July 6, 2007
The Questionably Quotable Quaker Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 02:00 PM EST I guess we can all be thankful that Daniel Webster did not inspire Fred Smoler strongly enough to make him become a lawyer. As it happens, I also used this Fourth of July to check out a corny work of patriotism: The movie version of 1776, a musical about the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. My first reaction was to agree with Wilfrid Sheed that Broadway lyricists are the spawn of Satan. As released to cinemas in 1972, after a long Broadway run, 1776 was a shade over two hours long, but the “director’s version” I saw contained lots of material that was cut from the original, and it clocked in at a hefty 2:40. My parents got a bit drowsy as midnight came and went, but I managed to stay awake by counting the historical solecisms (which were numerous but mostly minor and, I’ll concede, excusable in the interests of dramatic necessity). As the movie wore on (and on), I found myself wishing that the musical interludes could have been replaced by anything else, even commercials. While the scenes with dialogue are quite brisk, every 10 minutes or so the characters break into a profoundly unmemorable song*, and the movie stops dead until it’s over. 1776 is an example of why the old-fashioned musical has gone the way of the Volkswagen van: It must be done well to work at all, and first-rate composers and lyricists now have better (or at least more lucrative) things to do than write for the theater. But initiates into the Broadway-musical cult think that setting any story to music somehow sanctifies it, like a priest blessing a suburban community’s motorboat fleet. The Turner Classic Movies host said that Jack L. Warner, the producer of 1776, screened the film before its release for President Richard M. Nixon, who suggested numerous cuts. Warner followed the President’s directions, and the slimmed-down result moved along much better than the uncut version. As would be true with the Watergate transcripts a year later, Nixon showed a deft editorial touch. (Now there’s an alternative-history premise for you: Smoler becomes a lawyer and Nixon becomes an editor.) Anyway, the musical opened on Broadway in 1969 and ran for several years. Given the political climate of those times, as Fred Smoler describes in his recent entry, I had to wonder how such a pro-war, flag-waving musical could have been so popular. Were audiences supposed to see the plucky, underdog, guerrilla-fighting American colonists in the role of the North Vietnamese? Perhaps. It’s easy to romanticize revolutionaries indiscriminately, like the guy in the bottom picture on this page, a pro-democracy demonstrator in Hong Kong who is burning a Communist flag while wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt. What struck me most in watching 1776, though, was one specific line that probably made little impression on 1960s audiences but would create quite a stir today. During the debate over whether to risk a ruinous war with Great Britain, Benjamin Franklin quotes a line of his that we’ve all been hearing a lot lately: “Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” Now, after reading Allen Barra’s latest entry, I am extremely wary of attributing quotations to Early American figures. This is especially true for Franklin, who is the Yogi Berra of the Revolutionary Era, except more so: Not only did he never say half the things he said, but as I brilliantly pointed out a few years back, many of the things he did say were stolen. Sure enough, according to the infallible Wikipedia, which links to this rambling but informative piece, the attribution of this quote to Franklin is dubious—though, ironically, the actual author of record may have lifted it from Franklin to begin with. Authenticity aside, Franklin speaks this line in 1776, and if the show were being performed on Broadway today, one can imagine the handful of New Yorkers in the audience giving it a tumultuous ovation. But what was Franklin really saying? The opposite of what that quotation is interpreted to mean today: He was saying that sometimes you have to go to war instead of appeasing the enemy.** It’s essentially the same slogan as “Give me liberty or give me death.” Shifting connotations attached to the words “liberty” and “security” (which is the usual modern paraphrase for “safety” in this quote) have had the result of reversing the original meaning. Indeed, as a diligent but plodding American Heritage staff member once wrote, Franklin showed little respect for our modern notion of privacy when he purchased stolen personal letters and published their contents to advance the Revolutionary cause. Not that it matters. The debate over civil liberties and national security will not hinge on whether Franklin did or did not say something fallaciously apposite-sounding in an entirely different context 230-odd years ago. One could cite the same quote, or many similar ones from equally impressive sources that were spoken during the debate over independence, to support today’s War on Terror, and it would mean just as little. History has many functions besides its main one, which is simply to be interesting. It provides perspective, makes us re-examine our beliefs, suggests contingencies we may have overlooked and possibilities we should consider, reminds us of fundamental truths about human nature, and in many cases shows us how lucky we are to live in the present day. But all these things apply only in a broad sense. Once you start making direct substitutions between past and present, like “King X equals President Y” or “poor people in 1789 equal poor people today,” the result is as weak as when a freshman literature major writes “shooting victim = Jesus” or “banker represents capitalism” in the margins of the books on his Introduction to the Novel reading list. Franklin was a very smart man, but he was not clairvoyant. There’s no telling what he (or Lincoln or Emerson or any other frequently misquoted American) would have thought or said about anything in our modern world. And in cases like this where the attribution is uncertain at best, the wording is deceptive, and the circumstances to which it applies are vastly different—reducing a historic quotation to a bumper-sticker slogan sets back the cause of reasoned debate instead of advancing it. -------------------- * The songs are occasionally amusing for the wrong reason, as in one number where John Adams and the spirit of his wife (who is at home in Massachusetts) sing about how much they yearn for each other, mentally and physically. Mrs. Adams sings that she feels like “a nun in a cloister,” whereupon John replies that he feels like “a monk in an abbey.” Considering that his wife’s first name is Abigail, I consider this a poor choice of words. ** Nor has history borne out the suggestion that lost national security is temporary but lost civil rights are permanent. Every one of this country’s major wars has been accompanied by large-scale civil-rights violations, which have always been reversed when the crisis ended.
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