The American Revolution, part 5: "The Soul of All America" (American Revolution Film Project, Florentine Films, WETA, PBS, aired November 20, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Two nights ago (Thursday, November 20) I watched the fifth and next-to-last episode of the major documentary Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein, and David P. Schmidt, The American Revolution: “The Soul of All America.” This episode covered the years 1778 and 1779 and covered the catastrophic winter George Washington and his army spent in the freezing cold of an abandoned ironworks at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania as well as the long-sought alliance between the U.S. and France. The French entry into the war on the American side (and the likelihood that Spain and The Netherlands would soon join them, Spain in hopes of regaining their former colonies in the West Indies they’d lost to Britain in the Seven Years’ War from 1756 to 1763, and The Netherlands may have dreamed of retaking New York, formerly New Amsterdam, from the British) turned the American Revolution into a European conflict. The French sent a fleet of ships too big for American harbors and gave its command to Jean Baptiste Charles Henri Hector, Comte d'Estaing, who proved spectacularly incompetent. Defeated by the British Navy in their first sea battle off the coast of Newport, Rhode Island, d’Estaing then sailed for the West Indies, where he tried and failed to conquer the British-held islands of St. Lucia and Grenada. Ultimately he was recalled to France after a coordinated attack by the French and American navies on the British position at Savannah, Georgia in 1780 also failed. D’Estaing was replaced by François Joseph Paul de Grasse, who led the French participation in the successful siege of Yorktown, Virginia in 1781 that finally won the war for the U.S., and when he returned to France he was targeted by its own revolutionaries after 1789 and guillotined in 1794 largely due to his friendship with the deposed Queen Marie Antoinette. “The Soul of All America” also featured a segment on U.S. naval commander John Paul Jones, who sailed a barely seaworthy ship called the Bonhomme Richard (after the French title for Benjamin Franklin’s book Poor Richard’s Almanack) and staged a series of successful raids on British ships sailing to bring supplies to their embattled armies in America.

Most guerrilla campaigns by rebels seeking to regain control of their countries by foreign forces work by wearing down the willingness of the government of the occupying country to resist – the collapse of public support for the U.S. war in Viet Nam was the most obvious modern example – and the American Revolution was no exception. As the war dragged on and the British Parliament started to realize that the Americans wouldn’t be the pushovers they’d thought originally (much as the modern-day Russians have gradually realized that the Ukrainians won’t going to be the pushovers they originally thought), a number of Members of Parliament started to wonder just why they were putting so much money and resources into what was beginning to look like an unwinnable war. What’s more, the American Revolution was one that was dragging other European countries into alliance against the British, and it was threatening important parts of the British Empire, including not only the West Indies but also the port of Gibraltar on the Spanish coast. Meanwhile, the Americans were able to retake Philadelphia and return the Continental Congress there after its exile to an old meeting house in York, Pennsylvania. Perhaps the most moving part of this episode was the sequence which depicted the roller-coaster ride the population of Philadelphia went through as the city went from American to British control and then back, and when Philadelphia finally went back to the Americans a number of the Loyalists that had sought refuge there fled to New York, which remained under British control until the war finally ended and the British withdrew. There was also a segment about the American campaign against the Native Americans throughout what later became known as the American Midwest, where American raiders got as far as modern-day Illinois before they were stopped by Native resistance and the anxieties of Colonial commanders who called them back to the main front. This part of the documentary reinforces the critique of Left-wing historians who point out that the rise of the United States was inexorably tied in with genocide against the Native Americans and the economic prosperity of a nation built on the labor of enslaved African-Americans.

The American Revolution, part 6: “The Most Sacred Thing” (American Revolution Film Project, Florentine Films, WETA, PBS, aired November 21, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, November 21) my husband Charles and I watched “The Most Sacred Thing,” the sixth and last episode of the mega-documentary mini-series The American Revolution directed by Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein, and David Schmidt. “The Most Sacred Thing” dealt with the years 1778 to 1781 (when combat in the American Revolution effectively ended with the British defeat at Yorktown, Virginia) and beyond, well beyond. Ken Burns and company chose to make The American Revolution at a time in our history when the whole question of whether the United States will remain a democratic republic or degenerate into tyranny the way Plato said all democracies would is frighteningly open. Among the many events that call into question America’s future as a republic that happened during the six days PBS was airing this program were Donald Trump hosting Mohammed Bin Salman, crown prince and effective ruler of Saudi Arabia, at the White House with full honors; him giving Ukraine an ultimatum that they must effectively accept his terms (which are basically the same as Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s) for an end to the war or face the total withdrawal of American support; and his extraordinary threat to six sitting Democratic members of Congress (Senators Elissa Slotkin, D-Michigan, and Mark Kelly, D-Arizona, and House of Representatives members Jason Crow, D-Colorado; Chrissy Houlahan and Chris Deluzio, D-Pennsylvania; and Maggie Goodlander, D-New Hampshire) that they should be tried, convicted, and executed for “seditious behaviour at the highest level.” The “crime” for which Trump wants them put to death was making a social-media video telling U.S. servicemembers that they don’t have to follow illegal orders, and indeed they have a legal obligation to resist them. Already I’ve received texts from Slotkin and Kelly asking me to respond by – guess what? – donating to the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee. I’m sure Trump envies the power Putin and MBS (as the Saudi crown prince is universally called) of simply having their political enemies put to death without bothering with such niceties as due process and a criminal justice system.

