Author James C Thompson has written a new history of America! He describes it as “forensic history” because, in the process of reconstructing what actually happened, he identifies and corrects several misreported events and includes several more that disappeared from America’s folklore history.
America’s folklore history is picturesque and often heroic, but it also misinforms. People who want to understand how America became what it is today need to read Thompson’s American Revolutions Series. It’s a 21st century history of America that sticks with the facts.
The four “revolutions” Thompson reconstructs in his series transformed America from “the land of the free and home of the brave” Francis Scott Key memorialized in his star-spangled anthem into the government-managed “flock of timid and industrious animals” that Alexis de Tocqueville foresaw in Democracy in America (1840). Thompson’s narrative spans two-hundred years and tells a story that has never before been told.
Sam Adam Wage a Revolution for the Minds of the American People
In The First Revolutions in the Minds of the People, Thompson reconstructs the propaganda campaign Samuel Adams and his compatriots conducted during the ten years leading up to the War for American Inependence.
After critiquing the designer history of humanist Professor Bernard Bailyn, Thompson focuses on English placeman John Wilkes, who used attention-grabbing rights rhetoric to rouse London’s working classes against the ministers of King George III.
Sam Adams and his cronies read about Wilkes’s escapades while drinking together in Boston’s Green Dragon Tavern in 1763. The following year, Adams began applying Wilkes’s method of “speaking in the voice of the people” to rouse American colonials against British rule. He filled his campaign with rights rhetoric derived from ideas he encountered in John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government (1689). Indeed, Adams made himself the foremost authority on John Locke in the King’s American colonies by writing a Harvard Master’s thesis (in 1743) on Locke’s “right of resisting.” The paper has been lost but the title remains: “Whether it be lawful to resist the Supreme Magistrate, if the commonwealth cannot be otherwise preserved.” This commentary on political resistance explains, Thompson contends, why Adams based the propaganda campaign he launched twenty-years later on pseudo-Lockean concepts like Natural Law, Natural Right, and the Right to Revolution.
Thompson also documents how Adams supplemented his Wilkesean rhetoric with public violence and intimidation. Adams added these features, Thompson explains, because he wanted to silence his unyielding loyalist opponents, who constituted the great majority his colonial neighbors.
The War for American Independence began, Thompson notes, when King George III moved to restore his authority in his American colonies, which he did on 23 August 1775 by issuing his Proclamation of Rebellion. The facts show, Thompson concludes, that the War for American Independence was orchestrated by Sam Adams and the “energetic minority” he organized during the decade leading up the King’s proclamation. It was not, as Folklore history pretends, an uprising against tyranny by the American people!
The War for American Independence continued for eight years. Thompson stages it in his new history of America, but he does not treat it separately. Instead, he leapfrogs from Sam Adams’ revolution for the minds of the American people (1764-1775) to Thomas Jefferson’s “Second American Revolution” (1790-1801). The two events are linked, says Thompson, by the methods their head men used. Both relied on organization and propaganda.
The Second American Revolution Transformed America’s majoritarian political system into an adversarial party system
In The Second American Revolution, Thompson documents how Thomas Jefferson encouraged his neighbor and protégé, James Madison, to use the network of “Republican” newspapers he was organizing to attack Jefferson’s political enemies and divide the American people againt themselves. Jefferson’s objective was to grow his faction, which was strongest in the agricultural South and the rapidly growing West, into a voting majority that would give him control of the new national Congress—and allow him to thwart President Washington’s brilliant Treasury Secretary, Alexander Hamilton. He eventually hit on a theme that appealed to Southerners and Westerners: Liberty! By trumpeting this ideal while disparaging Hamilton, Jefferson quickly accomplished his objective. In 1793, his Republican Party became the majority in the House of Representatives.
Jefferson became Vice President in the presidential election of 1796. He did this by placing second behind John Adams in the vote to succeed retiring President Washington. Thompson traces the “hare-brained coup d’état” (1797–1800) Vice President Jefferson conducted against unsuspecting President Adams to prevent him from winning re-election. Jefferson’s shadowy campaign worked, and he squeaked to victory in the House of Representative in February 1801. He referred to his victory as “the Revolution of 1800.”
Jefferson directed that three of his most remarkable accomplishments be inscribed on his tombstone. Thompson details what he did in each of these initiatives before focusing on two others that Jefferson did not mention.
