David Talbot - By the Light of Burning Dreams: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the Second American Revolution

To our childrenJoe Talbot, Nat Talbot, Ike Allen,

and Lucy Allenand Jimmie Fails, and the other members

of their generation who are fighting the good fight.

T he first American Revolution was a glorious but abortive enterprise. Martin Luther King Jr.who must be crowned the leading protagonist of the second American Revolutionsang the praises of the countrys origin story in his final speech, extolling those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the Founding Fathers in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. The first revolution took the puny offspring of an empire, a collection of disparate colonies huddled along the Atlantic coast [with] less than two million monarchical subjects, in the words of historian Gordon S. Wood, and turned America into the most liberal, democratic, and modern nation in the world.

Successive waves of radical dissentfrom the nineteenth-century abolitionist movement to the populist uprisings of the Progressive Era to the labor militancy of the 1930s to the sweeping social and cultural transformation of the 1960s and 70s that we are calling the second American Revolutionwould keep the unfinished work of US democracy alive. King, like all those who fought heroically in the second War of Independence, knew how far short the nation fell from the ideals of its hallowed founding documents. It would take a second American Revolution to expand the dream he prophesied so that it included (or at least strove to include) those left orphaned by the Founding FathersAfrican Americans, Native Americans, women, exploited workers of all races and ethnicities, gays and lesbians.

The civil rights movementwhich won its greatest victories in the first half of the 1960signited the second American Revolution. Inspired by civil rights and Black Power activism, a string of other liberation movements caught flame that decade and the nextincluding the Vietnam antiwar struggle, the United Farm Workers union, the American Indian Movement, womens liberation, and the gay and lesbian uprising. Together these upheavalswhich were often linked by mutually supportive activists and shared goalsforged the nations most daring interpretation of freedom and justice since the first American Revolution.

This second revolution forced the country to change its assumptions about race, war and peace, gender, sexual orientation, reproductive rights, labor justice, consumer responsibility, and environmental protection. Almost all of these movements grounded their claims at one time or another in the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happinesscompelling America to be true to its stated ideals in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. Like the great African American poet Langston Hughes, the activists whose stories we tell here wanted America to be America againor was it for the first time? As Hughes wrote, America never was America to me, and yet the longing and the faith that it could be remained real to him.

The nations founding betrayalthe first and most profound way in which it failed to make true its promisewas the perpetuation of slavery, which George Washington himself called a foul stain of manhood. While the soaring idealism of the original American Revolution inspired widespread hopes, and moved many slaves and economically dispossessed to join Washingtons Continental Army, only a small minority of enslaved African Americans (who made up one-fifth of the infant nations population) won their freedom after the war. Indeed, a majority of the men who signed the Declaration of Independence were slave ownersincluding Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison. And those who opposed slavery in principlelike John Adams and Benjamin Franklinnever took decisive action on behalf of the nascent abolition movement.

Washingtons young French generalMarquis de Lafayette, who was like a surrogate sontried but failed to convince the father of the nation to free the men and women held in bondage on his Mount Vernon plantation. Lafayette later summed up the betrayal of the Revolutions ideals with bitter eloquence: I would never have drawn my sword in the cause of America if I could have conceived thereby that I was founding a land of slavery.

If men like Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, and Adams had risen to the brilliance of their language and followed through on the grand experiment (in Lafayettes words) to liberate all of King George IIIs subjects, then America would have been spared historys terrible reckoning. But as the historian Gary B. Nash ruefully noted, Eighty years later, more than 600,000 American lives were lost accomplishing the goal of emancipation, roughly one for each of the slaves in the new United States as of 1785.

The first American Revolution abandoned not only its enslaved population. During the War of Independence, Native American tribesincluding even those who sided with the Patriots against the Britishcame under relentless onslaughts from white frontiersmen, militias, settlers, and even regiments of Washingtons army. In a genocidal pattern that would be widely repeated for the next two hundred years, peace-minded tribal chiefs were ambushed; villages torched; men, women, and children massacred; treaties falsely made and soon broken.

Women, too, were disappointed by the expectations the American Revolution raised and dashed. Many of them had aided the Patriots cause in various ways, with socially established women gathering funds for the perennially ragged Continental Army and the wives and lovers of soldiers serving as unsung camp followers, nursing their wounds, washing their uniforms. One of the liveliest ongoing debates over womens emancipation took place in the Massachusetts home of John Adams, where his wife, Abigail, kept up a constant drumbeat for Americas leaders to remember the ladies. Women must be allowed to at least have a voice in lawmaking, argued Abigail Adams, since all Men would be Tyrants if they could, she wrote her husband in 1776. But Adams generally deflected his wifes political advice, believing in the sovereignty of elite white male leaders like himself.

John Adams worried that the Revolution had left colonial societys lower orders unconstrained, and he was not alone in his anxiety. In 1776, he wrote from the Continental Congress in Philadelphia: We have been told that our Struggle has loosened the bands of Government every where. That Children and Apprentices were disobedientthat schools and Colledges [sic] were grown turbulentthat Indians slighted their Guardians and Negroes grew insolent to their Masters.

Adams fretted, There will be no End of it. New Claims will arise. Women will demand a Vote. Lads from 12 to 21 will think their Rights not enough attended to, and every Man who has not a Farthing will demand an equal Voice with any other in all Acts of State. Americas future second president ardently wished for the Whirlwind unleashed by the Revolution to be calmed by more Serenity of Temper.

But over the next two centuries, that whirlwind would come howling free again and again. During the increasingly fractious years before the Civil War, Frederick Douglassthe great orator of African American liberationoften invoked the broken pledge of 1776 in his speeches and writing, on no occasion more powerfully than his famous Independence Day address delivered in Rochester, New York, on July 5, 1852. The fathers of this republic, Douglass acknowledged to the nearly six hundred white abolitionists packed into Corinthian Hall that day, were brave men and even great men and their great deeds demanded universal admiration. And yet, Douglass declared, he could not join in the national celebration of freedom because the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice embodied in that Declaration of Independence were still not extended to men and women of his skin color. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.