- [Announcer] And now an Arizona PBS original production.

- [Announcer] The School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership presents, the Civic Discourse Project, Ideological Conformity on Campus and In American Society.

This week- - The Left has evacuated patriotism and the Right has evacuated reflection.

Let us wake from that deceitful dream of the Golden Age.

All ages are brass.

Our declaration remains aspirational.

Let us aspire together.

- [Announcer] The Civic Discourse Project is brought to you by Arizona State University School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership and the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law.

And now Dr. Jane Kamensky, professor of American History at Harvard University, speaks on 1776 And Us: Finding the Founding in a Foundering Democracy.

- Thank you for letting me talk about the beginnings of the American National journey, about 1776 rather than 1787, here two days after Constitution Day, as this occasion has been known just since 2005.

A core truth of the year 1776 is that British colonials were animated in significant measure by the opposite of reverence, by a refusal to make gods of their rulers past, present, or future.

In July of 1776, upon hearing the Declaration of Independence read aloud, crowds demonstrated that refusal dramatically by toppling the gilded statue of George III on Bowling Green in New York.

This is a 19th century rendering of that.

And by pulling the English lion and the Scottish unicorn from the roof of the townhouse in Boston.

After achieving independence the leaders of the American experiment, especially, but not only George Washington, were extremely wary of being costumed or addressed or portrayed as demigods.

Their demure was a matter of politics and principle as well as personal character.

So my first preposition, the idea that we must kneel before them is un-American but here is my proposition number two.

If the 1776 we need is not an altar, nor is it a house of horrors, no Valhalla, no Gomorrah, no gods, no monsters, just women and men doing the best that they could by the standards of their day, their own self-interests obviously included, because they were people.

The ordinary British Americans who protested over home rule and over who should rule at home, the continental Congress and the local committees who framed new laws and institutions as older ones crumbled.

These were not people who gathered, twisting their mustaches to enact a plot to keep other people down.

Yet they were imperfect egalitarians.

Their leaders were drawn from selected segments of the colonial population.

Men of property and to some degree, artisans and laborers.

Their wives and other daughters of liberty played catalyzing but unofficial roles.

Their political bodies neither included nor meant to include categories of persons deemed incapable of the predicates of self-government.

And that included women and enslaved people poor men and minors.

Native Americans were considered separately sovereign.

So together these less than independent or otherwise independent parts of the population comprised a substantial majority.

Those birthing a new order wanted to level many distinctions, yet they also believed in preserving hierarchies that we have since discarded or tried to.

But in the end the hierarchies they wanted to preserve hardly mattered.

Their discourse of liberty was as contagious as smallpox.

John Adams said as much to Abigail Adams in April of '76, when he answered her vaunted call to "remember the ladies" by saying that, "our struggle..." I'm quoting Adams here, "Our struggle "has loosened the bonds of government everywhere."

And he goes on to specify, "among young people "among Indians under guardianship, Black people in bondage."

And now he joked, women, that "tribe more numerous and powerful "than all the rest."

He said that Abigail's "extraordinary code of laws," made him laugh.

If so, it was mordenic laughter because Adams and his fellows also believed that over time, we the people would, and even should discard much that they held dear.

Jefferson famously questioned the extent to which, "One generation of men has a right to bind another," and expected a new insurgency to seek a more perfect union roughly every 20 years.

So they were imperfect and they were self-knowing, they were not gods, they were not monsters.

A tale with neither Gods nor monsters doesn't make for big Box Office numbers in the Marvel Universe, and it's even less suited to our contemporary all or nothing politics.

Which brings me to my third proposition.

The 1776 we need is history and not propaganda.

Our Tracy McKenzie, who is the Holmes Chair of Faith and learning at Wheaton College, offers appointed warning about the dangers of propaganda in a fascinating new book, "We The Fallen People."

"Too often," he writes "we end up turning history into an arsenal, "a storehouse, not of wisdom, but of weapons."