The “Most Sacred Thing” episode of The American Revolution covered the period during which George Washington fiercely sought to coordinate his operations with those of the French officers and troops sent to bail out the Revolution despite the fact that they literally didn’t know each other’s languages – most of the Frenchmen sent to aid the American Revolution spoke no English and almost none of the Americans knew French. He also brought in the German Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben to train his troops and give them a sense of real discipline. Von Steuben (who’s become so much of a hero to German-Americans they even hold “Steuben Day parades” in cities with large German-descended populations; one figures prominently in John Hughes’s teen comedy Ferris Bueller’s Day Off) had been driven out of Europe for having seduced underage boys, and while I’m not sure whether his sexual activities would have been considered part of a Gay identity today, he was definitely attracted to his own gender. Steuben was bilingual in German and French, but the only English word he knew when he arrived was “Goddamn!” So he would swear colorfully in the languages he did know until the troops got the message that he disapproved of their screw-ups. Also the French expeditionary force sent to aid the Americans, the Expédition Particulière, was led by Jean-Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, comte de Rochambeau, and like the French officers assigned to command the navy (Jean Baptiste Charles Henri Hector, Comte d'Estaing, who had the job until 1780; and François Joseph Paul de Grasse, who replaced him after d’Estaing bombed badly in a naval battle with the British on the open seas outside Virginia in 1780), he spoke barely any English. The person brought along to interpret for him was a Swedish diplomat named Axel von Fersen, who later became friends (and possibly more than that) with French queen Marie Antoinette. Unlike most of the French officers who helped win the American Revolution, Rochambeau narrowly escaped the guillotine when his own country erupted into revolt in 1789. He was actually scheduled to be executed when the so-called “Thermidorian Reaction” of 1794 abruptly brought an end to the Reign of Terror and saved his life, and he was rehabilitated by Napoleon, allowed to retire with honors, and died quietly in 1807 at age 81.

One of the fascinating stories about the American Revolution is that the cause was nearly lost because the U.S. Congress had no money to pay the troops, and therefore a number of them mutinied. Washington ended one mutiny by negotiating with the mutineers and getting them to re-enlist; he ended another by hanging the two ringleaders in full view of their followers and thus scaring the rest of the men into submission (which may be what Trump meant when he said of the six sitting U.S. Senators and House members he’s accused of “seditious behavior,” “Hang them! George Washington would”). The immediate crisis ended when the French arrived and paid off the restive American troops in silver coins instead of worthless Continental paper money, but even after the Revolution ended (with a 1783 treaty that, though it was negotiated in Paris, involved direct talks between the Americans and British that did not include the French, despite their decisive role in winning the Revolution in the first place), there were still mutinies. One of the most famous was Shays’s Rebellion, which took place in Massachusetts in 1786-1787 and was led by Revolutionary War veteran Daniel Shays. It was ultimately put down by a militia force led by another Revolutionary War commander, Benjamin Lincoln, but the spectre of civil war on top of what had already largely been a civil war (a number of battles in the Revolution featured Loyalist Americans fighting in support of the British Crown against their fellow Americans on the Patriot side, including some instances of brother against brother) led to the calling of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787. Originally called just to revise the Articles of Confederation of 1778, which had created a federal government but a surprisingly weak one with no independent taxing authority, the Convention decided early on to write an entirely new founding document which became the Constitution of the United States. George Washington chaired the Constitutional Convention, and one reason the President was given such extensive authority was everyone at the Convention assumed Washington would be the first one. At the same time some of the people who later became the nucleus of the Federalist Party wanted an even more powerful executive: Alexander Hamilton wanted the President to be elected for life (it was the biggest battle he lost at the Convention) and John Adams wanted a more royal-sounding title for the chief executive, which Washington successfully stopped. (At the same time I’ve long suspected that one of the reasons the United States didn’t become a monarchy was Washington’s low sperm count. Washington never had children of his own, though one of his wife Martha’s sons by her late first husband called himself “George Washington, Jr.,” and you can’t very well start an hereditary monarchy with someone who can’t produce heirs.)

The saddest part of The American Revolution’s final episode was the treatment of Native Americans and African-Americans who had fought in the war on both the Patriot and Loyalist sides. A number of Black slaves who had joined the British army lured by promises of freedom after the war if the British won were ordered returned to their owners, and some fled to Canada rather than allow that to happen. As for the Natives, long-standing tribal alliances split over the question of which side would be better for them to ally with, and as I’ve noted in discussing previous episodes of the series, even while the war was still going on Washington and the other officers running the American army were promising soldiers “Indian land” in areas where there were still self-governing Native nations and which white Americans hadn’t conquered yet. At the same time, The American Revolution also challenged some of my ideas about the history of warfare, especially on the American continent. Some of the fighting forces in the American Revolution on the Patriot side included Black and white troops fighting alongside each other – a distinction that wasn’t repeated again in U.S. history until 1948, when President Harry Truman ordered an end to the segregation of the U.S. military that had required Black soldiers to participate only in all-Black units (under white commanders). The American Revolution was also the first war that involved trench warfare; I’d long assumed that Ulysses S. Grant and his fellow Union commanders in the American Civil War invented trench warfare, but not only were there American commanders in the Revolution who ordered their men to dig trenches, the final victory at Yorktown was achieved in part through two long trenches by which the American forces and their French allies were able to surround the British general, Charles Cornwallis, and force him to surrender.

Overall, The American Revolution was a fascinating program and aired at a particularly fraught time in U.S. history, when the nation is led by a rogue President who longs to be a dictator; the separation-of-powers scheme by which the Framers of the Constitution sought to keep that from happening has almost completely broken down (Trump essentially owns both houses of Congress as well as the Supreme Court, and they meekly do his bidding at least 90 percent of the time); he’s doing the classic dictator thing of ruling by decree through a seemingly unending series of “executive orders”; and by pardoning all the rioters who fought to keep him in power on January 6, 2021 even though he’d lost the 2020 Presidential election (and in some cases pardoning them again for crimes they’ve committed since his last pardon of them), he’s created a cadre of people who’ve already proven themselves willing to commit political violence on his behalf and proclaimed on social media their willingness to do so again. Reason enough that the six Democratic Senators and House members Trump directly threatened have had their security details increased, lest some maniac pro-Trumpers try to do themselves what Trump has so far been unable to do on his own, namely kill his so-called political “enemies.”

