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The Irrelevant Revolution: 1776 and Since

1978; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 30; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/2712324

1080-6490

Michael Zuckerman,

American Constitutional Law and Politics

IN PHILADELPHIA, NEARLY ALL THE TOURISTS SEE THE NEW JOHN HUSTON movie. It is the orientation film for the visitor center at Independence National Historical Park, and it attempts to recreate the epic events of the American Revolution in an extended and intricate flashback. Eli Wallach, as Benjamin Franklin, emerges out of the swirling mists of antiquity to stand full face before the camera. He wears a long frock coat, a ruffled vest, and buckles in odd eighteenth-century places. A twentieth-century trolley car cruises by. He has achieved his old wish to be preserved with a few friends in a cask of fine madeira, so as to return to see how the experiment they began has turned out. Not remarkably, it proves to have turned out rather well in this Hollywood version commissioned by Richard Nixon's National Park Service for the holiest sepulchre of American independence. But Hollywood has never expended its best energies on distinguishing fact from fantasy, and the movie does not dispel its essential question: how has it all turned out? What would Franklin, and Jefferson and Washington and Madison, and Patrick Henry and Tom Paine, think if they came back to take stock of the nation founded upon the central event of their lives? Would they find their Revolution still relevant to our reality? Would their land in our time seem to them still imbued with their spirit, or might our modern ways more nearly mock their dearest dreams? We may be confident that even a Franklin would be dumbfounded by our uses of the lightning he snatched from the sky, and even a Sam Adams amazed by our permutations of the mass political protests he contrived. But beyond these transformations of technology and technique, beyond the popup toasters and the millions of marchers sunning themselves and sharing drugs beneath the Washington Monument, we may suspect that the men who made the Revolution would be bewildered by us in far more fundamental ways.