurdle in cinematizing the seminal event is the understanding of it.
This issue had crept up early in pre-motion picture days. A full generation after the revolution and the end of conflict with Britain, the American public, looking back at the monumental event and finding a dearth of source material, mythologized it into a great national pageant, distinguishing it from the violence of the Revolution the Americans had inspired in France. The old order in America had fallen in speeches, parades, and oratory.
A Revolution is a violent divisive event, an abrupt change with the existing order, the creation of a new path. The very violence and the unnecessary destructiveness of the initial course of Revolution persuaded Kenneth Roberts's Oliver Wiswell to remain with the peace, harmony and order of the Empire in face of the open sudden hatred of his friends and neighbors for everything British. Although hatred of Britain subsided into a form of peaceful co-existence which blossomed into the "special relationship" just one step short of total reconciliation, the Revolutionaries held no such promise of future mutual accommodation open. "We hold them as we hold all mankind, enemies in war, in peace, friends," the declaration reads.
The Republic which springs from the American Revolution is the product of a conflict with Britain which takes the form in part of a Revolution in the French sense in which an existing order was cast asunder when Crown officials were deposed and their supporters imprisoned or run off; a national liberation struggle where an occupied nation casts out the occupier; and
a bloody civil war between contestants bitterly vying for power.
Enaring from the very nature of the event, a primary obstacle to a film on the Revolution is Britain and the US Special relationship. Books may sell in a limited market of an interested, select public unconcerned with current international political ramifications of a controversy; movies, due to the expenses of production, must be international blockbusters the very first week after release. While the more calculating British may be more receptive to constructive criticism on many fronts, The American Revolution is a topic that galls them today. Yet Britain and its major commonwealths are an important English speaking market a motion picture producer must consider.
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Kenneth Robert chronicled the Glorious Cause in historical
fiction. His Arundell and Rabble in Arms track Arnold's
career as the American Hannibal from his march on Quebec to Victory
at Saratoga. In Oliver Wiswell, Robert takes a bold stride:
retelling the Revolution from the Tory point of view. Lost from view in
Robert's work after he is carried off the battlefield at Saratoga,
Arnold joins loyalist ranks in the bitter tale of Oliver Wiswell.
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America's turn to a cozy special relationship leads to a corollary difficulty: facing not only the violence rupture but also the change in direction away from involvement in European conflicts. A prime reason for the breach was that association with England drew America into all International escapades Britain undertook. Freedom broke America free from Europe's never ending cycles of wars inspired by British ambitions. The special relationship brought America back into the pacified fold not only to share in the gentility and order of the British monarchate but also into the cycle of wars primarily to protect British interests.
Of course the first picture produced in the genre, Goldstein's flic Spirit of 76 was condemned for having upset ally Britain and endagered
the budding special relationship.
Then of course the War itself looms as a difficulty. America did not win its independence as much as Britain lost it. Kenneth Roberts' Oliver Wiswell and his Tory friends bottled up in British held New York City would have most certainly agreed. Despite a few glittering moments in the early part of the war, the Americans fought poorly. Yet the British Army never fully pressed its advantages. By and large composed of Whigs, the Red Coat's Officer Corps found no objection to the stated original goal of the Patriots: one King, two legislatures. It seems the idea of a special relationship is not one which is original with the 20th century. Washington was repeatedly let off the hook as the Red Coat leadership encouraged a negotiated peace. Only when the Patriots rejected the Carlyle Commission's Report which would have resolved the stated causus belli did the Red Coats give determined battle. The War in the South (1778-1783) which followed was the bitterest part of the struggle.
British atrocities were a reason cited for condemning the film Spirit of 76. The British do rankle at
American claims of British War crimes in the struggle for independence.
Even today, the portrayal in the movie the Patriot of
the Red Coats as brutish conquerors invited protest from Britain.
The guerrilla war in the South was fought without gentility, without conventions, and generally without quarter. The tactics of Sumpter and Marion and Morgan and Greene in The Southern Department, commemorated in The Swamp Fox and The Patriot, left its mark on the American mythology touting its Army as a resourceful bunch willing to take fantastic risks and break all conventions of warfare to defeat a better organized and equipped enemy and left its mark on a popular perception that the Revolution was a Great Turkey Shoot.
To the contrary, Washington's objective throughout the War was to build a conventional European styled army capable of defeating the Red Coats in one colossal engagement. That concept, not the myth, has infected unconsciously American military planning under different guises ever since. That same one decisive Armageddon was the stated objective of the Union and Confederate Armies. Similar sentiments were espoused by Mac Arthur in Korea and Westmoreland in Vietnam and hides under the tag `Awe and Spectacle' in the Bushist strategic thinking in the current Iraq conflict.