Law and Order: Organized Crime: "He Was a Stabler" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, streamed June 12, 2025; aired November 20, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After The American Revolution episode “The Soul of All America,” I watched a Law and Order: Organized Crime episode called “He Was a Stabler” that rehabilitated the memory of Elliot Stabler’s (Christopher Meloni) scapegrace brother Joey (Michael Trotter), who’d been killed at the end of the previous week’s episode, “Off the Books,” by Julian Emery (Tom Payne), British-born psychopath and leader of a smuggling operation linked to a drug cartel from Syria. The Syrians are planning to fly in a shipment of a new, highly dangerous drug (were writers Edgar Castillo and Matt Olmstead thinking of the so-called “C-Fentanyl,” even more deadly than original fentanyl, here?) on a plane and are counting on Emery’s organization to be their American distributors. At the end of “Off the Books” Stabler and another cop skating on the thin edge of the law, Stabler’s old Police Academy buddy Detective Tim McKenna (Jason Patric), captured one of Emery’s right-hand men, Vincent Mathis (Paul Gorvin). They quickly debated whether to turn him in to their superiors for proper booking or kidnap him and subject him to what the George W. Bush administration called “enhanced interrogation” – i.e., torture. At the beginning of “He Was a Stabler” they hold him in a secret location and Elliott pours lighter fluid over him and threatens to set him on fire if he doesn’t reveal the secret locations where Emery might be hiding. Mathis gets scared enough to give Elliott a list of 21 possible locations where Emery might be staying, and then Elliott turns that list over to his colleagues at the Organized Crime Control Bureau. They’re able to whittle it down to one, but when the police raid it Emery had left just 15 minutes before – they can tell because he ordered a dinner delivered and then fled while it was still warm, and the delivery bag contained a receipt with a time stamp. There’s an odd scene in which Elliott visited his wife and child in New York and threatened to have the child taken away from them if she didn’t yield up Emery’s whereabouts, and needless to say she’s upset, calls his bluff, and throws him out of her apartment. Ultimately the police finally capture Emery after a gun battle between the cops on one side and Emery, his associates, and the Syrians on the other at the airport where the Syrians have flown in their drug cargo.

Elliott is ready to shoot down Emery on sight, but his nominal superior, Sergeant Ayanna Bell (Danielle Moné Truitt), an African-American (in the earlier episodes she was established as an “out” Lesbian, but we haven’t seen her romantically involved with anybody since her wife broke up with her in the second or third season, I forget which), talked him out of it and allowed Emery to be arrested normally instead. Then Emery boasts that he’ll be able to retire to his estate in Devonshire, England after his arrest, and an FBI agent comes in and announces that the federal anti-terrorism unit has cut a deal with Emery. In exchange for information that will allow the U.S. and its Israeli allies to bust the three top leaders of the Lebanon-based terrorist group Hezbollah, he’ll be allowed to return to England and serve out his sentence, whatever it is, under house arrest at, you guessed it, his estate in Devonshire. Elliott is predictably mega-upset at this turn in the case, and fortunately he’s able to stop it from happening via evidence in the form of a flash drive his brother Joey mailed to his family’s home before Emery killed him. The writing in “Off the Books” had made it seem like Joey had gone permanently to the Dark Side and been lured by Emery into taking part in his drug enterprise, but it turns out at the end of “He Was a Stabler” (explaining the rather clunky episode title) that he remained on the side of law and order after all. In fact, among Joey’s effects Elliott finds an uncompleted application to join the New York Police Department just like his big brother, which Joey abandoned when he realized his history of drug abuse would disqualify him. But he also carefully collected enough damning evidence against Emery that the FBI abandons its sweetheart deal with him (though we never find out just what the evidence is or why it’s so terrible the feds agree to let Emery be punished by New York’s authorities instead of protecting him), and in the end Emery is marched off to the untender mercies of New York’s criminal justice system and his story arc blessedly ends. I still don’t like the way the writers of Law and Order: Organized Crime have moved Elliott Stabler’s character from one willing to skirt the thin edge of the law to one whose quest for revenge (for the killing of his wife in the very first episode of Organized Crime to the killing of his younger brother in “Off the Books”) leads him to break it outright. Overall, though, this was a good episode and benefited from an especially sleazy and at the same time powerfully understated villain.

