Fighting over the Founders: How We Remember the American Revolution

by Andrew M. Schocket

Overview

Explores how politicians, screenwriters, activists, biographers, jurists, museum professionals, and reenactors portray the American Revolution.

The American Revolution is all around us. It is pictured as big as billboards and as small as postage stamps, evoked in political campaigns and car advertising campaigns, relived in museums and revised in computer games. As the nation’s founding moment, the American Revolution serves as a source of powerful founding myths, and remains the most accessible and most contested event in US history: more than any other, it stands as a proxy for how Americans perceive the nation’s aspirations. Americans’ increased fascination with the Revolution over the past two decades represents more than interest in the past. It’s also a site to work out the present, and the future. What are we using the Revolution to debate?

In Fighting over the Founders, Andrew M. Schocket explores how politicians, screenwriters, activists, biographers, jurists, museum professionals, and reenactors portray the American Revolution. Identifying competing “essentialist” and “organicist” interpretations of the American Revolution, Schocket shows how today’s memories of the American Revolution reveal Americans' conflicted ideas about class, about race, and about gender—as well as the nature of history itself. Fighting over the Founders plumbs our views of the past and the present, and illuminates our ideas of what United States means to its citizens in the new millennium.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814708163
Publisher:	New York University Press
Publication date:	01/23/2015
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Andrew M. Schocket is Director of American Culture Studies and Associate Professor of History and American Culture Studies at Bowling Green State University(OH). He is the author of Founding Corporate Power in Early National Philadelphia.

Table of Contents

Contents

List of Illustrations ix

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction 1

1 Truths That Are Not Self-Evident: The Revolution in Political Speech 17

2 We Have Not Yet Begun to Write: Historians and Founders Chic 49

3 We the Tourists: The Revolution at Museums and Historical Sites 85

4 Give Me Liberty’s Kids : How the Revolution Has Been Televised and Filmed 125

5 To Re-create a More Perfect Union: Originalism, the Tea Party, and Reenactors 165

Conclusion 201

Further Readings 213

Index 237

About the Author 253

Editorial Reviews

12/15/2014
Schocket, a professor of history and American culture studies at Bowling Green State University (Ohio), looks into how politicians, historians, children’s literature, movies and media, museums, and the Supreme Court make use of the legacy of America’s founders. His central argument is that conservatives view the founding fathers as paragons of virtue against whom the present is judged, while liberals view them from the perspective of the present, with very different sensibilities on gender and race, and society in general. Schocket is an opinionated and sometimes cynical writer who makes his argument—which is that institutions and politicians use the founding fathers for commercial and political purposes—with direct and provocative examples. For example, he reveals his deep concern over American difficulties with race through a critique of the way in which politicians, biographers, and others ignore the founding fathers’ views on slavery (he considers these views the “greatest collective failure” of the founding fathers’ generation). An entertaining feature of Schocket’s writing is the gusto with which he takes on those he feels have misconstrued American history for political gain or profit, all of whom he happily skewers. Schocket covers a lot of ground in an accessible and entertaining style, with many provocative opinions to engage readers. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

"This book looks in-depth at how [the Founding Fathers] have been used by a variety of forces and takes a wide lens to see the views, goals, and how people use history to their advantage...This is an interesting book because it looks at the present day while talking about people and events over two hundred years old."- San Francisco Book Review

"[…] Fighting Over the Founders is an important and provocative book….The book stands out among its peers in the field of American Revolution memory studies both because of its currency and because of Schocket’s innovative approach.”- The American Historian

“Schocket is an opinionated and sometimes cynical writer who makes his argument—which is that institutions and politicians use the founding fathers for commercial and political purposes—with direct and provocative examples. For example, he reveals his deep concern over American difficulties with race through a critique of the way in which politicians, biographers, and others ignore the founding father’s views on slavery. An entertaining feature of Schoket’s writing is the gusto with which he takes on those he feels have misconstrued American history for political gain or profit, all whom he happily skewers. Schocket covers a lot of ground in an accessible and entertaining style, with many provocative opinions to engage readers.”- Publishers Weekly

"Scholars have long been familiar with—and often groused over—the literary phenomenon we call 'Founders Chic.' But in this imaginative book, Andrew Schocket provides an honest, critical, and wonderfully clever account of the complicated ways in which the Revolution still figures in our culture. Fighting over the Founders is full of thoughtful observations, wry remarks, and sharp judgments. Yet every chapter illustrates just how seriously Schocket takes his subject, and why the Revolution's legacy still reveals so much about our patriotic culture—and cult."-Jack N. Rakove,W.R. Coe Professor of History and American Studies, Stanford University