The personality of Washington is the greatest hurdle of all. It is difficult to reconcile the legend with the event. James Fennimore Cooper who tried in literature lived to have regretted the introduction of a moral ambiguity around the great leader which the novel The Spy created. Washington was a clever warrior, hitting the Hessians and the British just at the right moment necessary to keep the élan of `The Cause' alive; yet he slavishly followed orders from Congress which led to great military disasters. He wanted a conventional victory when irregular tactics worked better. He even rejected Franklin's proposal that it would be cheaper to arm and train troops with bows and arrows just to reap surprise and terror. Yet Washington never became the dictator many others would have made him perhaps because he understood how meaningless dictatorship was in the context of a country that listened only when it wanted to. On the other hand, others who might have stood with him in the lime light were swept away. Washington was not one to share in laurels.
Colonel Dupuy in his classic writing A Short History of the Revolution warns iconoclasts not to ignore Washington's talent in de-mythologizing the man.
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Kenneth Robert's Books on the Revolution all speak of
the courage of Arnold and the insiduousness of his critics.
Roberts never published a version of Arnold's treason, but Arnold
reemerges in Oliver Wiswell as a British Loyalist Commander.
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This leads to the Arnold Treason. The recent TV film Matter of Honor with Kelsey Grammar as Washington and Aidan Quinn as Benedict Arnold posts an interesting hypothesis. General Sir Henry Clinton (Nick Dunning) tells Arnold that his defection defined a nation. I'm not sure if the real Sir Henry were ever so acutely clinical; Historians following the Tory tradition might have compared Sir Henry Clinton to US General George McClellan from the later American Civil War for having the slows in following up on victories and pursuing opportunities. Many loyalist commanders called Clinton incompetent for unwillingness to use native troops loyal to Britain to the fullest potential. Kenneth Robert's Oliver Wiswell and others in the Tory ranks were left on the sidelines by British regular forces as spectators to the great drama around them..
Sir Henry openly mistrusted the Tories and their intentions as much as he mistrusted the Rebels.
This of course brings us to the problem of the Tories. Are they the villains of American history or the victims of it caught between the Rebels they refused to join and the British who didn't trust them? The Patriot did not make the Tories the villains of the plot. The film accurately showed that Tories came from the same classes and background as the Patriots. While The Patriot doesn't explain what followed, the ending for the American Tory or British Loyalist was not one Hollywood might design for the faithful servants of the Crown. Despite some protections in the peace treaties, the Tories were expelled and their property seized. There would be no tearful reconciliation or accommodation of the Whig and Tory traditions. This is a harsh reality for a nation which prides itself on the virtue of compromise and accommodation of inconsistent traditions.
The last obstacle is the Government the War for Independence
created. As heir to the Cause, its legitimacy rests solely upon a victory in the
War for Independence, but for which the British sovereign
would reign and the British parliament would rule. Although
the country long claimed to be the child of the emerging
bourgeoisie rising with the force of the reason of the
English Enlightenment, the dynamic republican and
democratic strains have given way to an officialdom
longing for staid ways, aristocratic permanency and
popular placidity in lieu of a popular government
led by a middle class.
A Republic lives in the hearts of the people.
When it is lost it perishes forever.
Just how does officialdom define itself, as the new American
beginning touted in the Ratification conventions, a continuation or adaption of the
British Imperium to a new climate or a borrowing of the democratic ways of the American Indian recasting them
with a European frontage?
The debt to the American Indians may be more than corn and cod. The idea
of checks and balances permeated America's predecessor The Iroquois
Confederation which had grown to encompass six separate nations stretching
from Canada down into the Carlonias and New York to Illinois, all run
without a written language. America ties its form of government
to the abstractions of European philosophers. Could it be the
new experience was home grown which belongs to an identifiable communityand not born of an
abstraction, empty oratory or an artificial compact?
That may have been a concern at the time of the suppression of the
Spirit of 76 that American ways may be regarded as too savage to the
effete betitled European world to which the American leadership aspired.
To the New Class of Officialdom, the war has become an adversity
the government would like forgotten as Republic and Democracy fade into the oblivion of despotic oligarchy. Ever engirding itself behind bigger barriers
distancing itself from the American people and removing itself into its own wonderous isolation, the government has retreated into a comforting belief in its own delusionary propaganda of its own universal omnipotence, a self-insulated cocoon out of touch with daily life.