Last week in this space I jumped the gun a bit by celebrating July 4th in advance. Today it’s actually here, which means I’ll continue the celebration. First, though, I’ll go back to Michael Pearson, the English historian with the dim view of some of the heroes of our Revolution. Two of his least favorite people were Samuel Adams, the Boston agitator who kept stirring up the people there against the Redcoats, and John Hancock, the wealthy merchant who bankrolled him. Adams was of course a “demagogue” and Hancock a rich dilettante who was pulling his strings. A proper hiding would do each of these wretches no end of good, God bless my soul, sir.

Another aversion of his was Benjamin Franklin, who proved himself not quite a gentleman when he opened some letters of Governor Hutchinson of Massachusetts that came into his hands and sent them back to Boston from London, where he represented Massachusetts pre-war. The letters showed the governor to be demanding harsh punishment for his own state for resisting the King’s taxes, This resulted in a petition to the King for his immediate removal from office. Franklin refused to display any remorse for his naughty actions. Apologies weren’t in his line.

Another British writer from the turn of the century, George Trevelyan, thought otherwise about Franklin. He considered him justified in opening the letters since the British Post Office always opened his. He went on to describe Franklin’s career as America’s envoy to France as a triumph without parallel in diplomatic history. With no money and no assistants available he dazzled the French court and the Paris elite by personality alone and eventually had the satisfaction of seeing France recognize America as a free nation and sign a treaty of alliance in earnest of this. Three years later the presence of a French fleet and French troops at Yorktown enabled Washington and his men to force the surrender of Cornwallis and end the war.

Both the English writers, seventy years apart, came down hard on the French diplomats for their cruel deception of the trusting British in denying that they were shipping guns and ammunition hand over fist to the Americans long before the recognition in 1778. Inexcusable behavior, they called it. They seemed to forget that fifteen years before in the Seven Years’ War Britain had seized Canada, India and other territories from the French, which the latter could hardly be expected to swallow without some attempt at revenge. A century later in 1880 when a British general, Gordon, was killed in the Sudan, the British waited eighteen years before wiping out hordes of Arabs in retribution. Then they made movies about it.

The British writers are also inclined to dwell on the rebels’ alleged propensity to shoot and stab prisoners and remove their scalps as well when successfully ambushing them through “sneak” tactics. They don’t give equal space to the similar behavior of their soldiers, not to mention their wholesale looting. They even did this when running for their lives in ’75 on the road to Boston from Concord. The source for this is English.

There were atrocities on both sides, as in all wars. In particular the irregulars on both sides were guilty of this. The Patriots and the Tories as they were known were usually neighbors so the mutual hatred was intense. The result was a lot of dirty work by both sides when they got the chance to abuse prisoners. On the English side, though, the regular army was also involved in atrocities. The worst was the practice of confining prisoners in ships at their moorings, called hulks, where disease and hunger ran wild and killed large numbers. In 1777 Washington issued an order to his army that its prisoners were on no account to be treated in the British way. Today that would be called taking the high road. Washington was like that and he got the army to listen to him, mostly.

Washington’s policy of humanity proved itself at the end of the war when of the !3,988 Hessian soldiers who survived it, 3,194 (23%) elected to stay in the country rather than return to Germany. A number of those who returned only did so to collect their families and come back to America. Considering that the Hessians were well hated by the Americans as a lot of foreign mercenaries serving for money and loot alone, this speaks pretty well for Washington’s ideas, which originated with his capture of 900 or so Hessians at Trenton in December 1776.

Dwelling on the seamy side of American history is no way to celebrate July 4th. It certainly wasn’t when I got my introduction to history in grammar school way back when. (The school is the one shown from the outside in the movie “Doubt”. The interior scenes were filmed in another school.) We kids then were practically wetbacks, many of our parents having immigrated from Europe. Europe? Where was that? It got mentioned all right, but only in footnotes. History began and ended with America. Two pictures were on the wall in every classroom -- Washington and Lincoln. The Revolution was taught as Holy Writ. The Declaration; a masterpiece. The Hessians; outlaws. King George; a nut job. So it went. We were indoctrinated and we took to it like ducks to water. To tell the truth, I’m still swimming. Happy holiday!

Oh beautiful for baseball games

For happy days of golf

For tennis too if that’s for you ,

My TV’s never off.

We like our sports vicariously

We sit us down and root

And if we end victoriously

We hoist a Bud to salute.

(America, America, that wasn’t the pioneers’ way

They weren’t no couch potatoes

The game they played was the Indian raid

Where the winner scalped all the spectators.)

Americans, Americans,

Throw your remotes away

Get off your duffs and strut your stuff

And melt the fat away!

(When it disappears from between your ears

Now that’ll be an Independence Day.)

THE DEFAMATION OF INDEPENDENCE

July Fourth is here again and patriotism is busting out all over. My own is overflowing as you can see from the verse above, bursting with good advice for all and sundry. To stimulate it further I did some skimming in a book I’ve read already, but which has always been worth another look. It’s about the Revolution and it’s called “Those Damned Rebels.” The writer is named Michael Pearson and he examines things from the “British point of view.” This means that he makes it clear that he regards the Americans who dissed the Empire at that time as pretty much a gang of stinkers who would have gotten a jolly good thrashing if people like himself had been in charge of things.

This doesn’t fit in very well with the Brits erecting a statue of George Washington in London or graciously accepting our help in two world wars lest they be overrun by the Germans, but he’s entitled to his opinion, no doubt. Probably he believes America would have been even more useful to Britain if it had continued as a colony, but he can’t prove that, and the actual facts of the Twentieth Century don’t support his case.

