Who Really Makes History?

Who is that makes history? We're predisposed to think of certain people as the history makers- men like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson are seen as the architects of the American Revolution, as if they somehow took down the British Empire in North America through the sheer power of their mighty importance as Founding Fathers.

The problem with this type of thinking is that they were just human beings, flawed like all human beings. So we revere them on the one hand and distrust them on the other, unable to fully reconcile their nearly-mythic stature in our national heroic narrative with their moral blindness as slave holders and otherwise less-than-ideal hero figures.

 

George Washington and Thomas Jefferson didn't make the Revolution in the first place. They were just participants, along with thousands and thousands of other people. If some now-nameless, half-trained, under-fed militia soldier dressed in rags and shivering in the cold of Valley Forge had not somehow found the inner strength to remain at his post and face an uncertain future, the Revolution would not have succeeded. That man, whoever he was, made the Revolution. So did the lonely wives and children waiting at home and scraping by without the assistance of absent fathers and husbands. So did the slaves on the Southern plantations, without whose labor men like Washington and Jefferson would never have had the leisure to take the roles they did. So did the Indians of Massachusetts, who donated two pounds sterling (a lot of money back then) for the relief of revolutionary Boston when it was besieged by British soldiers.

 

The Founding Fathers, for all their flaws, were brave men who fought hard and took great personal risks to move the world a little bit further in the right direction- further than they themselves ever knew or would even have welcomed. That's the role of participants in a process. Yes, Jefferson was a hypocrite when he wrote that all men were created equal. But once he wrote those words and the country committed to them, slavery was doomed.

 

It wasn't his personal act of writing the words that did it. It was the acts of thousands of ordinary people who committed to fight and die to defend the truth of those words- and could never afterward be comfortable with their own participation in oppression and injustice. History isn't made by “Founding Fathers.”

 

History is made by the 99%.