GW: It’s not the revolution itself, it’s these people who are middling sorts, who are for the most part artisans, mechanics, proto-businessmen, who are held in contempt. TM: How is it that the American Revolution invests labor with dignity? So I think this is one of the very interesting developments of the 19th century. And that really makes slavery more and more of an anomaly in the North, but the South remains patriarchal and hierarchical. GW: Yes, and now all of a sudden it’s celebrated as the highest value. Because work, from Aristotle’s time, was considered despicable, mean, fit only for slaves.
It may not be an aristocracy by English standards, but in their eyes it is.Īnd these people are celebrating labor, and just by that celebration they’re way ahead of the Europeans in that respect. I see these people not as oppressed, but really as angry and wanting to assert themselves against what they see as an aristocracy. So I agree with the Progressives that there is a social conflict, but I put a different spin on it. Where they saw ordinary people as oppressed-under pressure from creditors and so on-I see them as middling sorts who are the future business-commercial sources of the economic explosion, in the North at least, of the early 19th Century.
Gordon Wood: A social revolution, only not the one the Progressive historians emphasized. Tom Mackaman: Your basic conception of the American Revolution is that it was radical, that it was actually a revolution… WSWS history writer Tom Mackaman recently spoke with Wood at Brown University, where he is professor emeritus of history. His book, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993, and his Creation of the Republic, 1776-1787 won the Bancroft Prize in 1970. Gordon Wood is a leading scholar of the American Revolution.
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