The American Revolution, part 4: "Conquer by a Drawn Game" (American Revolution Film Project, Florentine Films, WETA, PBS, aired November 19, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, November 19) I watched the fourth episode of Ken Burns’s (and Sarah Botstein’s and David P. Schmidt’s) mega-documentary (12 hours over six straight nights on PBS-TV) The American Revolution. The episode was called “Conquer by a Drawn Game,” a title that comes from one of Thomas Paine’s later Revolutionary War essays, the same one in which he denounced ‘the summer soldiers and the sunshine patriots” who turned their backs on the war and walked out on it. (They had a perfect right to do that since most of them were militiamen who had enlisted for a limited time, usually one year, and were free to go once their term expired.) Paine was arguing basically the guerrilla war strategy before the term “guerrilla warfare” existed: wear down your enemy, avoid engaging in pitched all-out battles unless absolutely compelled to, fight skirmishes all over the place, and ultimately cause their country to lose the will to win so they withdraw and give you back peace. At the same time the Americans were in the sort of quandary that would later befall the British, our enemies in the Revolution and the War of 1812 and our solid (to the extent that any American alliance can be considered “solid” under the wild, mercurial, mistrustful leadership of Führer Donald Trump) allies since. While Winston Churchill was bravely carrying on about how the British would fight to the bitter end, he was secretly in communication with Franklin Roosevelt over whether and how the Americans would enter the war on his side, which he was well aware was the only way he could conceivably withstand Nazi Germany’s assaults long-term. Likewise the Colonial Americans in the 1770’s were aware that their only hope for a victory lay in winning one of the European powers to enter the war on their side – and the logical one to go after as an ally was Britain’s centuries-old enemy, France. The French were still smarting from their defeat at the hands of Britain in the Seven Years’ War, of which the French and Indian War that cost the French their own North American colonies in Canada had been just a part of what amounted to a world (or at least a Western-world) war. They were anxious to strike back however they could against their traditional enemies, Britain and Russia, and one way to do that would be to help the Americans win their war of independence against Britain. But the French proceeded cautiously, understandably reluctant to go all-in to help an insurgency which seemed to be losing steadily as the Americans retreated from Fort Ticonderoga and its neighboring Fort Independence on either side of Lake Champlain in upstate New York.

The French first opened their ports to U.S. merchants and then carefully provided arms to the Americans on an arrangement that anticipated the Lend-Lease program President Franklin Roosevelt would initiate, on shaky legal ground, to help the British in World War II while still maintaining America’s official neutrality. The battle that turned the tide for the Americans was one, ironically, on which British General John Burgoyne had pinned his hopes for ending the war altogether and forcing the Colonials to surrender: a three-pronged assault on Albany, New York. Unfortunately for Burgoyne, his three-pronged assault only was a two-pronged one in fact because General William Howe decided not to march on Albany but to send his forces south to conquer the rebel capital, Philadelphia. The narration, delivered by Peter Coyote from a script by Geoffrey C. Ward, noted that most European wars at the time ended when one country captured the other’s capital. Howe successfully took Philadelphia, forcing the Continental Congress and what there was of a national American government to retreat to a small town north of the city, largely due to George Washington making some of the same mistakes he’d made earlier in the battle of Long Island and the defense of New York. He overestimated the depth of the river separating the city from the British forces, and the British army was able to ford the river where the water was waist-high, sneak up behind the Americans, and catch them in a pincer movement on both sides. Meanwhile, Burgoyne’s strategy was to capture Albany and use it to isolate the New England colonies, which the British considered the heart of the rebellion, from the rest of the American territories. One thing the British didn’t realize was that their actions of offering enslaved African-Americans their freedom if they fought for the British and also enlisting the support of Native Americans backfired and solidified the support for American independence throughout the 13 colonies. It scared slaveowners and white settlers anxious to grab Native lands and made them more, not less, willing to support the Patriot cause.

Indeed, one of the ironies of the American Revolution was that it broke apart the Six Nations Confederacy of six Native nations – the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora – in upstate New York that the framers of the Constitution would later cite as an example of how to make a confederation of independent states work. As explained here in Ward’s narration, the Six Nations Confederation was a forerunner of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Each nation would continue to govern itself as it always had, but they would regard an attack on one nation as an attack on all of them and mobilize to defend each other. The Oneida and Tuscarora aligned themselves with the Americans while the rest of the nations sided with the British. The Mohawk leader Thayendanegea, also known by his British name Joseph Brant, was the most aggressively pro-British member of the Confederation and recruited his own raiding parties to help the British in their battles. Meanwhile, the Marquis de Lafayette, the well-to-do heir of a major French noble family, decided on his own to help the Americans and use some of his family fortune to do so. He arrived in the U.S. on a ship he’d paid for himself – and, naturally, he was quick to point that out. He also helped pay for arms and uniforms for the American soldiers. Ultimately the Americans won a major victory at Saratoga in upstate New York, where in a battle in which Benedict Arnold was one of the key commanders (his later treachery to the American cause has so far eclipsed his earlier successes in the war on the U.S. side he’s basically been “unpersonned” in U.S. histories of the Revolution and his importance in battle after battle has been ignored) the Patriot forces seized Saratoga and surrounded Burgoyne and his men. The overall U.S. commander at Saratoga, Horatio Gates, was promoted after his victory and put in charge of the Continental Army in the South (where he led it to a major defeat at Camden, South Carolina in 1780 and never commanded it again even though after his victory at Saratoga he’d been talked about as a possible replacement for George Washington). He cut a deal with Burgoyne and the German general who had led troops in the battle, Friedrich Adolf Riedesel, to allow them to leave the U.S. and never return in exchange for their freedom, but the Continental Congress reneged on the deal and forced the defeated British and German armies on a long march stretching all the way to Virginia, where they were incarcerated as prisoners of war.

Saratoga was in many ways the turning point of the American Revolution; one British officer is quoted as saying, “The courage and obstinacy with which the Americans fought were the astonishment of everyone, and we now became fully convinced that they are not that contemptible enemy we had hitherto imagined them, incapable of standing a regular engagement and that they would only fight behind strong and powerful works.” Word of the sweeping American victory reached France about seven weeks later – that’s how long it took for information to travel in an age before electronic communications of any kind – and it helped America’s ambassador to France, Benjamin Franklin, in convincing the French foreign minister, Charles Gravier, the Comte de Vergennes, that the American cause was a worthy investment for France. (Vergennes’ career is fascinating; before he was recalled to Versailles as foreign minister he’d been an ambassador to Sweden and Ottoman Turkey. He was recalled from his Turkish posting because he married his long-time mistress without King Louis XV’s consent and he hadn’t done enough to provoke the war between Turkey and Russia his boss, the Duc de Choiseul, had wanted. When Louis XV died and his son Louis XVI became king, Vergennes was rehabilitated and served first as foreign minister and then also as prime minister until his death in 1787.) Actually the Americans had sent two ambassadors to France, Franklin and John Adams, but the French were put off by the strait-laced Puritan Adams while they eagerly embraced Franklin, with his love of fine wines and women, as one of their own. In Ken Burns’s previous documentary on Franklin, he showed how Franklin became a celebrity, the most well-known American in the world at the time, and essentially charmed the French court into accepting his plea for an alliance with the nascent United States to help them win their revolution.

