gordon s wood the radicalism of the american revolution

Working in what an older critic called “the flush times of mid-twentieth-century capitalism,” they were perhaps less sensitive than their predecessors to internal conflicts among the Revolutionary Americans and so earned, unwittingly, the title of “consensus” historians. The resistance was successful in both cases, and the Revolution ended in Thermidorean reaction with the adoption of the federal Constitution of 1787.Īfter the Second World War a new generation of historians took a closer look at the supposed struggle over who should rule at home. The outcries of colonial leaders against British oppression became mere window dressing to cover the self-interest of a local ruling class, determined to resist interference by their betters in Britain or their inferiors at home. Carl Becker, in an enduring epigram, described the Revolution, in New York at least, as a contest not merely about home rule but about who should rule at home, with an emphasis on the latter.įollowing Becker, a succession of historians throughout the Twenties and Thirties translated every division among Americans (of which there were many) into neo-Marxist terms of class struggle.

Instead, under the influence, direct or indirect, of Marxist analysis, they went looking for a local ruling class against whom a local working class could have risen.

But the academic professionals who took up the subject at the beginning of this century, priding themselves on a scientific objectivity, had difficulty finding enough evidence of British oppression to explain the extent of American resistance. The first American historians easily rose to the challenge by identifying the British and especially George III as tyrants and the Americans as oppressed. Even if the end result is the new tyranny of a Cromwell, a Bonaparte, or a Stalin, a revolution scarcely seems to deserve the name without the overthrow of an oppressive ruling class by some kind of underclass. Revolutions are supposed to be risings of the masses against the tyranny of their masters. The American Revolution has always posed a challenge to historians.

Gordon s wood the radicalism of the american revolution