Andrew M. Schocket has written a unique, important book, which is wonderfully written, conversational, and full of Schocket's “experience … education, and … values” (13). Fighting over the Founders looks to incite debate on how we engage with the American Revolution. For source material, Schocket has read widely. He has also attended seminars, visited historic sites, and watched relevant television shows and films, using his personal experience as evidence. This book does not contain footnotes; instead, it has a detailed list of further readings. At the outset Schocket introduces two terms, “essentialism” and “organicism” (4–6), to his understanding of how the Revolution is and has been memorialized. “Essentialism” is defined as a type of history that offers one meaning, one answer, and one interpretation. It is blunt. Its adherents – David McCullough, Gordon Wood, and Glenn Beck, for example – are mostly conservative in their politics. They tend to study white men. Schocket sees “organicist” interpretations as part of an evolving process. Its adherents – Gary Nash, Annette Gordon-Reid, and David Waldstreicher, among others – examine marginalized individuals alongside white men. Organicists can be more liberal, but not always. Schocket admits that neither label is all-encompassing.
The first chapter of Fighting over the Founders examines how American politicians – Democrat and Republican – have used the Revolution in their rhetoric. It examines speeches from 1968 to 2012, and is one of the most thought-provoking chapters. To make sense of politicians' “loquaciousness” (21), Schocket ran a computer program to search for obvious buzzwords, terms, and dates (e.g. “Washington,” “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” or “1776”). He shows how Democrats and Republicans could use the same events, ideas, and people for different purposes, viewing the Revolution as “a low-risk” but effective strategy (24–25). There are also useful tables in this chapter, especially for those writing on rhetoric in American politics. In chapter 2, Schocket deals with “Founding Fathers Chic.” Historians writing on early America will take a great deal from Schocket's explanation that “Founding Fathers Chic” offers essentialist readings of the Revolution, emphasizing the contributions of old white men to the United States. More importantly, or perhaps more worryingly, though, Schocket tells us how the authors purposely omit parts of the Founders' narratives that don't fit their essentialist visions. The third chapter examines historical sites, and is the book's strongest. Schocket offers analyses of various spots in Philadelphia – Independence Hall, the First White House, and the National Constitution Center, for instance – and Colonial Williamsburg and tells us how they tell the history of the Revolution. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Schocket sees race as a difficult issue for historic sites to address. In all of the areas he visited, with the possible exception of the First White House, they struggled to fully address the complexities of race.
Chapter 4 examines how the Revolution has been portrayed through television and films, while chapter 5 examines the Tea Party and battle reenactors. In the penultimate chapter he examines the National Treasure films, The Patriot, Liberty’s Kids, and HBO's John Adams in detail. The chapter includes black-and-white images from each. Schocket analyzes the strengths and shortcomings of each. He argues that, through media-related ventures, television shows and films function ideologically. The way they are made puts forward particular, heavily politicized visions. These visions can be essentialist or organicist. The Patriot (Roland Emmerich, 2000), for instance, partakes in what Schocket calls “white fantasy slavery lite”: “all the racial hierarchy, none of the mutual resentment” (140); meanwhile, the television series Liberty’s Kids (2002–3), though admirable, is filled with anachronism (138). In chapter 5, Schocket criticizes the Tea Party movement, telling us how it originated and tapped into the consciousness of between six and eight million “supporters” (180–81) by using a seminal event of the Revolution. He discusses how he attended a National Center for Constitutional Studies, where he worried he might be seen as a spy because his politics did not fit the essentialism of the other attendees. This chapter is mostly on the Tea Party, but he has a short section on reenactors, telling us of the camaraderie and ideology of fighting the American Revolution on the weekends. This section is too brief, and in need of further elaboration.
Fighting over the Founders makes a valuable contribution to scholarship. It should be read widely, especially when teaching the American Revolution within popular culture. The book's main contribution is that it shows us how twenty-first-century Americans understand the Revolution as a resounding success. Whether in a speech, at a museum, or on a battlefield, Americans, for better or worse, pay little attention to the Revolution's destruction, its cost, its full complexities, or its shortcomings.
