Gracious sakes, look at the calendar! Just a week from tomorrow comes the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence! My, my—how time flies when you’re publishing newspapers.
Routine journalistic practice would be to honor the occasion by combing the archives and republishing bits of our reportage on that earth-shaking event. Frankly, though, our Human Resources Department has failed to provide us with sufficient editorial staff to perform such a task. Also, not to cast aspersions on Daniel Fowle, our founder and then-editor, but mid-18th century prose is an acquired taste.
Instead, we’ll recommend to our readers a volume available at the Portsmouth Public Library: Declaration: The Nine Tumultuous Weeks When America Became Independent, May 1 – June 4, 1776, by William Hogeland, published by Simon & Schuster in 2010. A rip-roaring tale of characters both famous and obscure—some of them rather weird, to boot—engaged in all manner of intrigue and skulduggery, its relative obscurity simply baffles us. Perhaps it’s just too much to ask that the nation acknowledge it was born in conspiracy.
Independence was on the minds of the all delegates to the Continental Congress, as it met that May in Philadelphia. For Samuel Adams and his pro-independence cohort, though, too many of them were against it. This was especially true in Pennsylvania, the second-largest colony in terms of population. With it, Congress might vote for independence. Without it the colonies would be geographically divided and have no clear path forward. Compounding the problem, on May 1st the Pennsylvania Assembly, led by John Dickinson, voted in favor of reconciliation with Britain.
Spoiler Alert: Adams and his cast of fanatics and weirdos fomented insurrection among the working classes in Philadelphia and successfully overthrew the Pennsylvania Assembly. The rest, as they say, is history.*
Over the ensuing centuries, the natural advantages of this immense tract of real estate—timber galore, fertile plains, seemingly-inexhaustible herds of bison, etc.—made it possible for those who usurped it from the indigenous inhabitants to attain a position of global dominance. For better or worse, that lasted for about a century.
Some, it seems, would argue that this has all been for the good. Defending such a position requires a degree of selective blindness, but when has that ever been in short supply?
Others, if we are to employ a standard tool of the hack journalist and conjure up a theoretical symmetry rarely seen in the wild, view the U.S.A. as “The Great Satan.” The occasional comment from our critics notwithstanding, we are not among them.
Trying to encapsulate a quarter of a millennium in the history of any nation—particularly one containing such contradictory multitudes—is a fool’s errand. Anyone aspiring to achieve objectivity on such a subject would do well to practice first, say, by taking a census of pinhead angels.
We can say this with some confidence, though: America no longer needs to worry about leading the world astray. It ain’t gonna follow. And as for the role of The World’s Policeman, we ought to be looking over our shoulder for him, as we call the world’s bail bondsman.
A decent respect for the historical record requires at least a brief account of how we went from domination to laughingstock.
Sixty-two years and 2,500 books later, there is no single, agreed-upon answer to the question of who killed President John F. Kennedy. Rogue spooks from the CIA? Bosses of the Mob the FBI said didn’t exist?
Vietnam—the war JFK started, then tried to end [see above]. Once the secret history came out, we learned that the truth really did set most of us free—of the illusion that the government knew what it was doing. The war metastasized into a federal budget fiasco, so one could argue that it never ended.
Those irreconcilable differences set like concrete and the parties drove out their heretics. The constitution gave the rurals and the former slave-states an edge. Big money saw an opportunity, and took it, carefully hedging its bet by backing Democrats in Name Only.
Nothing rejuvenates old authoritarians like seeing strong young men go to foreign lands for glory and a cost-plus contract. The First Bush War was a plausible enough victory to give Bush the Younger a chance to overplay his hand. Even his twin catastrophes, though, failed to fully deplete the momentum of the military-industrial complex.
Fate left that task for a certain stable genius, who, meeting in secret with his sycophants, came up with a plan to overthrow, not some horse-powered colonial capitol, but a modern, hostile, sovereign nation. Iran won, coming out both richer and stronger.
Good luck trying to get the genius to understand that.
* Adams had come a long way since 1748-49, when Daniel Fowle printed for him, in Boston, a newspaper called the Independent Advertiser.