This episode also narrates how George Washington changed his mind about requiring his troops to be inoculated against smallpox when the Continental Army was so swamped with troops, many unknowingly carrying the disease with them. Before he’d hung back from requiring inoculations because he’d been concerned that the process would put the men out of action for weeks. It’s fascinating to note how far back the tradition of requiring American military enlistees to get inoculated or vaccinated runs, especially given the absurd accusations of various Right-wing conspiracy theorists (including, alas, Trump’s appointee as Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.) that this was part of some sinister plot against the lives and health of American citizens. And it also mentioned how, when Washington finally realized that he couldn’t rely on a volunteer army consisting of militiamen and he would need to pay his troops something to keep them in the field, among the promises he made to them was the offer of “Indian land” – in parts of the country where the Natives still ruled and weren’t yet under the control of the American government. This is yet another indication (as is the official name of Washington’s force, the “Continental Army”) that the American Revolution was intended from the get-go as an imperialist struggle to build an empire across the entire American continent, not just a struggle about “taxation without representation.” One of the major ironies of the American Revolution is what it did to the French government whose support was crucial to its success; it drained the French treasury so dry that the French regime raised taxes on its own people so high that eventually they rebelled, overthrew the King and his royal government, and did so using the same sort of high-falutin’ rhetoric about “liberty, equality, fraternity” the Americans had used in their struggle.

The American Revolution, part 3: "The Times That Try Men's Souls" (American Revolution Film Project, Florentine Films, WETA, PBS, aired November 18, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, November 18) my husband Charles and I watched the third episode of Ken Burns’s latest mega-documentary, The American Revolution, which he co-directed with Sarah Botstein and David P. Schmidt from a script by Burns’s usual collaborator, Geoffrey C. Ward. This was actually more than the first two episodes had been about the nitty-gritty of the war itself, particularly the battles in and around New York City that resulted in New York becoming the bastion of Loyalist (anti-Revolutionary) support for the rest of the war. Ward’s script was quite out front about the strategic mistakes George Washington made during the battle for Long Island and New York itself (though at the time “New York” was just a village of one square mile at the southern tip of Manhattan Island), including not guarding the Jamaica pass that the British were able to use to encircle the American forces, and moving most of his army to repel the attacks the British meant just as feints. The troops of the Continental Army started grumbling about how good they were getting at retreats, since the British had them on the run and gradually forced them out of New York City, New York state, and New Jersey until they reached Trenton, on the New Jersey-Pennsylvania border. About the only thing that saved Washington’s army was his successful mobilization of a fleet of whatever boats he could solicit, requisition or just plain grab to ferry his men across one of the rivers in an operation both Charles and I compared to the fabled British retreat at Dunkirk, France in 1940. When he finally got his men to safety it was already December 1776, and most of the troops under his command were militiamen whose enlistments were due to expire at the end of the year. This was one of the issues that bedeviled the American side throughout the Revolution; the Americans were relying on militias that didn’t consider themselves bound by military discipline and considered themselves loyal to their individual states rather than the entire U.S. Through two stirring speeches, Washington managed to convince most of his troops to stick it out for three months more.

The show also touched on the debate over the Articles of Confederation, which are usually dated from 1778 but which were actually discussed and fought over two years earlier. As it happened, the Articles of Confederation were being drafted and debated by the Continental Congress in the same building as the Pennsylvania legislature was drafting its own state’s constitution – and the radicalism of the Pennsylvania document, which among other things contained a Bill of Rights and guaranteed the right to vote to all adult white men whether they owned property or not, put off a lot of the delegates to the Continental Congress. (This probably reflects the view of the most famous Founding Father from Pennsylvania, Benjamin Franklin, who once joked that if a man owns a donkey, that’s considered “property” and he has the right to vote. Then, if his donkey dies, he loses his vote – so who held the franchise originally, the man or the donkey?) The Founding Fathers were in no way democrats: they equated democracy with anarchy and were quite specific that what they wanted the new nation to be was a republic governed by an elite political class. As James Madison wrote in Federalist #10, “[A] pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert result from the form of government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths. Theoretic politicians, who have patronized this species of government, have erroneously supposed that by reducing mankind to a perfect equality in their political rights, they would, at the same time, be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions, their opinions, and their passions. A republic, by which I mean a government in which the scheme of representation takes place, opens a different prospect, and promises the cure for which we are seeking.”

In the same document, Madison wrote that one of the benefits of a representative republic rather than a pure democracy was “to refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations.” (Ironically, one of the major anti-democratic provisions the Founders put into the Constitution – the Electoral College for electing the President – had exactly the opposite result from the one the Framers were seeking: the election of a pseudo-populist demagogue who lost the popular vote in 2016 but won the Electoral College and proceeded to govern in so wretched a way as to fulfill Madison’s dire predictions about the fate of democracies as well as Plato’s belief that democracy would always degenerate into tyranny because a democracy “will promote to honor anyone who merely calls himself the people’s friend.”) Regrettably, though the imdb.com pages on The American Revolution name the voice-over actors featured in the series (including major stars like Tom Hanks, Ethan Hawke, Kenneth Branagh, Claire Danes, Jeff Daniels, Paul Giamatti, Michael Keaton, Edward Nortun, David Oyelowo, and Liev Schreiber), they don’t identify them as to who voiced whom. And the talking heads (mostly historians, among them a few African-Americans and Native Americans to make sure their sides of the story are included) aren’t identified at all, which is a shame because many of them tell compelling stories.

