Paul Revere's Ride (61 page)

The debunkers were undeterred by flying filiopietists and presidential reprimands. With the growing antiwar movement of the 1930s they also turned their attentions to the myth of the minutemen, who were increasingly represented as cowardly country bumpkins, and bad shots to boot.
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In the late 1930s an army officer was detailed to make a study of the battles of Lexington and Concord. He concluded that there was nothing of professional interest to be learned from the event.
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On the midnight ride, both debunkers and filiopietists continued to be very active through the 1930s, much to the bewilderment of the reading public. H. L. Mencken’s irreverent magazine
The American Mercury
was publishing iconoclastic attacks on the legend of Paul Revere as late as 1938.
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When Esther Forbes brought out her biography of Paul Revere in 1942, she reported in amazement, “Since I have begun on this book I have been asked several times if it is true that Paul Revere never took that ride at all.”
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Crusade for Democracy: The Myth of the Common Man

The age of the debunker ended abruptly with the outbreak of World War II. As fascist and communist dictatorships gained strength throughout the world, and free institutions were increasingly under violent attack, Americans began to think again about their national heritage of liberal values and democratic purposes.

Once again the reputation of Paul Revere was a sensitive indicator of cultural change. The reputation of the midnight rider began to be refurbished to meet the changing needs of a new generation. In 1940, the city of Boston finally got around to erecting Cyrus Dallin’s equestrian statue of Paul Revere as a symbol of resistance to tyranny and aggression.

One might have expected that the militant Paul Revere of Dallin’s monument would have returned to fashion in a world at war. But something else happened. Paul Revere was suddenly given a new image, different from all that came before, and yet perfectly matched to the needs of a democratic crusade against fascism and militarism.

The architect of this new interpretation was Esther Forbes, a New England novelist who turned her hand to the writing of history with high success. It was one of the more improbable pairings of subject and author—a masculine figure whose life had been absorbed in the hurly-burly of politics, war and business; and a New England spinster who worked beside her aged mother in a quiet alcove of the American Antiquarian Society.

In that setting, Esther Forbes wrote a book called
Paul Revere and the World He Lived In.
It was published in 1942, the year of Corregidor and Midway, and gave the midnight rider a new identity suitable to the nation’s great crusade for freedom and democra:y. Esther Forbes interpreted her hero as an ordinary American, a peace-loving common man who rose to the challenge of great events. In a letter to her editor, she summarized her idea of Paul Revere in two sentences. “He represents a typical and important type of man about which very little is written,” she wrote; “I mean the simple artizan [sic].”
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To make her case for Paul Revere as a “simple artizan,” Forbes gave much attention to his commmunity, and especially to his domestic life. She had little interest in the details of politics, or military career, or business affairs, beyond an evocation of Revere’s colonial silver shop and intimate vignettes of his bell foundry. Her idea of the American Revolution was a hierarchical movement in which Sam Adams appeared as the “mastermind” and Paul Revere as a “lone horseman” who acted as “courier” for his social superiors. The midnight ride was given merely twelve pages out of five hundred in the book, and interpreted as an event of minor consequence, except for its status as a myth and symbol. Most of the book was about the social world of a “simple artizan” in colonial Boston.

Esther Forbes celebrated the everyday life of an ordinary man with grace, verve, deep feeling for her democratic theme, and high good humor. She was less enthusiastic about Paul Revere himself, whose personality tended to disappear into the social background. The organizing idea of Paul Revere as a “simple artizan” was very far off the mark—as romantic and inaccurate in its own way as Longfellow’s solitary rider.
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Academic historians have also tended to criticize the scholarship of the work in another way, complaining that it “lacks citations” and “uses significant literary license.”
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This criticism is unfair. It is true that the book is not well documented, and it has been corrected in detail by subsequent research. But Forbes made excellent use of the materials assembled by Goss and also of the Revere Family Papers. The book is beautifully crafted as a work of popular biography and still very fresh and lively. Its sustained interest in social history was far in advance of academic scholarship. For its timely expression of the new national mood,
Paul Revere and the World He Lived In
won the Pulitzer Prize in 1943.
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Esther Forbes’s interpretation of Paul Revere as a “simple artizan” was taken up by many other American writers in the mid-20th century. It lent itself perfectly to a new generation of children’s books by Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Jean Fritz, and especially Robert Lawson’s
Mr. Revere and I
(Boston, 1953), a charming fable told by Paul Revere’s horse, whom the author renamed Scheherazade. Lawson’s witty drawings showed Paul Revere as an ordinary American who reluctantly left his domestic hearth and rose heroically to keep his rendezvous with destiny—an interpretation very close to that of Esther Forbes.
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The Cold War: The Myth of the Capitalist Democrat

In 1949, a symbolic event occurred in Boston. Paul Revere’s “patriotic bowl,” commissioned by the Sons of Liberty in 1768 to commemorate the courage of ninety-two members of the Massachusetts legislature, was returned to the Commonwealth with high ceremony. The bowl had passed into the hands of private collector, Mrs. Marsden Perry. It was purchased from her estate for $56,000, raised partly from schoolchildren in Boston, in a campaign sponsored by Yankee social leaders, Jewish businessmen, and Irish politicians led by Thomas P. O’Neill, Jr., then speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives. Paul Revere’s bowl with its libertarian inscriptions was placed in the Museum of Fine Arts as an icon of American freedom, and a symbol of a new society which was open to people of diverse origins.