Since the rise of the Tea party in 2010 the Right has been perhaps more overt in its weaponizing of 1776, but there is no partisan monopoly in claiming the mantle of the founding as President Biden demonstrated in his speech outside Independence Hall a couple of weeks ago.

So no gods no monsters, no weapons, which is to say, forth and finally, any civically useful account of our founding must be legitimate, and any legitimate account must be true.

More than that, any such account must seek to teach the values and skills and habits of truth telling, to a polity awash in competing information and misinformation and even disinformation to a degree literally inconceivable in the 18th century, which had its own very scurrilous press.

In order to hold these truths we need to instruct young people and even to probe each other in the means of discovering, debating, and evaluating what they are.

It goes without saying, though, one of the core elements of my pedagogy is always to say the things that are supposed to go without saying, that any true story is a complicated story, because people are complicated.

The historians who are doing the best and subtlest work about the founding know this.

I'm thinking of my colleague at Harvard Annette Gordon Reed, who manifests her enduring sense of Jefferson's importance to our national story and to the global history of ideas through a commitment to understanding as fully as possible his works and his world, including his property and people, his family, Black and white.

But it's not just Harvard dons who know that people are complicated.

In his fascinating recent book about slavery on public history in the United States the poet Clint Smith quotes a docent at Monticello who says people sometimes make fun of her for trying to "tear Jeffrey Jefferson down."

And she goes on.

But to me, I think they put him up on a pedestal and they deny the fact that he was human.

He had things about his life that were flaws and you have to look at his life.

You have to look because those past lives still matter.

I hope as we barrel towards our nation's 250th that we begin to imagine the history of our founding era not as a collection of saints lives or a catalog of original sins, but as a capacious toolkit.

One that can be used to build new structures, structures that are sound because they are firmly grounded.

Or we might think of the past as a collection of melodies, harmonious and dissonant refrains that can be joined by different voices or rearranged for new instruments, translated into different languages, transposed into new keys without becoming distorted.

I offer this second metaphor, because the case study I want to lay before you this evening centers on "1776," the musical.

There have been numerous revivals since including one concert, staged in modern dress in 2016 in the middle of the presidential election cycle and perhaps more to the point in the wake of the mania surrounding Lin-Manuel Miranda's "2015 Hamilton."

For those who have never seen it I'll offer a super quick synopsis.

The show dramatizes the deliberations of the second Continental Congress in the spring of 1776.

The action takes place almost entirely in a single room, in Independence Hall, the dramatic format now known as the bottle episode.

The cast consists of 20 members of Congress spread across 13 delegations, along with five functionaries and two delegates wives.

Abigail Adams exists in John Adams' mind's eye and Martha Jefferson visits Philadelphia to inspire her husband suffering from writer's block.

The action... That was a dirty joke, none of you laughed.

(audience laughing) The action begins on May 8th.

Everything I've heard about Arizona is true.

No, the action begins on May 8th and concludes on July 4th of 1776.

The show began casting in September of 1968 just after the days of rage in Chicago.

Its creators wanted an antidote to rage.

They told "The Times that 1776 promised, "laughter, poignancy and above all, "a kindling of pride and inspiration."

That may sound all warm and dewy but 1969's, 1776 was not an altar.

From the very first moments of the action it refuses to treat its protagonists as "gods" or cardboard characters, as Sherman Edwards later said.

The collaborators meant to offer a real story of real people, founders with both... And I'm quoting them again.

"Public passions and personal foibles.

"Men who disagreed and fought with each other "but fought affirmatively."

And Paul, there's the SCETL mission.

I continue to be surprised when I meet people who say "Oh, "1776," it's my favorite musical, "it's just what our country needs."

Polis recently told the "New York Times," "I keep thinking, what are they talking about?"

I think at least the question of what our country needs as Paul has put it, is an essential one for serious students of the past to be asking, whether their medium is the monograph or the musical, whether their metier is Congress or the classroom.

Those needs are profound, especially among young people.