He’s not obnoxious, just doesn’t venerate us as much as most historians and can be annoying at times with things like calling the Massachusetts Minute Men at Lexington and Concord “gunmen.” That means they were guerrillas not on his side. When on one’s side they’re not gunmen, but “patriots”, “freedom fighters”, “partisans”, “Maquis”, “irregulars”, “the resistance”, and so on. Definitely not “terrorists” or “assassins”. Not users of “sneaky tactics” either as Pearson avers about the Colonials.

One story in the book is worth more than all the battle pieces and strategic analysis it contains. It’s about the battle of Saratoga in 1777 and the plight of the Baroness Von Riedesel, the young wife of a Hessian general leading a brigade attached to the British army. Wives went to war with their husbands in those days, and in her case brought their three young children along too. The British were falling back late in the fight and the baroness found herself in charge of things in the cellar of a house full of wounded men on whom the army surgeons were working as best they could. Water was in great demand for young and old, but any soldier who tried to get it was in danger of death.

As the book says “At last, one of the soldiers’ wives offered to take the buckets down to the water, insisting the rebels would not kill a woman. With great courage, she walked to the river, but she was right -- they did not open fire on her.”

Hurray for our side. We did the right thing. Goes a good way to justify celebrating the Fourth. Where are my firecrackers?

IT’S MAGIC

Oh give me a home with a government loan

And a mortgage I ain’t paying no more

With stimulus dough I can call my own

And the wolf slinks away from my door.

Stim, stim, stimulus

Dot’s wot I learned in my school.

Dough, dough, it’s fabulous,

That Obama he ain’t no fool.

He’ll find us the gelt to pay off our debt

Tho’ the clouds we see are cumulus

Payin’ a debt just ain’t no sweat

If you can just score some…stimulus.

Stim, stim, stimulus

It’s all comin’ out of a pool

In the land of Oz so famous

Ooh, that man is so cool!

Mythology seems to get into any consideration of the current breakdown of the economic machine. That’s not too unusual in times of stress. People look for a savior to come to their rescue from out of nowhere. As you see, he did, and he got into my head, triggering a poetic reaction which also extended to his land of origin. Not that he’s actually Ozian, it’s just that if one took seriously the mystic qualities with which he’s been invested, he would have to be. Luckily all this has been exaggerated and it’s been ascertained that he is a member of the human race.

That settles that. But mythology still intrudes, the most popular variety right now being the golden legend about the New Deal of the Thirties, also featuring a superhuman character who used a magic wand to bring prosperity out of disaster and a new day to dawn on an America raised to glory through his inspired leadership. All this has made for a hard act for Obama to follow, like a singer following Pavarotti.

Well, it’s not that bad. Roosevelt, the man I’ve been alluding to, did not actually perform miracles. His New Deal just didn’t live up to its advertisements when it came to lifting the country out of the Great Depression. Let that be a consolation for his successor. If he flops, he just has to remember that FDR did too. That’ll make him feel better. For a few minutes anyhow.

What happened in the Thirties? As I’ve written before, it was saved by the Forties, that is, by World War II. Unemployment, the curse, disappeared. As one writer has said “Roosevelt hadn’t known what to do with the extra people in 1938, but now he did; he could make them soldiers.” All those folks who are convinced that Obama will get us out of the Middle East and make peace with all our enemies should take heed of this. Roosevelt was a peacemaker too until 1939. By then he’d been fighting unemployment since 1933 and hadn’t gotten anywhere after some early success. Things had actually gotten worse in 1937. Overnight, from a supporter of the Neutrality Act FDR became a warrior thirsting for battle and summoning his armies to follow him to victory or death. He found it thrilling. His cousin Theodore had been the same way.

Could Obama turn out the same? Politicians, as I’ve just shown, often go to war when domestic troubles get them down and a diversion is needed. Being still the richest country in the world we have no shortage of enemies who’d enjoy taking a crack at us. I worry about Hillary Clinton being the Secretary of State. She tends to rub people the wrong way. So does Biden when you come to think about it. With a couple of troublemakers like that on the loose, anything could happen.

Going back to Roosevelt, he took the 1937 increase in unemployment very hard. He concluded that it had been cooked up by the “interests” to make him look bad. They wanted revenge for his forty-six state sweep in the 1936 election and his attacks on businessmen in his speeches. Calling them “economic royalists” and “princes of privilege” didn’t endear FDR to them. Although it hardly seems likely that they would reduce hiring of help just to spite Roosevelt, it could also have been possible that attacks like these served to weaken confidence in his attitude toward business and thereby indirectly reduced activity, including hiring.

Roosevelt tried to have it both ways -- beat up on business and at the same time beg it to bring back prosperity by extending credit to customers, investing in new equipment, exporting to new markets and generally whipping itself into a lather of activity which in the opinion of businessman and in his would not just strengthen the country but also his regime. A lot of the businessmen thought the two outcomes were incompatible.

Obama, with his soak-the-rich ideas seems to be on the same track as the Roosevelt of 1938. He should remember that the successful Roosevelt was the FDR of 1939. With war raging in Europe and threatening to spread here, FDR allied himself with the businessmen of the country, who became his favorite people. The first was William Knudsen of General Motors, who took charge of war production. After him came men like Charles Wilson, also of GM, and Charles Wilson II of GE, then William Jeffers of Union Pacific, Henry Kaiser, Andrew Higgins, Donald Nelson of Sears and literally thousands of others, including Wall Streeters. Roosevelt told the world he was giving Dr. New Deal a rest and substituting Dr. Win-the-War. It worked: he won the war, stayed in power and died at his peak. Obama, take notice.