The Awful Truth (Part 1)

[Tootsall]

The Revolting Truth; Now It Can Be Told! A Canadian Exposes Our
July 4 Charade
By Malcolm Gladwell

I still remember where I was when I first realized that this
whole Fourth of July business was a fraud. It was in Mr. Speck's
seventh-grade history class, in the small Canadian town where I
grew up. There, in the pages of a history textbook shipped over -
like all our history textbooks - from England, the case for the
great annual flag-waving and jingoistic caterwauling that went on
every year south of the border was blown away before my eyes.

What I learned was that the American colonists who declared
their independence from England on this day so long ago were not
an idealistic band of freedom fighters but a pack of whiners,
welshers and tax cheats. Every Fourth of July since I have
eschewed fireworks, hot dogs and all manner of celebration. Like
all Canadians, I will instead spend today quietly reflecting on
the use and abuse of history and giving fervent thanks to my
Creator that I was not born an American.

Understandably, the history that I learned is not the same
history that is taught to schoolchildren in this country. For
instance, I have been told by my American acquaintances that the
senseless vandalism of the Boston Tea Party - an act that today
would certainly violate every environmental and clean water
regulation on the books - is celebrated in this country as an act
of courage. Paul Revere, who clearly abused his horse, is a hero.
And pages on pages of American history books are devoted to
breathless testimonials on behalf of Thomas Jefferson, a man who,
to the extent that he was described at all in my childhood
history classes, came across as a kind of 18th-century
Buckminster Fuller with a bad haircut. Enough already. It is time
for the truth about the Fourth of July. I hope it doesn't ruin
your holiday.

The true story about the War of Independence (or, as it is so
grandiosely known in these parts, the American Revolution) begins
with the Seven Years War, the massive European conflict that
ended in victory for the British in 1763. The war had the result,
among other things, of chasing the Spanish out of Florida and the
French out of North America entirely, thereby opening up the
entire continent to virtually unimpeded development by the
American colonists.

One would have thought that the 13 colonies would have been
grateful to the British for this extraordinary favour, especially
since the substantial cost of the Seven Years War was born almost
entirely by the British. But they were not. In fact, the 12-year
period between the end of the Seven Years War and the start of
the War of Independence is the story of a group of peevish and
ungrateful New Worlders who persistently refused to contribute
even a modest amount toward the defense and upkeep of their newly
claimed continent.

Thus was the true spirit of American political life born. The
American colonists wanted no new taxes. The British Parliament,
as a result, ran up a crippling deficit of over 130 million
pounds. Sound familiar? As one of my teachers once said, the
Declaration of Independence - that manifesto of tax evasion -
might more appropriately have been signed on April 15 than July
4.

The big issue in those years, of course, was the army of 7,500
men the British wanted to keep in America after the end of the
Seven Years War. This was an army, it should be stressed, that
existed entirely for the benefit of the 13 colonies. The French
and Spanish, having just been kicked out, had to be kept out.
Further, the colonists had to be defended against the hostile
intentions of Indian tribes, a point made abundantly clear when
the Ottawa chief Pontiac burned down all but two of the British
forts west of Niagara in 1763.

All the British asked was that some small fraction of the more
than 200,000 pounds a year it took to pay for this army be picked
up by the American colonies themselves. No one ever asked that
the colonies pick up the entire tab, nor were any of the taxes
proposed by the British imposed illegally. From the standpoint of
fairness, it seems almost unbelievable that the colonists would
oppose the British levies. At the time Americans were paying, on
average, six pence a year in taxes compared to a yearly burden of
25 shillings for the average British taxpayer, a difference of
about 50-fold. They may not have had a word for this at the time.
We do now: Freeloading.

I have, somewhere in my possession, pages of notes from Mr.
Speck's class - and the subsequent British history lessons I was
given in grades 10 and 11 - filled with outrage about how the
colonists contrived to make a mountain out of this perfectly
reasonable molehill.

Take the much-maligned Sugar Act of 1764, the first of the
taxes to arouse the colonists to fits of hysteria about their
allegedly endangered liberties. This was, everyone seems to have
forgotten, a tax cut. In an attempt to get more people to comply
with a tax that had been widely evaded, the British Parliament
dramatically reduced the tariff on molasses exported from England
to rum distillers in New England. The people who complained about
this were not patriots. They were molasses smugglers upset that
the economic incentive to smuggle had been taken away from them.

