Assaying the revolt that changed everything
By Richard Robbins
Not often does a magazine edition come along that begs both reading and keeping.
In the dusty archives of my home work room are several such numbers: A Life and a Look, both devoted to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy; and, most conspicuously, the 40th anniversary edition of Esquire, published in October 1973, its thick pages covered by a sketch of literary types who appear to be attending the same swanky (it must have been) cocktail party.
These range from the lone women guests, Nora Ephron and Dorothy Parker, and the youngsters (relatively-speaking) John Updike, Phillip Roth, Gore Vidal, and Gay Tales to the lions Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck, and William Faulkner, along with a dozen or so others.
Now comes the November edition of The Atlantic. Its cover, too, is a fold-out of prominent figures. Those pictured include that wily and wise Philadelphian Benjamin Franklin, the masterly George Washington, the prim if not always (politically) proper Abigail Adams, the misunderstood royal (according the historian Rick Atkinson) King George III, and oddly enough, the fictional Rip Van Winkle.
The collective portraiture also includes John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and an American Indian chief, Pontiac. Just two Black writers graced the cover of Esquire back in the day. In contrast, The Atlantic cover includes the likenesses of five African-Americans. Standing next to George Washington, for example, is Harry Washington, his enslaved stable hand.
The November edition gives itself over to the American Revolution, the 250th anniversary of which will be commemorated, celebrated, canonized, condemned, and accounted for in 2026.
Far be it from me to recommend what you should read, but I’ll venture this: The November edition of The Atlantic is a delight; its literary quality is high, while its commentaries and observations are acute and penetrating. It’s a keeper.
Here’s a sampling:
Stacy Schiff, a historian who has written magnificent books on Cleopatra, the New England witch trials, and Benjamin Franklin’s improvisational skills on behalf of the American cause at the French court of Louis XVI, takes another whack at Franklin in The Atlantic. This time her subject is the great man’s tragic falling out with his son William, who remained loyal to the Crown.
“The Myth of Mad King George” is the title of Rick Atkinson’s piece in which he explains how colonists, “inflamed by a public reading of the newly adopted Declaration of Independence,” toppled a chiseled likeness of the king from “atop a marble plinth … at the lower tip of Manhattan,” and how and why the king persisted in trying to keep Americans as loyal subjects.
Guardian of the worldwide British enterprise, George asked to be spared the disgrace of presiding over the loss of the empire’s most precious jewel, only to have it happen. Even so, according to Atkinson, George was “a far more complex, accomplished, and even estimable figure than the prevailing caricature.”
Annette Gordon-Reed, the historian of Sally Hemmings fame, tackles the vexing existence of slavery and the meaning of equality to enslaved and free alike in the early days of the Republic. Jane Kamensky addresses the role (or the non-role) of women in the American Revolution while focusing on “the many lives of Eliza Schuyler,” the widow of Alexander Hamilton and the champion of his legacy.
Because the Revolution feels so contemporary, two pieces seem especially noteworthy. The first is Fintan O’Toole’s take on how the Founding Fathers might feel about the American experiment in self- government in the 21st century. Hint: not good, but not entirely surprised. Demagogues and wannabe tyrants “never go extinct.”
George Packer punches back on today’s skin deep patriotism of both the left and right. Devoting considerable space to a discussion of the Declaration of Independence, Packer brings in Abraham Lincoln, and the 16th president’s reverence for the document, the touchstone of his politics and the key to his political philosophy.
Lincoln posited that Jefferson’s immortal phrase, “All men are created equal,” is “the electric chord … that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as love of liberty exists in the minds of men throughout the world.”
The American creed which Jefferson had “the cool, forecast and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document,” Lincoln said, “… shall be a rebuke and a stumbling block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.”
Spoken in the 19th century of an 18th century document, may Jefferson’s “moral sentiment,” (Lincoln’s words) remain fully alive in the 21st century.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.