Revere, Revisited

Chris Beneke

Now that public interest has shifted to the contents of Sarah Palin's email account, it appears that the dust has settled on her imaginative reconstruction of Paul Revere’s Ride. It was fun while it lasted. The high point may have been Steven Colbert’s demonstration of how Revere could have rung a bell and fired multiple warning shots from a front-loading (single shot) musket, while riding on a rocking, coin-operated steed.

The editors of Revere’s once relatively sedate Wikipedia page were kept very busy with this extra attention. Palin supporters descended upon them with Palin-friendly edits. Then the gawkers, like me, stopped for a look. The page saw as many as 140,000 visitors on June 6.

At least we were all motivated to learn something about Paul Revere and the American Revolution (how many of those 140,000 were history professors and teachers making sure they had their stories straight?). The chief authority on this topic might be David Hackett Fischer, author of the magisterial book with the deceptively quaint title Paul Revere’s Ride. But Fischer appears to have (wisely) made himself scarce during this controversy.

Though the subject was one on which very few, outside of the Minute Man National History Park, are expert, Palin’s Revere comments gave some very respectable historians and pundits a chance to address the public on an early American history topic and to reflect more broadly on our commitment to education.

Here, forthwith, is a brief snapshot of the historically informed media attention:

In the New Yorker, Jill Lepore described Revere’s ride as a form of “hyperlore, which passes from one computer to the next, along a path best called hyperbolic.” Lepore provides a helpful link to Revere’s 1775 deposition for the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, which is held at the venerable Massachusetts Historical Society. It’s well worth the few minutes it takes to read Revere’s account, charmingly laden with contemporary expressions and the variety of spellings for which early Americans are justly known.

On Salon.com, Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg were in grading mode, awarding Palin an "'F' on the Paul Revere quiz." They continue: "Okay, Sarah. Here's your guide to what you need to know about Paul Revere. He did not ring bells or fire warning shots. He did not warn the British. He did not defend ‘freedom.’ And he did not yell, ‘The British are coming!’ because he was a British subject in 1775. As Professor David Hackett Fischer explained in his book 'Paul Revere's Ride,' Revere would have shouted, ‘The regulars are coming!’ That is, the regular army. Americans in and around Boston were called ‘country people.’ Revere was not defending a nation, because the nation we became did not exist yet. Before the phrase ‘United States of America’ was born with the Declaration of Independence, those resisting British power, identifying with the Continental Congress, were collectively known as the ‘United Colonies.’"

Burstein and Isenberg’s larger point is that Palin, who lacks “a basic respect for knowledge” should be, but is decidedly not, “embarrassed by her ignorance.”

Robert Allison, was more sympathetic to Palin in his New York Daily News oped, finding several nuggets of truth in her understanding of Revere’s Ride: “[S]he was, in a sense [right]. Revere, in fact, was warning the British Empire—of which Massachusetts was part—that it could not invade the rights of Americans. Revere himself did not ring bells or fire shots, but the colonists he alerted did. The British troops beginning their march westward heard the bells, and knew the alarm was out. The rest of it—the warning about being secure and being free, was metaphorical . . .”

Allison’s larger point is that historians should take responsibility for failing to educate the public and be grateful for this opportunity to share what they know. "Sarah Palin is not a historian. . . . She is a politician, and quite emphatically a representative of ‘ordinary Americans.’ If her reading of Revere is too subtle for the professoriate, and if she comes across to many as woefully misinformed after visiting these sites, whose fault is it? Hers, or ours, as tour guides and historians?"

Acknowledging how much we all could do with more learning, Pulitzer-Prize winning commentator Leonard Pitts, Jr., observes that "while it is comforting to think Palin’s gaffe speaks only to her own considerable limitations, it is also short-sighted. The evidence suggests that she is less an exception to, than a reflection of, a nation that is in the process of forgetting itself."

Which, I now editorialize, makes Congress’ recent decision to gut the Teaching American History (TAH) program especially disappointing. I just assisted with a TAH proposal and was looking forward, as part of the proposed program, to take local elementary school teachers on a tour of the battle sites at Lexington and Concord, showing them where Paul Revere was likely to have been captured—and where he warned the Regulars that colonial militia were mustering—as well as discussing Paul Revere’s Ride with them.

The alarm has rung, but getting the actual message out will now be more challenging.

Chris Beneke on The First Prejudice

Randall Stephens

[From Religion in American History]

About a week ago over at Religion in American History Paul Harvey posted on Chris Beneke and Christopher S. Grenda's, The First Prejudice: Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Early America (Univ. Pennsylvania Press, 2011). The edited volume, "presents a revealing portrait of the rhetoric, regulations, and customs that shaped the relationships between people of different faiths in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America. It relates changes in law and language to the lived experience of religious conflict and religious cooperation, highlighting the crucial ways in which they molded U.S. culture and politics." I recently caught up with Beneke, a Historical Society board member, by email and asked him some questions about the project and the work being down on tolerance/intolerance.

Randall Stephens: What is the unifying theme of The First Prejudice: Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Early America?

Chris Beneke: Our title, The First Prejudice, plays on the popular understanding of religious liberty as the nation’s “First Freedom.” It also draws on the proposition that religion was initially the source of the deepest prejudice to afflict early Americans and the object of the first large-scale efforts to mitigate prejudice. We asked our contributors to be attentive to the distinguished and extensive historiography on church and state, but not beholden to it. The idea was to create a history of religious tolerance and intolerance that took into account a broader range of religious and cultural interaction than histories of religious liberty have traditionally done. For us, it presented an opportunity both to build a compelling new narrative of early American religious history-where religious differences are at center stage-and to develop a common set of reference points and questions that would frame more useful conversations about tolerance and intolerance in America.

Stephens: Why did religious tolerance develop in the West when and where it did?

Beneke: In a sense, it depends on what you mean by tolerance (I know it’s annoying when historians say that, but there, I’ve gone and done it). If you mean what Willem Frijhoff calls “everyday ecumenism,” or at least everyday cooperation and non-violence, then it’s very old indeed. Historians have been hard at work in the archives over the past two-plus decades, discovering that sort of tolerance in surprising places across medieval and early modern Europe. But as a commonly accepted ideal, as a stated commitment to some form of equality, and a legal practice that guaranteed a modicum of protection, tolerance is something that developed in the intellectual capitals of northern Europe during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. And though I risk irritating my intrepid co-editor and some contributors by saying this, I think that it took hold in a much more fundamental and irrevocable way in the early national United States.

Stephens: When it comes to religious tolerance did the early United States differ all that much from Great Britain and western Europe?

Beneke: Here's the very short answer: official church establishments persisted across most of Europe into and beyond the twentieth century. In the United States, they did not. The U.S. may have maintained an unofficial Protestant establishment for many decades (via instruments such as the common law, public education, state religious tests.), but the fact that it was un-official and the fact that it was accompanied by substantive protections for free exercise, was critically important. For all the disingenuity involved, an un-official establishment was surely more hospitable toward religious minorities than almost any official establishment might have been. Maybe just as importantly, the commitment to disestablishment and religious liberty meant that the religiously intolerant had to explain themselves and find ways to wrap bigotry in the mantle of tolerance.

These factors have always kept American religious intolerance in check.>>>