[Tootsall]

Ditto for the Tea Act of 1773, which authorized the East India
Tea Company to sell its product directly to America and led to
the infamous Boston Tea Party. By relieving the Tea Company of
export duties, the bill had the effect of driving the cost of
legitimate British tea below the Dutch tea that criminal elements
in the colonies had been smuggling illegally into America for
years.

By my reading, the Act should have been a win-win situation for
the 13 colonies. They save money because they get cheaper tea.
They reduce the deficit because legitimate tea has an excise tax
that goes back to the Treasury. Most importantly, they get
British tea, which, as something of connoisseur of the beverage
myself, I would point out is a far cry better than the sawdust
the Dutch serve up.

But no. The colonists, who have a smuggling operation to
protect, dress up in war paint and turn Boston Harbour into a
Superfund site. If this is an act of conscience, I'm an
astronaut.

What the colonists were interested in was money. For the
tobacco farmers of Virginia, who included among their numbers
many of the very biggest names among the Founding Fathers, the
sums were huge. Virginians owed between 2 and 3 million pounds to
British creditors just before the War of Independence broke out.
Their motives for fighting were, my history books explained,
rather obvious. As George "University" Mason pointedly said to
Patrick "Give me liberty or give me death" Henry at the end of
the war: "If we now have to pay the debts due to British
merchants, what have we been fighting for all this while?"

For the bulk of the colonists, however, the amount of money
they were prepared to go to war to save was almost embarrassingly
trivial, which only goes to show just how cheap they were. The
best examples of this are the Navigation Acts, which were the
source of great whining by the colonists at the time and have
been whined about by partisan historians ever since. By
restricting whom the colonies could trade with, and forcing all
exports and imports to be channelled through England first, the
laws are supposed to have imposed a huge economic burden on the
colonies.

But when economist Robert Thomas - who teaches at an American
university but who clearly has the soul of a Canadian - crunched
the numbers a few years ago, he found that the economic cost of
the trade restrictions on the colonies was almost entirely offset
by the benefits of guaranteed markets and British military
protection. All told, he concluded, the net burden of British
trade policies on the colonies in those years worked out to about
26 cents per person per year - about $50 in today's money.

Throughout history, revolutions have been fought over systems
of government. They have been fought over personal liberty and
over the right of self-determination. The American Revolution may
be the first fought over the cost of dinner and a movie.

I know that I haven't talked about the great ideological
issues of the day, about all the colonial handwringing over the
behaviour of the English troops and the fact that a tax imposed
by a Parliament in which they were not represented was an affront
to their liberty. "The Britons are our oppressor . . . . We are
slaves," as one lathered colonial put it. Slavery, of course, is
something the colonists knew all about, since they were
practicing it themselves. George Washington - indebted Virginia
farmer, human-being owner and wooden-mouthed one-time president -
summed it up with characteristic candour: "The crisis is arrived
when we must assert our rights, or submit to every imposition
that can be heaped upon us, till custom and use shall make us
tame and abject slaves, as the blacks we rule over with such
arbitrary sway."

The hypocrisy of it all was too much even for that crazed
pamphleteer Tom Paine. "With what consistency or decency," he
asked in 1775, did the colonists manage to "complain so loudly of
attempts to enslave them, while they hold so many hundred
thousand in slavery?"

I could go on, of course. I could talk about the allegedly mad
tyrant King George III, who a) really wasn't that bad; b) to the
extent that as a psychotic he was bad, needed professional help
and the colonists' sympathy and not a stressful armed
insurrection; and c) was a German anyway. I could talk about how
the British just wanted to honour their treaties with Native
Americans while the colonists wanted to plunder and pillage and
build huge colonial subdivisions on tribal lands in the interior.
I could talk about the stark contrast offered by Canada's path to
independence (which, thank you very much, we Canadians celebrated
three days ago), a gloriously peaceful transition hammered out by
reasonable men over many bottles of gin. Or, since you're still
reading, I could even talk about the War of 1812, my absolute
favourite subject. We learned about that in Mr. Speck's class as
well. Did I tell you that Canada won that war? I could go on and
on . . . .

Malcolm Gladwell is New York bureau chief of The Washington
Post.

[jpdtpt]

At least you posted this in the right section! ;D

John