THE History Channel’s ambitious and handsomely mounted miniseries Sons of Liberty represents a new and relatively rare foray by TV into the revolutionary period of American history. The American Revolution was the prototypical modern anti-colonial revolt (it would one day even inspire Ho Chi Minh) and indirectly detonated another, class-based revolution in France not a decade later. Yet even though the key documents resulting from the conflict — the declaration of independence, the US constitution and its attendant bill of rights — mark the pinnacle of Enlightenment idealism, there’s a startling lack of cultural pride in such achievements.

America’s foundational myths — and its foundational history — lie far back beyond the banner era and primary locale of American myth-making, which were, of course, the second half of the 19th century and the untamed west. Next to the legends of the cowboy and the gunfighter, the cattle baron and the railroad magnate, the stories of the American break with its colonial parent tend to pale somewhat. That’s especially evident in the face of an American folk memory that rarely stretches any further back than Ronald Reagan or Star Wars (itself a new kind of foundational myth); even the bicentennial celebrations of 1976 seem like ancient history now. Set against countless movies and TV shows about the civil war and its aftermath, the number of serious dramas about the Revolution is comparatively pitiful: a mere 32 of them are listed on the Wikipedia page for the subject, versus hundreds for the civil war.

With Sons of Liberty, the genre expands by one substantial entry, itself following in the footsteps of AMC’s Turn, which tells the story of George Washington’s fledgling intelligence service, and HBO’s epic 2008 miniseries John Adams. The period has been fiercely contested by left and right since the dawn of the Republic, but of late it seems as though the right has been making all the running, or at least, donning the motley of the period for political gain. Half a century ago the hippies were the ones co-opting revolutionary outfits, regalia and rhetoric in protest against the Vietnam War; today it’s more likely to be the Tea Party and the constitutional fundamentalists of the new right, acting as though the federal government had somehow supplanted and surpassed the bloody British in villainy, calumny and treachery. There’s a lot of “print the legend” in the right-wing approach to the era — no one can quite make space for the ever-awkward Tom Paine — and these latest entries seem intent on resetting the balance somewhat leftwards, or at least in the direction of greater historical plausibility.

Not that this is a new phenomenon. The revolutionary era’s last flourishing in literature and film was in the mid-20th century, between the New Deal and the post-war McCarthyite reaction to it. On the one hand, there was the perennial children’s patriotic favourite Johnny Tremain, based on Esther Forbe’s 1943 best-seller and filmed for TV in 1957 by the not notably liberal Walt Disney, featuring cameos by real-life figures such as Paul Revere and Sam Adams. Set against this more or less “official” version of the struggle, and published in the same era, were the best-selling novels of former Communist and one-time HUAC jailbird Howard Fast, including Young Tom Paine and a half dozen avowedly left-wing novels — like The Crossing, about Washington breaching the Delaware — on the nation’s founding (while in prison Fast wrote Spartacus, published in 1951, the movie of which, like most Hollywood movies set in ancient Roman times, pits clean-living American slaves against decadent, English-accented Roman oppressors).

The paucity of Revolution-era movies and TV shows in recent decades can plausibly be laid at the feet of Hugh Hudson’s Revolution, the 1985 disaster that scorched all earth around the subject for decades afterwards. In 2000, The Patriot, starring Mel Gibson and brought to you by the team responsible for Independence Day and Godzilla, fouled the nest again by inventing massacres and atrocities (the incineration of a townspeople inside their church) that simply never happened, and by its laughably mendacious depiction of Gibson’s slaves as “employees”.

This last instance reminds us exactly how tricky, contradictory and replete with ironies the whole period was and remains. Every invocation of “Liberty!” (a term now almost entirely hijacked by the right) prompts a compensatory thought for the liberties not savoured by America’s slave population — men and women literally owned, and often raped, by the very people pealing the bells of freedom at Concord, Lexington, Valley Forge and Philadelphia. And any partisan for the British Empire will remind you that the Seven Years War, in the decade before the Revolution, was the closest the Empire had yet come to outlawing slavery in its area of influence — which surely chastened the minds and sharpened the purposes of many slave-owning rebels. Even the notorious Boston Massacre seems more like a godawful cock-up of history than a planned act of villainy — and that same Empire partisan might also say that five is a pretty sluggish death toll from the people who brought you Amritsar and Bloody Sunday. Sons of Liberty is honest enough to view it as a tragic moment adroitly exploited for rebel gain by master propagandist Sam Adams, and seems in general willing to dwell on such ironies rather than merely printing the legend all over again.

—By arrangement with The Guardian

Published in Dawn, January 26th, 2015

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