With the beginning of the Cold War, Paul Revere began to appear as a personification of the linkage between capitalism and democracy, and the symbol of an open pluralist society in the “free world.” On the anniversary of the ride in 1950, the
Boston Herald
warned that “tyranny of Red Coats takes a new form—Communism. In saluting the patriots of Concord and Lexington we sound the alarm once again. The enemy is now in our midst.”
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Much popular writing in this era stressed the connection between Paul Revere’s activities as a Son of Liberty and his career as a “businessman” and an archetype of “free enterprise.” The image of Paul Revere became increasingly prominent in commercial advertising. The Paul Revere Insurance Company reached its public with the slogan, “Revere, a name you can trust.” The Revere Sugar Corporation used the silhouette of the midnight rider as its advertising logo. The Revere Copper and Brass Company, which had grown from Paul Revere’s business, stamped a profile of its founder’s head on the bottom of each of its copper-clad saucepans, which it sold by the millions to American housewives.

The most widely read work in this period was a lively piece of popular history by Arthur B. Tourtellot, first published in 1959 as
William Diamond’s Drum
and reissued as
Lexington and Concord: The Beginning of the War of the American Revolution
(1963). Tourtellot was a specialist in public relations for Time, Inc., and director of its television productions from 1950 to 1952. He drew heavily on the British materials found by American Anglophiles to celebrate the minutemen and the midnight riders as defenders of a free society.

Another expression of this interpretative mood was an important and highly original work by John R. Galvin, a graduate of West Point in the class of 1954, who served in Latin America, Vietnam, and ended a distinguished career as Commanding General of NATO. Galvin was also a trained historian of high ability, with a master’s degree in history from Columbia University. During the early 1960s, while a junior officer stationed at Fort Devens, Massachusetts, he wrote a book, later published under the misleading title of
The
Minute Men: A Compact History of the Defenders of the American Colonies, 1645—1775.
Of the twenty-nine chapters in this work, twenty-three were devoted to events of 1774 and 1775, seventeen of them to the battles of Lexington and Concord.

Galvin’s interpretation was conceived in the context of the new military thinking about “unconventional warfare” that developed in the early 1960s. He found the battles of Lexington and Concord deeply interesting in that respect. At the same time, he studied the minutemen and the midnight riders as products of a deeply rooted American tradition, and in general celebrated their conduct on April 19 as a model of military preparedness and unconventional warfare, from which soldiers and civilians in the 20th century had much to learn. In the process, Galvin offered a revisionist account of the fighting, that corrected many myths. The book also gave new meaning to Paul Revere’s role as an active and highly effective leader who had a major impact on events, including the fighting itself.
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The books of Tourtellot and Galvin were serious and able works of scholarship. At the same time, popular writers during the 1950s and early 1960s began to celebrate the midnight riders and the minutemen with unrestrained enthusiasm. One example was a children’s book of this period, William De Witt’s
History’s Hundred Greatest Events
(New York, 1954). It elevated Paul Revere’s ride to equal rank with the crucifixion of Christ, the discovery of penicillin, and the struggle against Communism in Korea.

The Age of Vietnam: The Myth of the Evil Americans

As the celebrations became more exaggerated, the midnight messenger was riding for a fall. A reversal of his reputation came with a vengeance, during the late 1960s and 1970s. The American mood changed more abruptly and radically in that period than in any other era of the nation’s history. Once again the reputation of Paul Revere was a highly sensitive cultural barometer.

The deeply troubled generation of Vietnam and Watergate returned to a mood of iconoclasm that was very different from the light-hearted debunking of the early 20th century. The first generation of American debunkers had often come from the right. From the Adamses to Henry Ford and H. L. Mencken, they were deeply uncomfortable with the principles of American liberalism and democracy. The iconoclasts of the 1960s and 70s came mostly from the left, and complained of collusion between capitalism and democracy. The tone was different too. The old debunkers had cultivated a light touch. The new iconoclasts were bitter, cynical, cruel and angry. They turned furiously against the culture of the nation they called Amerika, and published scathing attacks on its patriotic symbols. A favorite target was Paul Revere.