America’s Original Culture War
The Memory of ‘76: The Revolution in American Memory by Michael D. Hattem (Yale University Press, 2024)
Reviewed by Matthew J. Sparacio
Right before his first presidential term ended in January 2021, Donald Trump issued the “1776 Report” of the President’s Advisory 1776 Commission, a rejoinder to the New York Times Magazine’s popular and polarizing “1619 Project.” In the introduction to the “1776 Report,” the commission describes the United States as “an exemplary nation” and its history as “remarkable,” while not without its share of missteps. The report suggests that the “true and eternal” principles and history of the founding era are necessary to learn for each person to “become a better person, a better citizen, and a better partner in the American experiment of self-government.” Within 72 hours, newly inaugurated President Joe Biden issued an executive order rescinding the 1776 Commission and its report. Re-elected in 2024, Trump followed Biden’s precedent, issuing an Executive Order almost four years to the day after the 1776 Commission was rescinded that attacked “anti-American ideologies” that question the moral character of the founding generation. Conflating the Declaration – a document the “1776 Report” characterizes as “formulated by practical men to solve real-world problems” – with the Constitution, both executive efforts reject any scholarship that suggests the revolutionaries were guided by principles other than “openness, honesty, optimism, determination, generosity, confidence, kindness, hard work, courage, and hope.”
The Revolution and the documents drafted by the Founders unquestionably placed concepts like liberty and equality at the center of national identity. Both conservatives and progressives throughout our nation’s history have used these concepts to advocate for their own platforms. Over time, an antagonistic relationship between liberty and equality has developed and deepened. Michael Hattem’s The Memory of ’76: The Revolution in American History (Yale University Press, 2024) offers an explanation as to why and how these concepts have diverged over the last two hundred and fifty years.
Hattem argues that liberty and equality, although often lumped together, are in fact oppositional concepts in American politics and history. Liberty, which he defines as “a set of privileges” is noticed and appreciated more when “others are denied those privileges” (9). Across twenty-four short chapters, Hattem introduces his readers to a historical arc of the United States that saw conservatives prioritize liberty and privilege. In contrast, progressives have tended to prioritize equality, an aspirational society where inequality is not allowed to thrive. The advocacy of colonial elites against Parliamentary alterations to the policy of salutary neglect, the distrust those same elites directed towards the rabble (a pillar of the Federalist party platform), in addition to the obvious inequality inflicted upon enslaved Africans and African Americans, are all clear examples of how the Revolution preserved these liberties and privileges and how they operated in the early United States.
A history of the United States centered on the tension between liberty and equality should sound familiar. In 1975, Edmund Morgan published his most influential work, American Slavery, American Freedom, which outlined this paradox of privilege and inequality in colonial Virginia. Hattem takes us out of the 1600s, through the War for Independence, and beyond. Using a cast of understudied historical figures such as Lemuel Haynes, William Cooper Nell, and Maud Littleton, Hattem describes how the memory of the American Revolution—and whether it was defined by liberty or equality—shaped politics and society in the ensuing centuries. Divergent interpretations of the memory of independence emboldened abolitionists and first-wave feminists, resulted in the private and public preservation of historic homes and documents, and provided a litmus test by which immigrants should acculturate.
The meaning of the Revolution also bolstered calls for big business and consumerism. Hattem compellingly explains how a “long bicentennial era” was seized by movement conservatives in the 1960s-1980s who argued for the moral superiority and “eternal” nature (to borrow a quote from the “1776 Report”) of the central principles of individual liberty, limited government, and free enterprise (237). In doing so, conservatives painted progressives as both out of step with the wider patriotic public and, more alarmingly, subversive to U.S. nationalism during the Cold War. These principles were only further accentuated and entrenched by the “Founder’s Chic” wave of popular histories in the late 1990s and early 2000s that included best-sellers such as David McCullough’s John Adams (Simon & Shuster, 2001), Joseph Ellis’s American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson (Knopf, 1996) and Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation (Knopf, 2000), and Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton (Penguin, 2004). These works entrenched the view of the American Revolution as a result of effort exerted almost exclusively by white, male landowners.