Jefferson’s greatest legacy, says Thompson, was to create the adversarial party system Madison managed during the Second American Revolution. Jefferson’s second great legacy, Thompson contends, was to make the American government the instrument of his political party. Jefferson quietly transformed the government during his first year as President, Thompson observes, by instituting his “spoils system.” Using his authority as President, Jefferson appointed trustworthy members of his party to run the American government. Being dedicated partymen, they also protected Jefferson and his administration from political sabotage, and assured his party’s victory in future elections.
Inventing a political symbol: Faux Thomas Jefferson
The third book in Thompson’s American Revolutions Series is Faux Thomas Jefferson – A 20th Century Fiction. Here, Thompson traces the activities of leading historians as they moved to support the administrators of the country’s increasingly activist government. In the 1930s, he continues, scholars began teaching the American people to appreciate the “Benevolent Government” Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Dealers invented to lift up those less fortunate.
Thompson calls this partnership the Political-Historical Complex (H-PC) and recounts how its members replaced Jefferson qua real 18th century partisan with a progressive caricature whose role was to make the American flock comfortable obeying the shepherds who administered FDR’s New Deal. Thompson then follows the advance of Faux Thomas Jefferson as he replaced the real Thomas Jefferson in America’s folklore history.
Fulfilling Alexis de Tocqueville’s Prophesy: Benevolent Government:
The final book in Thompson’s American Revolutions Series is The Third American Revolution – The Rise and Fall of America’s Imperial Hierarchy.
Few Americans today remember John Dewey, the devastation and consequences of the First World War, or why America’s leading historians became Marxists in its wake. Thompson weaves these threads into an account that explains how a few Nietzscheans bureaucrats gained control of America’s government “of, by, and for the people” and used organization and propaganda to manage them while exerting their “will-to-power” to expand and perpetuate their authority. By transforming themselves into an all-powerful governing class, Thompson observes, they fulfilled Tocqueville’s 1840 prophecy.
Propaganda fueled the American Revolutions
Another important aspect of Thompson’s narrative is his treatment of the philosophical concepts that underpinned the revolutions that transformed America.
One of the folklore illusions Thompson corrects is the idea that the individuals who led the rebellion against King George III’s colonial government were enlightened philosophers. A few, men like Richard Bland, George Mason, and John Dickinson, were “idea men.” But most, including John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and Thomas Jefferson, were aspiring politicians driven by their political interests, which they advanced with rhetoric and organization.
Thompson, whose undergraduate and graduate degress are in Philosophy, straightens out the ideas that men like Sam Adams and Thomas Jefferson wove into the patriotic narrative. These rhetorical pieces, Thompson explains, were designed to shape public opinion and build support for opposition to the English rule. Patriotic penmen attempted to do this, says Thompson, by wrapping their power grab in enlightened reason.
Men on colonial streets knew nothing about Natural Law or Natural Right, but they understood their rights as Englishmen, and large majorities of them trusted their common law rights far more than they trusted Sam and John Adams and the murky rights by Nature they espoused. This divergence often led to violence. Thompson documents the civil war conditions that existed in many communities and regions of the country.
Where did patriotic penmen get their ideas? Some point to the 15th century’s Florentine Republic. Thompson dismisses this designer notion. But he also conditions claims that John Locke was the source of patriotic inspiration. Instead, he shows that the key concepts in the patriotic insurgency originated with the colonies’ foremost Locke scholar, Sam Adams. Thompson shows how Adams twisted Locke’s “right of resisting” insurgencies by political “malecontents” into the so-called “right to revolution” that Thomas Jefferson institutionalized in the preamble of the Declaration of Independence.
Could folklore historians know this? Of course. But they would have to read the original philosophers as Thompson has, rather than cite their colleagues in the P-HC.
American History for the 21st Century
Thompson’s new history of America not only details what once happened, it also clarifies what is happening today.
Thompson explains that America’s patriots conducted a propaganda campaign, which they supplemented with public violence and intimidation. Having subverted the King’s colonial governments, they used fear to silence his loyal American subjects. By doing these things, they orchestrated a war with the most power nation in the world. America’s unlikely victory in the War for American Independence allowed folklore historians to change the narrative. After the victory that made the King’s American colonies “free”, it became customary to celebrate individual rights, popular sovereignty, and majority rule as central parts in an American creed.
Thompson agrees that societies must have these characteristics to be healthy. But he warns that politics makes achieving them unlikely. In this context, he remembers Winston Churchill. The real point in reading history, Churchill once advised, is not to cheer the home team but rather to learn from the past so as not to repeat it.
“The American Revolutions Series” presents a fascinating narrative about what once happened in America. It is also food for thought about where it is today and where it might go tomorrow.