Fifth of July

Blythe Danner as Martha Jefferson with William Daniels (Adams) and Howard da Silva (Franklin), from Barb Spangler's Pinterest.

Found myself watching the 1972 movie musical 1776 (based on the Broadway show, with music and lyrics by Sherman Hunt, book by Peter Stone, directed by Peter H. Hunt) on the teevee at the end of the day, a dramatization of the Continental Congress activity in Philadelphia over the two or three months leading up to that first Fourth of July. Not a very plausible subject for a musical comedy, with dozens of male characters and basically no women (the female lead, Abigail Adams, is hundreds of miles away in Quincy the entire time and appears on stage only in John Adams's daydreams, or staged reconstructions of their very extensive correspondence, depending on how you look at it), and there really aren't enough songs in fact, or too many words (it's almost three hours).

What they really did right dramatically, I thought, and it feeds into the way we should think about the history, is to present it in terms of a series of conflicts among the delegates, in which everything could go wrong at any moment, principally between a startlingly obnoxious, pushy Adams (we like him, and know he's right, but we see why Franklin is the only one of the characters who does) and more or less everybody else, simultaneously or in sequence, beginning with his rage at them all for their preoccupation with trivia and refusal to understand the colonists' need to separate themselves from the empire that's trying to kill them all.


Wise, frequently silly Franklin takes him in hand and helps him focus his aggression on John Dickinson of Pennsylvania, the charismatic, popular opposite of Adams, who really doesn't want independence. New Jersey won't cooperate because its governor (Franklin's illegitimate son) is a Tory, New York because the Albany government refuses to give them any instructions. Franklin and Adams decide they need a Declaration and form a committee to prepare one, but Jefferson, silent in debate but eloquent in writing, chosen to draft the thing, is too distracted by the torment of being separated from his wife (you can see how annoyed Adams is—he's tormented by separation from his wife too but he just keeps working harder instead of whining about it), so they bring her in from Virginia and after a sweet afternoon with her he's able to get the work done at last, while Adams and Franklin, bizarrely, take her dancing (it's at this point you start to get clear that there's a good deal more fiction going on than you'd noticed particularly).

One by one the recalcitrant states come on board, even at last Pennsylvania (Dickinson is outvoted by his delegation and goes off to fight, on the Patriots' side), but between the vote and the signatures new issues come up, more serious ones: the pious insist on getting God into the document, and Adams and Franklin and Jefferson capitulate on that, and the slave states insist on cutting out Jefferson's passionate denunciation of slavery, and this is too much for Adams, but Franklin puts the pressure on, and he gives in at last, with considerable anguish, in the fear that this surrender to wickedness may start the new nation off on a wrong footing from which it can never recover.

These are the real conflicts that went in to the making of the Declaration, though they're resequenced for rhetorical effect and presented mostly in comical form by means of the personal stereotyping of the characters. The emphasis on that, on the difficulty of it, is so different from the views of the David Brookses and the biographical historians from which they derive, with their solemn pageant reenactments of the highlight moments in which "the nation came together" and unanimously compromised themselves into the right historic spot. Mine is the hippie version, I guess, it really is dated 1972, but so much more serious in the long run, so aware of the dangers, physical and moral, of the enterprise and the likelihood that we've made the fatal compromise and doomed the enterprise long since, but there was no other way of getting it done.