The Memory of ‘76 is a book about culture and the war for independence and how it has been remembered. Perhaps unintentionally, Hattem is implicitly making a claim for a long durée approach to the American culture wars. Too often, the culture wars are viewed as a recent modern socio-cultural moment rather than a method of public argumentation. For example, the most widely assigned open-access U.S. history textbook in higher education, The American Yawp (first published in 2019), defines the culture wars as symptomatic of the 1980s and ultimately petering out with the rise of neoliberalism. One historian even went so far as to ring the death knell for the culture wars in 2015. In contrast, Hattem describes how culture wars over the meaning of the Revolution have been contested ever since the colonies secured independence.
One can think of The Memory of ‘76 as an extension or sequel to Hattem’s first book. In Past and Prologue: Politics and Memory in the American Revolution (Yale University Press, 2020), Hattem utilized the framework of “history culture” to examine how the past was referenced and utilized throughout colonial society to build a movement towards independence. A shared understanding of history was viewed by both Federalists and Anti-Federalists alike as hard but necessary work to facilitate nation-building. The meaning of the Revolution loomed large for these new Americans, in no small part because most lived through the crisis. But what happened after these men and women died? The Memory of ’76 answers that.
By extending this discussion all the way through the January 6 insurrection, The Memory of ‘76 sits as the crossroads of history, historiography, and memory studies. Hattem does not directly wade into the “founding myths” debate, which has seen a recent surge in scholarly interest - important recent entries into this discussion include Richard Slotkin’s A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America (Harvard University Press, 2024) and Akhil Reed Amar’s chapter in Kevin Kruse and Julian Zelizer’s edited volume Myth America (Basic Books, 2022)—but is instead interested in outlining the way that interpretations of the past have been deployed to serve conservative and progressive interests over the last two hundred and fifty years.
The timing is important here. As the United States prepares to embark on an extended semiquincentennial celebration, the meaning and memory of the American Revolution, the Founders, and the institutions they created will be at the center of public attention. As Hattem notes, history and memory have always had a contentious relationship. While closely related, they are fundamentally different. History derives from a method: it has a process that requires constant conversation and interrogation, resulting in what some derisively call “revisions.” In fact, it is these revisions that allow historians to have a more holistic understanding of the past. Collective memory, on the other hand, calls not for nuance but cohesion, an agreed upon simplified narrative that people can draw inspiration and a sense of community from.
The Americana that we are about to endure for the next decade will be impossible to avoid. Each state and U.S. territory has its own individual commission to create local programming. For example, Georgia’s Semiquincentennial Commission has adopted a timely plan themed around “Restoring Trust in American Institutions.” Unfortunately, there does not seem to be a planned revival of the 1947-1949 “Freedom Train,” that brought the revered Founding documents to towns across the country (something Hattem writes about at length). The National Archives will, however, make room for a more inclusive look at liberty sought and gained by adding permanent encasements for the Nineteenth Amendment and the Emancipation Proclamation in the Rotunda.
While the pageantry will be on center stage, behind the scenes the Trump Administration has hyper-charged attacks on the Department of Education, forced out senior leadership in the U.S. National Archives, for all intents and purposes outlawed Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs, and has begun gutting historic preservation services provided by the federal agencies like the U.S. National Park Service (allegedly for austerity measures). Our access to the history (warts and all) of the American Revolution has never been more precarious.
As these recent developments highlight, the history of the United States continues to be contested ground between idealism and realism. Right now, it seems that a narrowly-defined idealism has the legislative upper hand. What Hattem’s work has shown, however, is that we should expect the realists—those who recognize and accept that past despite its unsavory features—to rise to the occasion during the semiquincentennial and defend an objective narrative of our nation’s origins. It is possible that The Memory of ‘76 may need a revised second edition within five years.
Matthew Sparacio is a lecturer of colonial and Native American history at Georgia State University. He mostly posts about dogs and pizza on instagram @calumetsncrowns .
