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THE REVOLTING TRUTH - The Washington Post 10/19/18, 9(10 PM

The Washington Post

THE REVOLTING TRUTH

By Malcolm Gladwell
July 4, 1993

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 Be the first to
flag-waving and jingoistic caterwauling that went on every year know.
south of the border was blown away before my eyes. Our award-winning journalists
are there when the news
What I learned was that the American colonists who declared their breaks.

independence from England on this day so long ago were not an


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idealistic band of freedom fighters but a pack of whiners, welshers
and tax cheats. Every Fourth of July since I have eschewed Send me this offer
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. Inside 'Trump
Revealed'
Understandably, the history that I learned is not the same history Read stories based
that is taught to schoolchildren in this country. For instance, I have on reporting for
“Trump Revealed,” a
been told by my American acquaintances that the senseless broad, comprehensive
vandalism of the Boston Tea Party -- an act that today would biography of the life of the 45th
president.
certainly violate every environmental and clean water regulation on
• Reporting archive: Trump’s
the books -- is celebrated in this country as an act of courage. Paul financial records,
depositions and interview
Revere, who clearly abused his horse, is a hero. And pages on pages transcripts
of American history books are devoted to breathless testimonials

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THE REVOLTING TRUTH - The Washington Post 10/19/18, 9(10 PM

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 favor, 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.

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THE REVOLTING TRUTH - The Washington Post 10/19/18, 9(10 PM

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

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THE REVOLTING TRUTH - The Washington Post 10/19/18, 9(10 PM

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.

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 Harbor 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

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THE REVOLTING TRUTH - The Washington Post 10/19/18, 9(10 PM

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
channeled 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


goverment. They have been fought over personal liberty and over
the right of self-determination. The American Revolution may be
the 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 behavior 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

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THE REVOLTING TRUTH - The Washington Post 10/19/18, 9(10 PM

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 candor: "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 honor 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 favorite 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

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