* Things were different only a couple of generations ago, when the cult of the founders underpinned consensus. In the 1960s sociologists discussed the role of a non-denominational ‘civil religion’ centred on the founders’ secular scriptures – the Declaration of Independence, the constitution and the Bill of Rights – and a calendar of public observance. Was America’s civil religion a substitute for Christianity, or merely a supplement to it? In the easy-going days before the rise of the evangelical right, it didn’t seem to matter, and the cult of the founders had no ulterior partisan or ideological significance. Indeed, liberals were just as committed to it as conservatives, happily hymning the Jeffersonian separation of Church and state.
* Stacy Schiff’s life of the revolutionary patriot Samuel Adams is an unobtrusively subversive contribution to the genre. Schiff’s Adams is, if not quite a purveyor of fake news, a master craftsman in the arts of distortion and exaggeration, whose spin and sensation-mongering transformed loyal colonial Britons into revolutionary Americans over the course of little more than a decade.
* The most persuasive explanation, advanced by Bernard Bailyn in The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967), is that the reading habits of the 18th-century colonists tilted heavily towards the fretful opposition Whiggery of the mother country. By contrast with mainstream Whiggish celebration of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, opposition Whigs – indebted to mid-17th-century commonwealth ideals, suspicious of government power in general, and nervous of conspiracies against liberty – stressed the frailty of English freedoms, not least from the poisons they identified in the body politic. Transatlantic distance aggravated such concerns. Eventually, colonials came to fear that England’s liberties were on the point of expiry, and British America’s might be next.
Schiff adds a twist to this story. The colonies’ instinctive British loyalties counterbalanced suspicion and mistrust; it took sustained, deliberate effort from Adams between the mid-1760s and mid-1770s to transform protest into outrage, then militancy, and finally a willingness to shed blood for an as yet unimagined American nation. Abetted by London’s misunderstandings of Boston, and Boston’s exaggerated misreadings of London’s intent, Adams’s persistent scheming, Schiff suggests, contrived America into existence.
* Her Adams and the mid-18th-century Boston crowd supply disturbing precedents for rabble-rousing populism, truth-bending demagoguery, intimidation, violence, vandalism and the destruction of property; the hanged effigies of Oliver and Grenville foreshadow the gallows the Capitol mob built for Vice-President Pence. Founding-era exemplars of this sort still matter. Most obviously, the Tea Party movement, which has now been absorbed by the Republican Party, klaxoned its debt to the American Revolution, and its anarchic, ultra-libertarian obstructiveness crudely echoed the chariness of government so characteristic of 18th-century Whig patriots.