Less than a third of Americans born after 1980 tell pollsters that they consider it important or very important, to live in a democracy, to self-govern, rather than to be ruled by the military or "a strong leader."

In order to believe in American constitutional democracy young people need knowledge of the foundations on which our peoplehood was built, and the burdens that those foundations impose on every one of us.

This is knowledge that we the people manifestly do not possess.

History results on the national assessment of educational progress, a flawed tool, but still the best one we have, are dismal and falling.

Even top performing students scored lower on NAP's democracy theme in 2018 than in 2014, and scores across all US history themes remained well short of proficient in every student band.

We need knowledge not only of our shared foundations but also of each other about what moves our hearts and blows our minds about what we wish for the future and carry from the past.

During the 2020 presidential election, some 40% of Americans, reported that they didn't personally know a single individual who planned to vote for the candidate they themselves opposed.

I came here today in part to raise the percentage.

Let's get to know each other.

We need finally to cultivate modesty about our convictions and a willingness to subject them to evidence and then to govern with modesty allied to evidence.

Is it not time to awake from the deceitful dream of a golden age, and to adopt as a practical maxim for the direction of our political conduct, that we as well as the other inhabitants of the globe are yet remote from that happy empire of perfect wisdom and perfect virtue?

Right over there from Hamilton in "Federalist number six," in the fallen moment of the fall of 1787.

Some 235 years later let us wake from that deceitful dream of the golden age, all ages are brass.

Our declaration remains aspirational, let us aspire together.

Thank you.

(audience clapping) (gentle music) - Thank you, Jane, for those remarks on the presentation.

I wanted to start with what might seem something of an inside baseball academic question for you.

But your remarks brought to mind the recent controversy from the president of the American Historical Association discussing popular histories, one might say, including the 1619 project, and particular popular histories that have a more partisan ideological agenda than a solid academic discursive evidence-based view.

And for this, he was very roundly criticized by members of the American Historical Association.

And it seemed to me, you were calling for a similarly balanced and complicated approach in universities and beyond universities, about American history.

That would include praise and criticism in appropriate measure, with evidence and argument.

Back it up, but not either monsters or demigods.

Two questions, is it fair to compare the spirit of your remarks to that president's letter for the American Historical Association, and what did you think of that letter by your colleague?

- Yeah, so have people followed this?

It's big in Twitter, which I'm not on.

But then Brett Stevens wrote about it in the New York Times so I figured I had to learn what it was about.

And the American Historical Association is going to do a plenary panel at its January convention about the relationship of the past to the present, at which I will be a speaker, so I'll say my piece on this then.

I found the column itself to be entirely anodyne even banal actually.

It makes two points.

One is that the great majority of people who study history now, which is a shrinking population, are studying the history of the very recent past, so that we really want a very proximate connection between our own age and the age we study.

And the other critique that he offered was that we are increasingly unwilling to treat the people of the past within the framework of the past.

To understand their ideas according to the world in which they live.

I'll offer a really superficial example.

You don't say like, "Well, why didn't he just pick up his phone "and text his mother?

"Why did it take five months to get this letter "back and forth across the Atlantic?"

I wholly endorse the view of needing to understand the past on its own terms.

Historians do autopsies.

We don't give funeral sermons, we don't sing praise hymns, We're not prosecutors.

It's just not our business.

We all come from a present.

We ask the questions, we ask and care about the things that we care about because of the world that shaped us.

The idea that we would ever get away from being people in bodies, living in space, who have their heads shaped by a particular moment, seems like a fiction.

So leveraging who we are in the present to ask new questions and get thoughtful answers from the past, seems to me like what historians do.

Nobody in academic history studied in a formal way the history of women before about 1970.

Like if you took your PhD in 1970 you did your second book not your first book on the history of women.

And if you did your PhD in 1970 and wanted to become a historian of women's experience in the past.

There were women in the past, it turns out, (audience laughing) that's how the population grew.

I don't mean to spoil anything.