I was especially struck by Friedericke Baer, a woman historian from Germany who mentioned that a lot of the German troops who fought in the Revolution on the side of King George III (himself of German ancestry, by the way; he’d succeeded his grandfather George II and was the first of the Hanoverian kings who actually could speak English) were themselves conscripts who resented being drafted to fight in a war in which they had no personal stake in the outcome. Indeed, the show pointed out that a lot of the Germans (many of whom were from the state of Hesse, which led to all the German troops being nicknamed “Hessians” whether they were from Hesse or not) ultimately stayed behind or returned to America and became immigrants, and eventually citizens, of the United States. The American Revolution is turning out at its midway point to be a quite interesting and surprisingly relevant look at both the founding myth of our nation and the reality as it was lived on the ground by those who fought (on both sides) as well as those who just stood by and waited for the dust to settle and the conflict to finish one way or the other. I recently reviewed an Intrada Records re-release of John Williams’s soundtrack music for Roland Emmerich’s film about the American Revolution, The Patriot, in which I wrote, “In a sense, The Patriot is about an old order dying and a new one being born – but not necessarily in the way you’d think. One of the recurring themes is the death of the old chivalric ideal of warfare, where both sides were led by gentlemen whose senses of honor put limits on what they could do to each other, and its replacement by the modern free-for-all in which anything literally goes and the distinction between ‘soldier’ and ‘civilian’ essentially disappears.” Certainly the American Revolution featured war crimes, or what today would be considered war crimes, committed by both sides, as well as instances of what amounted to blacklisting by Patriot committees of people who were, rightly or wrongly, suspected of Royalist sympathies. People who’d been victimized by this process emigrated en masse to New York once the British solidified their hold over it and spent the rest of the war there.

Blackwell's Island (Warner Bros./First National, 1939)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

On Tuesday, November 18, after my husband Charles and I watched part three of The American Revolution, I showed him a film we’d watched together from an old VHS tape from Turner Classic Movies back when I used to record the channel almost literally by the yard: Blackwell’s Island, a 1939 gangster movie from Warner Bros. (though at least partially in “First National” drag). This was a 71-minute movie, essentially a “B” picture, and it was the third feature-length film starring John Garfield. Garfield had begun his career in New York on the stage as a member of the Group Theatre, founded in 1932 by Harold Clurman, Cheryl Crawford, and Lee Strasberg. According to its Wikipedia page, “It was intended as a base for the kind of theatre they and their colleagues believed in – a forceful, naturalistic and highly disciplined artistry.” The Group Theatre became famous for importing the “Method of Physical Actions” derived from the writings and teachings of Russian director and drama theorist Konstantin Stanislavsky, though when Stanislavsky himself visited the U.S. and saw the Group Theatre in action he said they had misunderstood most of what he had taught. Though at least one major actor from the Group Theatre, Franchot Tone, came to Hollywood well before Garfield did, Garfield became a star basically as the first true Method actor to achieve starring roles in films. As a result, even when he was cast as a gangster (Warner Bros. obviously thought they could wreak the same transformation on Garfield, t/n Julius Garfinkel, they had on Edward G. Robinson, t/n Emmanuel Goldenberg), Garfield played in a quietly sinister style far removed from the snarling way Robinson, James Cagney, and Humphrey Bogart had in similar roles. Garfield made his movie debut in a quite good thriller, They Made Me a Criminal, a 1938 remake of a Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. vehicle from 1933 called The Life of Jimmy Dolan in which he played a boxer who accidentally kills his corrupt manager and then has to flee to the country to escape prosecution. The director was, of all people, Busby Berkeley, who took a break from his usual mega-production numbers in musicals and turned out to be a quite effective director of suspense and action.

Garfield’s next film was an enormous breakthrough: Four Daughters (1938), adapted from a Fannie Hurst story called Sister Act and featuring Claude Rains as a music teacher whose titular four daughters (real-life sisters Rosemary, Lola, and Priscilla Lane, with Gale Page as the fourth daughter) get involved in various romantic complications. John Garfield and Jeffrey Lynn played rivals for the hand of Priscilla Lane’s character; she marries Garfield’s but they have a hard life together and ultimately, realizing she’s still in love with the other man, he commits suicide by deliberately crashing his car. Blackwell’s Island was Garfield’s third film, and it was advertised with footage of a ceremony hosted by a trade association that proclaimed Garfield “the new dramatic star of the year.” I wanted to see it again mainly because one of its major plot issues concerns gang leader Bull Bransom (Stanley Fields), who runs the “Waterfront Protective Association” and intimidates boat owners to pay him money so he doesn’t wreck their boats or injure or kill them. The hero is crusading reporter Tim Haydon (John Garfield), who is determined to expose Bransom’s gang. He gets fired from the New York Times-Dispatch but gets a new job with the Star-Sentinel and has his meet-cute with Sunny Walsh (Rosemary Lane) when she’s a nurse at the hospital where Bransom’s latest victim, Captain Pederson (Wade Boteler), is recuperating and he shows up demanding an interview. He doesn’t get one, but two members of Bransom’s gang break in via an outside window (back when hospitals still had openable outside windows) and finish the job they’d started on him. Bransom and three of his thugs go on trial (a bench rather than a jury trial, for some reason) and are sentenced to six months on the titular Blackwell’s Island prison, but because they have so much political clout with the corrupt machine running New York City they’re able to live the life of Riley even while ostensibly incarcerated.