“The book is most insightful when Schocket leaves aside his two categories and listens to what the American Revolution means to guides and visitors at historical sites, public television producers, and Revolutionary War reenactors. They all seek an emotional connection to this heritage and long to be inspired by it, while being aware that representations of the past can never do full justice to its complexity.”- The Journal of American History

From the Publisher

"Schocket distinguishes between & essentialists who see the founders as demigods and who emphasize the founders belief in private property and Protestantism, and & organicists, who believe Americans are still in the process of trying to complete the Revolution. Covering the years since 2000, the book analyzes presidential speeches and debates as well as best-selling books, popular movies, and historic sites."

Trend & Tradition

"Schockets book will rightly become a must-read for specialists in the American Revolution and the early Republic, as well as for those engaged with understanding how history can become a way of entry into national self-understanding. His sharp-eyed approach to historic sites, museums, and parks and to such films asThe PatriotandNational Treasure...is particularly perceptive and enlightening."

American Political Thought

"Fighting over the Foundersis divided into cross-sections, each approaching different parts of our national culture, groups which alternately revere, recreate, and research the Revolution's legacy... Fighting over the Founders, thankfully, turns the page away from the crass exploitation of the framers' legacies, toward a new understanding."

Public Books

"This book looks in-depth at how [the Founding Fathers] have been used by a variety of forces and takes a wide lens to see the views, goals, and how people use history to their advantage...This is an interesting book because it looks at the present day while talking about people and events over two hundred years old."

San Francisco Book Review

"The book is most insightful when Schocket leaves aside his two categories and listens to what the American Revolution means to guides and visitors at historical sites, public television producers, and Revolutionary War reenactors. They all seek an emotional connection to this heritage and long to be inspired by it, while being aware that representations of the past can never do full justice to its complexity."

The Journal of American History

2014-10-23
This populist study of recent speeches, films and published works reveals the many uses of America's founding ideals.Schocket (History and American Culture Studies/Bowling Green State Univ.; Founding Corporate Power in Early National Philadelphia, 2007) has sifted through reams of material, film and text over the last 15 years and even embarked on his own treks to national historic sites like Mount Vernon and Colonial Williamsburg for a firsthand look at how the American Revolution is presented to the masses. He sees the allusions to the Founding Fathers and revolutionary heroes in speeches by Mitt Romney or President Barack Obama, and in best-sellers like David McCullough's John Adams or PBS's animated Liberty's Kids, as serving one of two points of view: An "essentialist" approach holds the memory of the founding myth as unchanging, true and knowable—i.e., the conservative approach. The "organicist" viewpoint maintains a more fluid approach, seeing America as an evolving theater of multicultural and feminist principles—i.e., the liberal approach. The mere mention of "founding fathers" seems to be a catchphrase for many essentialist notions, such as whiteness, gun possession, right-to-life, even Christian, while the Constitutional phrases "more perfect union" and "created equal" sum up many of the organicists' tenets, such as dedication to equality and belief in progress. The discovery by DNA proof that Thomas Jefferson fathered children by his black slave Sally Hemings has blown open the neat-and-tidy mythology of the upright and incorruptible Founding Fathers and forced a reckoning with a more complicated, messy story. Schocket's visits to such historic sites as the Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum and Philadelphia's private National Liberty Museum reveal the array of co-opting of the revolutionary messages. Along with Hollywood's take, the author delves into recent Constitutional Supreme Court battles and the formation of the Minutemen and tea party movements. Organized, accessible history for everyone.

Kirkus Reviews

"Afast-paced, often insightful, sometimes funny book aimed at the general reader. This is a subject of crucial importance to our understanding of American national identity."Schocket's book . . .will appeal to all readers with an interest in the contemporary meaning of the American founding"

The Historian

"[Fighting Over the Founders] is an important and provocative book.The book stands out among its peers in the field of American Revolution memory studies both because of its currency and because of Schockets innovative approach."

The American Historian

"In dealing with historic sites the tension between representing a complex history and satisfying sponsors and the public is richly conveyed. Schocket also brings out the problematic black experience at these sites, including the often thin representation of their Revolution, the racial imbalance in visitors of the sites, and the persistence of employment disparity."

U.S. Studies Online