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The Legend of The Founding Founders
Sam Haselby
LONG BEFORE Americans embraced the tradition of the Founding Fathers, New Englanders honored their ancestors as pioneers of democracy and freedom and as the nation’s patriarchs. John Adams claimed that the “wisdom and benevolence of our forefathers’’ were unmatched, and “at the expense of their blood’’ they made an original contribution to world history: self-government. Town leaders in Plymouth inaugurated a holiday, Forefather’s Day, to commemorate Myles Standish, Isaac Allerton, William Brewster and other 17th-century Pilgrims, for making America the world’s “asylum of liberty.’’
Plymouth first celebrated Forefather’s Day in 1769, and still observes it every Dec. 21. Following the American Revolution, Massachusetts elites tried to make Forefather’s Day a national celebration and to make the pilgrims the national founders. The 1819 Forefather’s Day unfolded with a grandeur befitting the bicentennial of the pilgrims’ 1620 landing. Harvard President John Thornton Kirkland opened the commemoration with a prayer. It lasted 18 minutes. Massachusetts Senator Daniel Webster, the great orator of his generation, gave the keynote address. Webster spoke — for more than two hours — on the unique role of New England in national history: “no portion of the country did more than the states of New England, to bring the revolutionary struggle to a successful issue,’’ he said.
During World War II, Kenneth G. Umbreit helped the phrase find its place in the national imagination. In 1941, Umbreit, a New York lawyer and historian with a flair for popularization, published “Founding Fathers: Men Who Shaped Our Tradition.’’ It was the first time the phrase appeared in a book title. Harding had characterized the founders’ defining accomplishment as stable, enduring government. Writing during World War II, under the shadow of fascism and in the light of America’s greatest moment in world history, Umbreit gave the leaders of the American Revolution a more heroic role. Without Washington, he wrote, “there would never have been a United States.’’
In helping to reinvent the American revolutionaries, Umbreit added the courage and virtue celebrated by Parson Weems to the story that New Englanders had first set forth in Forefather’s Day. Since then, the Founding Fathers’ stature, though occasionally embattled, has been on the rise.
Sam Haselby, a historian at Harvard University, will be a visiting faculty member this year at the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for American Studies and Research at the American University of Beirut.