They get to take over the prison’s hospital ward and set it up as a palatial private residence. They have special privileges including the opportunity to have Bransom’s dogs live with them and even eat Bransom’s specially cooked steak meals while the rest of the prisoners starve (one wonders what the prisoners who are genuinely sick have to do). They get to gamble through poker games with each other and horse-racing bets they place outside, and they organize a protection racket of their own to extort money from fellow convicts without their political pull. Haydon decides that the only way he’ll get the goods on Bransom and end his reign of terror inside Blackwell’s Island is if he gets sent there himself as an inmate, so he punches out a prosecutor named Ballinger (Leon Ames: the one degree of separation between Bela Lugosi and Judy Garland!) and ends up in Blackwell’s. The main reason I wanted to see this movie again right now is the similar level of insane privilege being granted to Ghislaine Maxwell, convicted sex trafficker and abuser of underage girls herself in partnership with the late Jeffrey Epstein. Maxwell, like the fictional Bransom, is allowed to have her dogs in her current prison and have catered meals specially cooked for her, and if any fellow inmates complain about the cushy kid-glove treatment she’s getting, they get disciplined. Bransom also has arranged to get out of prison any time he likes through a private boat he has concealed on the titular island, and he uses this to do in one of his gang’s enemies personally. He can get away with all this because the hapless warden, Stuart Granger (Granville Bates), is scared shitless that if he doesn’t give Bransom everything he wants, Bransom will use his connections to fire the warden and deny him the retirement pension he’s counting on to sustain him in his old age. The other guards are also mostly on Bransom’s payroll, and when Haydon ends up inside Blackwell’s, Bransom bluntly tells him that if Bransom says Haydon can eat, he’ll eat; if he doesn’t, Haydon will starve.

They warn Sunny Walsh’s family off doing anything by killing Sunny’s police-officer brother Terry (Dick Purcell, later the screen’s first Captain America in a 1942 Republic serial), trussing up his body (in a manner that makes it look like the crooks have seen 1931’s The Public Enemy, James Cagney’s star-making film), and leaving it in the Walshes’ home with a bomb attached that’s designed to blow all of them up. Luckily, while he was there having dinner with the Walshes, Haydon spotted the bomb and threw it out the window, so it exploded harmlessly outside. Ultimately Bransom sets up Haydon by promising to help him “escape” disguised as a guard, then tells the prison authorities that a prisoner dressed as a guard will attempt a breakout and should be shot on sight. Haydon keeps alive by hiding out in a barrel and then, when Bransom tries to get away on his speedboat, Haydon commandeers a police boat and gives chase. Ultimately, thanks to a new special prosecutor, Thomas McNair (Victor Jory), appointed by the New York state government and therefore not subject to control from the local political machine that Bransom controls, Bransom is arrested by the state police and will serve a 99-year sentence in a state facility over which he and his political friends have no influence. Blackwell’s Island is a pretty much by-the-numbers Warner Bros. gangster movie, though Stanley Fields as Bransom is a merely annoying villain thanks to his juvenile penchant for playing practical jokes. He’s got a whole lot of cigars that explode in people’s faces shortly after they’re lit (in one quirkily amusing scene, Bransom is about to give one of his exploding cigars to a person he wants to impress; he thinks better of it and reaches into his other coat pocket for a normal cigar). He also has a flower pinned to his lapel that shoots a faceful of powder into his intended victim, and he does this to his girlfriend Pearl Murray (Peggy Shannon, on her way down from the ethereal beauty she’d been in the 1933 disaster film Deluge; she was a chronic alcoholic and would die of a heart attack just two years later). All this business with the practical jokes makes Bransom come off as more of an annoyance than a genuinely sinister villain, and for that we can blame the writers (Lee Katz and Crane Wilbur) rather than Stanley Fields, John Garfield, or director McGann (who according to imdb.com had help from a much more prestigious “name,” Michael Curtiz, on some retakes). Blackwell’s Island wouldn’t be especially memorable (though it was based on a real-life scandal that took place on New York’s Welfare Island in 1934) if it weren’t for the striking parallel between the fictional Bull Bransom and the all too real Ghislaine Maxwell in terms of the super-cushy treatment both got even when they were nominally in prison!

The American Revolution, part 2: "Asylum for All Mankind" (Florentine Films, WETA, PBS, aired November 17, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, November 17) I watched “An Asylum for Mankind,” the second installment in Ken Burns’s six-part TV mega-documentary The American Revolution. This one depicted how the attitude of the Colonists towards Great Britain hardened over time, from the willingness to live within the British Empire as a largely self-governing outpost while still remaining technically subject to the Crown (the arrangement under which Britain later devolved its empire into the Commonwealth of Nations, or the Irish Free State it allowed the Irish to form in between the two world wars before Ireland finally gained outright independence) to the demand for all-out independence. While not as contentious politically as the first episode, this one made the point that African-Americans and Native Americans fought on both sides of the Revolution. At least one of the main reasons fence-sitting Americans ultimately declared for independence was the decision of British commanders actively recruit both natives and enslaved Blacks for their side of the struggle. One of the most interesting stories told in “An Asylum for Mankind” was the effort of the British-appointed governor of Virginia, John Murray, fourth Earl of Dunmore, to recruit Black slaves to the British cause by promising them freedom if they deserted their masters and fought for the British (in segregated units, as did the Blacks on the American side – the U.S. military wasn’t racially integrated until Harry Truman did it by executive order in 1948, and until then all America’s wars featured Black troops only in segregated units under white commanders).

