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You say you want a revolution?
By Deborah Taylor-Hollis
Every year around this time I get really patriotic waves washing over me and feel the need to indulge in a little introspection about America, about how we got here and where we are going.
Around July 1, I begin pulling out "The Annals Of America"--a Britannica Library set whose ironic origins are not lost on me--and start reading about our founding fathers. They were a wonderfully radical mess.
Very few people taught in public schools were ever exposed to the truth about how America was born. We all grew up reading about these men (and a few women) as if they were infallible beings whose sense of rightness and morality were perfectly instilled. That view is why most kids can't wait to be adults and think their parents are perfect.
I love to imagine how it was to be a young farmer of means in those heady times. Most of the men in the Continental Congress were in their mid-20's. They were young, rich, powerful optimists whose peers voted together to send them as representatives.
They were similar to the current dotcom wizards of Silicon Valley. Yes, there were a few, such as Franklin, who were getting on in years with gout, arthritis, pleurisy, liver cirrhosis (members of that congress were, almost to a man, heavy drinkers) and other ailments of old age. If you remember, in those times old age was anyone over 40. They were, for the most part, young, rich, idealistic men who wanted to keep the money they made. Those were our founding fathers.
Jefferson, the writer and dreamer of the Congress and a college man at 16, was a slave owner and gentleman farmer of means by the time he went to Philadelphia that sweltering summer.
He was a man so complicated, intelligent and rich in intellectual capacity that historians and constitutional writers today still argue over his motivations, thoughts and passions. He wrote our Declaration of Independence at the ripe, old age of 33.
My favorite colonial rebel is probably John Adams. He was a consummate debater, a school teacher, lawyer and a farmer whose land was dying from neglect during his crusade for freedom in New England. He was also a powerhouse of a man who persevered in his beliefs that America needed its freedom.
At 31, Adams led Congress, in spite of the fact that he was obnoxious and disliked. He knew it and wrote of it, as did most of his colleagues and many of his acquaintances. He became our first vice president and second president.
My encyclopedia says his vanity, pride and inborn contentiousness were serious handicaps for him. I only wish my vanity and pride would take me half as far.
Reading up on these men gives one pause about how America came to be.
Not one of these angry, frightened and determined men had ever run a revolution before. They were starting something called a democracy, which was then based on nothing more than theory. Nowhere in the world had the notion of an independent government of the people, by the people and for the people ever been tested.
It was crazy by any standard. It was heresy by European standards and by English standards it was treason punishable by death, confiscation of property and imprisonment.
Yet this bunch of angry young agitators sat in a hot room for weeks on end over a two-year period arguing about how to stop the tyranny while trying to finance and maintain a standing army that could fight for their beliefs.
That army was led by another rebel, a sailor, surveyor and farmer with years of military service under British rule: Virginia's own George Washington.
Retired at 45, Washington had already caught the revolution bug from Patrick Henry's stirring speeches about the Stamp Act. Washington volunteered to lead Virginia's troops when Congress called on him to run the war effort. It would have been a frightening request for anyone.
When I think about these people every year, I fire up the VCR and rent "1776," a bad musical composed almost entirely from existing letters, pamphlets and memoirs of our founding fathers.
The more you get to know them, the more they start looking less like members of parliament and more like the cast of "Animal House."
They were angry young men who would sacrifice everything for their pride and dignity, but when I try to think of how to tell my son about the Fourth of July, it seems easier to illustrate by comparing them to frat boys with beer and fireworks.
Deborah Taylor-Hollis can be contacted at DTHollis@metronews.com.
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Willow Glen, California Since 1992
