“Whittled down to a couple of dozen notables”

I started this week planning simply to pass on the Professor Buzzkill podcast’s analysis of the “We must hang together, or separately” remark.

But then I looked into the evidence myself to be sure. I found holes in the record, and more questions. I went in a different, and more prolix, direction.

Nonetheless, I do commend this analysis of how we remember the Revolution as time passes:

As the revolutionary generation started to die out and become part of the early written history of the young United States, the vast number of people involved in the revolution and the development of the new government was gradually whittled down to a couple of dozen notables in popular memory and history. I call this “the Mount Rushmore effect.” You can’t possibly talk about the hundreds or thousands of people directly involved in something important, so people concentrate on leaders and on the famous.

As time rolls on, and more and more events become part of the “American story,” the number of individual historical figures well-known in the popular mind continues to go down. We forget about all the second- and third-level people who do most of the work for which political and military leaders get all the credit. And that’s not even mentioning the hundreds of thousands of, if you will, “foot soldiers” on the ground. Archaeologists (perhaps alien archaeologists) thousands of years from now will find Mount Rushmore, and assume that the four men depicted there were responsible for most of American history.

Plus, of course, Benjamin Franklin.