Alas, the Black slaves who answered Dunmore’s call met a sad fate, mostly dying of smallpox in the camps Dunmore set up to train them. In fact, the American Revolution coincided with a severe smallpox epidemic throughout the country, at least partly because the war provided excellent conditions for the spread of a contagious and often fatal disease. Just as World War I triggered the so-called “Spanish flu” epidemic of 1918-1919 by creating ideal conditions for the flu virus to spread (and also continually renewing the supply of victims; normally viruses that kill off their hosts end up killing themselves when they can’t find enough new victims to remain alive, but the war generated an almost unending supply of victims), so the American Revolution, with its soldiers marching long distances from town to town and spreading whatever disease they had everywhere they went, turbo-charged a smallpox epidemic. At the time, according to Geoffrey C. Ward’s script, there were only two ways to stop smallpox from spreading: isolating the victims and keeping them from infecting anyone else, or inoculating people who hadn’t got it yet with reduced doses on purpose in hopes that they’d develop immunity rather than get the full-scale disease. George Washington was advised to have his entire army inoculated, but he declined on the basis that the troops who were inoculated would have to wait several weeks before they were sufficiently healthy to fight again. (At the time of the American Revolution, British scientists and doctors were just starting to explore injecting people with cowpox, a related disease that can cross over to humans, after discovering that milkmaids almost never got smallpox because their work had exposed them to cowpox. This was the start of vaccination, a term that derives from the Latin word for “cow,” vaca. But it wasn’t until 1796 that Edward Jenner demonstrated the first effective smallpox vaccine based on the cowpox virus.) Instead Washington insisted on isolating anyone in his army who caught smallpox and built prison-like hospitals, surrounded by armed guards, to maintain security.

The show also told the sad tale of Benedict Arnold’s attempt to invade and conquer Canada for the Americans; he and another American general, Robert Montgomery, successfully conquered and occupied Montréal but were stymied, and Montgomery killed, in an unsuccessful attempt to scale the fortress of Québec. (Not until Donald Trump regained the Presidency and talked about annexing Canada as “the 51st state” were any other Americans nuts enough to talk about taking over Canada.) I’ve read other sources that said Arnold blamed his failure to conquer Canada on George Washington not sending him enough troops and supplies to win the battles – Ward argued that part of the problem was that the Americans were relying on an old British map that showed the distance between Montréal and Québec as two-fifths of what it actually was – and this, along with falling in love with and marrying a Loyalist woman after his first wife had died while they were separated because he was off trying to conquer Canada, that led Arnold to switch sides and become America’s most infamous traitor. Needless to say, the show not only depicted the drafting of the Declaration of Independence but couldn’t resist pointing out the irony of a white man writing, “All men are created equal,” when he owned hundreds of slaves himself. I used to joke that Jefferson ordered one of his slaves, “Here, boy, sharpen my quill pen so I can write a declaration about how all men are created equal,” and it turns out my joke wasn’t far from the truth. Jefferson did bring a slave with him to Philadelphia when he went there to write the Declaration: Robert Hemings, teenage brother of Jefferson’s long-time slave mistress (and second cousin and half-sister of Jefferson’s late wife) Sally Hemings.

According to an historical post on the Associated Press’s Web site, written and published by Hillel Italie in 2020, https://www.cbs42.com/news/national/remembering-the-slave-who-joined-jefferson-in-philadelphia/, “The eldest of six children, Robert Hemings was born in 1762 into bondage, contradiction and entanglement. His father was the slave owner John Wayles, Thomas Jefferson’s future father-in-law; his mother was a slave, Elizabeth Hemings. Sally Hemings, the enslaved woman with whom Jefferson fathered several children, was Robert Hemings’ sister, and Jefferson’s future wife, Martha Wayles, was his half-sister. Robert Hemings himself would become both Jefferson’s in-law and his property. The Hemings siblings were brought to Monticello, Jefferson’s home in Virginia, not long after the 1773 death of Wayles. Within the plantation hierarchy, Robert Hemings held a high position and was described once by a friend of Jefferson’s as having ‘behaved exceeding well.’ He was just 12 when Jefferson chose him to replace the 31-year-old Jupiter Evans as his personal attendant. He was dressed more formally than other slaves, was permitted to read and write [most slaves weren’t, and if one tried to learn it was considered a whipping offense], travel on his own and to learn a craft, as a barber.” I’ve read some of Thomas Jefferson’s writings about slavery and they reminded me of George Soros’s writings about capitalism: both the work of intelligent men who realize that their wealth has been built on a fundamentally unjust system that has benefited them personally.

I think the ultimate comment on the Declaration of Independence and the contradiction between its promise of human equality and the reality of enormous human inequality that still persists in the U.S. today was made by Congressmember Thaddeus Stevens (R-Pennsylvania) in 1865 after the Civil War ended and the Thirteenth Amendment was passed. Stevens said in essence that the promise of the Declaration of Independence was fully sound, but the existence of slavery in the U.S. had prevented it from being completely realized. Of course it still hasn’t been completely realized, and in the yin and yang of American history today we’re in a period of at best retrenchment and at worst outright reaction. One of the ironies of Ken Burns’s series The American Revolution is that it’s being shown at a time when the second Trump administration is reproducing many of the injustices that brought rise to the American Revolution in the first place, including sending the military into American cities to intimidate the people into not protesting the authoritarian thuggery practiced by agents of whatever agencies Trump and his minions choose to send into large cities run by Democratic mayors to round up so-called “illegal” immigrants. Another irony is that funding for the production is still credited to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), billed for years as “a private corporation funded by the American people” (a wording that’s chilled me for years with its casual equation of “private” and “free”), when the Trump administration has demolished CPB by taking away its funding in a so-called “rescission” bill that was barely debated in Congress at all.