[For this year’s
July
4th series, I’ll be AmericanStudying cultural representations of
the Revolution and its era. Leading up to a special post on Hamilton!]
On two
complementary but also contrasting efforts to humanize the Revolution’s
Framers.
I don’t think
it’d be an even vaguely controversial position to argue that 1776 (1969, although
that hyperlinked film adaptation was released in 1972) is no longer the most
popular musical about the American Revolution. But we shouldn’t let the
record-breaking, award-winning, and history-eclipsing smash that is Hamilton overshadow what was strikingly new
and original about 1776 when it
stormed onto Broadway (winning its own collection of awards in
the process) half a century ago. That musical’s first scene immediately
presented its most striking element, its commitment to humanizing the
Continental Congress delegates, in two key ways: first using two competing
songs (“Sit Down, John”
and “Piddle, Twiddle, and
Resolve”) to frame John Adams and other delegates as bickering, exhausted,
emotional people (rather than simply Founding Fathers); and then moving into
John’s imagination for an even more intimate and emotional song, as he and his distant
wife Abigail (working the family farm in Braintree) squabble but then reiterate
their commitment to each other in the moving love song “Till Then.” These are
not, this first scene announces clearly, going to be the two-dimensional Framers
we’ve come to know through Great Men of History kinds of narratives and images.
Or are they? I
don’t want to suggest that 1776 doesn’t
succeed in adding human qualities, emotions, and relationships to its portrait
of the Framers, as it certainly does (to my mind it was those human elements,
along with the inarguably catchy songs, that made the musical the enduring hit
it was). Yet while the musical does highlight various debates and differences
of opinion among the delegates—particularly over the issue of slavery, which it
largely reduces to a North-South debate in the all-too-common way that obscures
the legal
reality of slavery in all thirteen
colonies as of the Revolution—it nonetheless frames all of the delegates,
at the end of the day (or rather the end of the show), as the idealized heroes
that the Founding Father narrative had helped create for a century and a half. Of
course no 1960s Broadway musical was going to portray the Framers as villains
or anything close to it, nor am I asking for (nor, indeed, would I agree with)
such a portrayal. But it’s possible to humanize historical figures and yet
still mostly mask their imperfections and failings (which could be included
without rendering characters villains in any sense), and I believe that 1776 does steer almost entirely clear of
that sort of “warts and all” portrayal of its subjects.
A few years
later, Gore
Vidal published Burr (1973), the
first in his American
Chronicles (or Narratives
of Empire, as they have come to be known in recent years) series
of seven historical novels. Burr
likewise seeks to add human qualities and depth to the Framers and the
Revolutionary period, but Vidal makes two narrative choices that significantly
shift the tone of his portrayal of the past: using a fictional first-person
narrator, Charlie Schuyler, a young New York lawyer who knows the elderly Aaron
Burr and has no reverence of any kind for him, his generation, and the
founders; and then having Charlie serve as Burr’s amanuensis, helping the
elderly Burr write his memoirs, which allows Vidal to create a fictional
version of Burr’s largely cynical and wicked perspective on his fellow founders
and every aspect of the Revolution and Founding period. Vidal’s Burr hates
Hamilton (obviously)
and Jefferson (only slightly less obviously, since Jefferson brought him up on charges of treason
while Burr was serving
as his Vice President); but even for those peers for whom his feelings are
less negative, Burr is all too willing and happy to highlight their flaws and
foibles (a lens, to be fair, which he likewise applies to himself throughout
the novel). Vidal’s novel is perhaps too sarcastic and even satirical toward
the Revolution’s figures and events, but it offers an important counter-point
to 1776 (and to Hamilton, for that matter), and would be an important Revolutionary
representation to keep in the conversation for that reason (among many others).
Next
Revolutionary representation tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other Revolutionary representations you’d highlight?
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