- Occasionally we make late breaking news here in- - Yeah, but it really was not until the modern woman's movement, the so-called second wave of the middle and late 1960s that people began asking questions.

"What was their experience like?"

That prompted a whole lot of very genuine discovery about the worlds of the past.

It was not a question of what was their experience like so that we can show how we are better, or how can we story their experience into our experience.

But it was a new curiosity that came out of a degree of, not presentism but present mindedness, just living in the present.

So that I think is natural and salutary, and certainly we ask much more about the diverse range of human experience in the past than we used to, because of the new things that we're aware of.

And that seems to me fine.

- Can you still love America if you can be so argumentative about its meaning, and occasionally critical of what America claims to be?

- I think love is a radical thing, right?

I said, affection, empathy, compassion and indeed love, seem appropriate to attach to all our endeavors.

Who wants to proceed out of something other than love?

I'm gonna offer a framing and I want you to accept or rebut wrestle with it.

I think reflective patriotism is so hard right now because the Left has evacuated patriotism and the Right has evacuated reflection, so that the idea of a critical engagement...

I use the word critical in 2022.

Struck from our lexicon.

A critical engagement with America I think feels anathematic to part of the Right.

And saying, "I love the United States," is a hard thing to say on the Left.

I love the United States because it's the place where I can say critical things about the polity, as I started with Branislav D. Brkic of Huntington Long Island, because truly where else on earth, and that I am an American photograph, of course is Dorothy Lang's photograph of a Nisei Japanese shop in Oakland in 1942.

Somebody saying, "No, do not intern me, "I am an American."

We are a vexed and beautiful place.

And I love it deeply.

And I think on the liberal side of the political spectrum and I think of myself as center left and you as center right.

Right here, we're seated correctly.

I think it's very important to stand up and voice the love.

I really, really do.

My American Revolution class, which I taught for the first time in 2017, came out of the widget factory of course numbering as history 1002.

And I taught the course as a sort of representation of the field of scholarship which is what we do at Harvard University.

And I had in the class, a wonderful young man who was a re-enactor of the Battle of Concord in Lexington.

Working class white kid had grown up in Concord, in Lexington was an EMT, wanted to bring like muskets and black powder to class, was really affectionate.

And I interviewed them all at the end of the class in this sort of metacognitive exercise.

Reflect on what you've learned.

And I asked him what he was gonna do differently in his reenactment troupe.

And he said, "I quit."

And I said, "You quit.

"Why did you quit?

And he said, "'Cause you, you taught me it was all lies."

And I realized that I had made a terrible mistake in calibrating the relationship of love and critique.

And I renamed the class history 1776 and I went about it quite differently in his name.

- My question is, how do I as the great, great-granddaughter of a slave who died in the late twenties.

How do I love this country, since as I said, my great-grandfather was enslaved, and when I see what we went through to get voting rights et cetera, et cetera...

So my people have been and are still at the bottom.

So how do I keep on, and my children keep on loving a country who has not loved them in my opinion.

- I wanna thank you for that important question and the passion with which you voiced it and for the reminder that slavery is very proximate.

So a person known to you, alive in what I think of as my century, the 20th, a direct tie, not just a sort of structural tie.

And I guess the answer that I would give to that question, is because Frederick Douglass did.

Because W. E. B.

Du Bois did as loudly as he criticized it, because of the people who hung in, in the struggle, in belief.

I do not have the identity position to say that that is enough to you, but that would be my answer.

Is that if Douglass hung in the work, having suffered it himself and believed in stretching the promise of this country to cover his people, and Du Bois, and Ellison, and Tony Morrison, all of the voices who struggled for and with the country in the 20th century, I would seek the comfort in their answers.

And whether that is morally sufficient is a question that I think I am not poised to answer definitively, and that nobody should try to answer definitively, but I thank you for asking it.

(gentle music) - [Announcer] The Civic Discourse Project, Ideological Conformity on Campus and in American society is brought to you by Arizona State University School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership and the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law.

(gentle music)