History is often presented as a set of facts and dates,
of victories and defeats,
of monarchs and presidents,
all consigned to an unchanging past.
Huzza!
But it's not like that at all.
History is the knitting together of rival interpretations,
deliberate manipulations of the truth,
and, sometimes, alternative facts.
In this series, I'll be lifting the lid
on three of American history's greatest national stories.
The Civil War.
Was it really a battle to reunite the nation
and liberate the slaves in the south?
The Cold War supremacy.
American dream or nuclear nightmare?
And in this programme, the American Revolution.
How a British colony
won its freedom from the biggest empire in the world.
This is the story of the birth of the United States.
It's a tale of David and Goliath
with high ideals and heroism and the ringing of the Liberty Bell.
It's a story that continues to inspire in politics,
literature and even on Broadway.
But how much of America's founding story
is founded on fact?
Did the Liberty Bell really ring out on July the 4th, 1776?
Who really won the War of Independence?
American rebels or the King of France?
The Americans could never have brought themselves up
by their own boot straps.
And was George Washington a man who truly believed
in liberty and equality?
It shakes the very foundation of American history.
Generations of politicians and poets and protesters
have used the story of the American Revolution.
Sometimes to unite the American people,
sometimes to divide them.
And the story they've told often super-sizes the truth
and comes with a side order of fibs.
Early in July 1776,
a future American president wrote a letter to his wife.
He was a leader in the American Revolution.
And the previous day,
the United States had declared its independence from Great Britain.
John Adams knew that this day would be celebrated
for generations to come.
He said that it ought to be solemnised
with pomp and parade.
BAND PLAYS And games!
And guns! And bonfires!
And illuminations!
From one end of America to the other.
The 2nd of July, he said,
would become the most memorable day in American history
and he was very nearly right.
But the 2nd of July, of course, was soon forgotten.
The wording of the Declaration of Independence
wasn't finally approved until two days later.
BOTH: Happy 4th of July!
Happy 4th of July!
ALL: Happy 4th of July!
APPLAUSE
MUSIC: STAR SPANGLED BANNER
The British Empire's first American colony
was founded in Virginia in 1607.
By 1732, Britain had 13 colonies along the Atlantic coast.
But in the 1760s,
American rebels rose up against British taxes.
They called themselves Patriots and, after eight years of war,
a plucky army of rebel farmers won its revolt
against the British Empire.
Heroic General George Washington became the first president
of the "land of the free".
A nation promising liberty and equality to all.
This version of the story is central to America's national identity
and it's given the American people a sense of special destiny -
that their country is going to lead the rest of the world to freedom.
But just as with any type of history,
the line between fact and fiction is blurred.
The American Revolution, so the story goes,
started with a tea party.
In December 1773,
three British-owned ships sat in Boston harbour
laden with tea.
But the people of Boston wouldn't let them unload their cargo
because that tea came with a British tax,
levied by a parliament in London,
where Americans had no votes and no voice.
The disgruntled American colonists wanted to send the British
a clear message - no taxation without representation.
So one night, they dressed up as Mohawk Indians,
they came storming onto the ships, they cracked open the crates,
then they threw the tea...
..right into Boston Harbour.
Yes!
This has been celebrated in history as a jolly jape in fancy dress.
A glorious stunt that sparked a revolution.
Huzza!
But the protest came after years of dark and bloody violence
between American colonists and British troops in the city.
And the rebels were disguised as Mohawk Indians to avoid arrest.
This wasn't called a tea party at the time.
Many in America saw it as a crime.
Now, some influential people -
people like Benjamin Franklin and George Washington -
thought that the destruction of the tea was a bad idea.
Destroying private property?
That could even damage their cause.
The Mohawk stunt also allowed the British to condemn
the American colonists as a criminal mob.
So the destruction of the tea was originally a violent, aggressive,
illegal action.
When did it become this sort of cuddly tea party?
Well, it became known as the tea party about 50 years
after the event, in the mid-1820s,
and that was at the time when a lot of those who took part
in the tea party were beginning to die off.
So, there was an attempt, then, beginning around that time
to reflect back on that act and it was not thought of
as an act of destruction, but rather something that was more patriotic
and that had become sort of a cornerstone
of the revolution itself.
One of the people who remembered the event,
although he reportedly was only about five years old at the time,
gave this vial of tea, in 1840, gave it to this institution,
and so this tea says,
"Tea thrown into the Boston Harbour, December 16th, 1773."
Do you believe it's the tea? I'm doubtful that it's the tea.
Well, you should be doubtful, but I think it's possible.
And the point is that in 1840, when he gave it to this museum,
he was wanting to remember... Exactly.
..this cornerstone of American history...
Whether it's real or not doesn't really matter. It doesn't, does it?
It's just the story that's told. It's the story.
It was all part of this renewal and revival of this event that
by this time, much of the violence associated with it was forgotten.
The story of the tea party takes on a new meaning
with each retelling.
In the 19th century, it became patriotic fun with dressing up.
In the 1970s, it was used to support calls
for Richard Nixon to be impeached.
And in the 21st century,
it's been adopted by the radical right's Tea Party movement.
We are going to make America great again.
Thank you. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
CHEERING
Back in the 18th century,
the tea party provokes a dramatic response from the British.
In 1774,
George III and the British Parliament punished Boston.
Political meetings were shut down.
And the port was closed.
Tensions mounted.
In 1775,
the rebels were stockpiling guns and ammunition,
they were getting ready for war,
but the British were onto them.
British troops were ordered to go to seize and destroy weapons
that were being stored in the Massachusetts towns
of Lexington and Concord.
The American Patriots got wind of the British plan,
so they set up a signalling system.
When the British mobilised,
lanterns would appear in the tower at the North Church here in Boston.
One lantern meant that the British were marching to Concord.
Two meant that they were travelling by boat.
At the signal, a Patriot would ride through the countryside
to alert the local militia.
Paul Revere was a local craftsman.
That night, he would become a folk hero.
Paul Revere is celebrated as the single courageous hero
who rode through the night to warn the Americans
that the British were coming.
But this is actually something of a fib.
And it was all cooked up by one of America's greatest poets.
In 1860, 85 years after the event,
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote a stirring poem
about Revere's ride.
It's been learned by generations of American school kids.
Listen, my children, and you shall hear
of the midnight ride of Paul Revere.
Listen, my children, and you shall hear
of the midnight ride of Paul Revere.
But the poem isn't the only version of the story.
Revere himself described his ride
in a statement made soon after the event.
He then wrote a more elaborate version 23 years later.
In each retelling of the story, though,
events become more dramatic and Revere takes a different route.
In the poem, Revere sees the signal in the church tower and sets off -
a lone rider in the moonlit night.
The fate of history is in one man's hands.
But according to Revere's own account,
there's a second rider - Mr Dawes.
Revere rode north of the British route to avoid discovery,
while Dawes rode to the south of it.
After stopping at Lexington to warn rebel leaders,
they then headed towards Concord with a third man.
But poetry prefers a solitary hero.
David taking on Goliath.
Longfellow's poem takes Paul Revere, the lone hero,
step-by-step through the Massachusetts countryside.
By 1am, he reaches Lexington.
2am, he gets to Concord.
Hurray! He's in time to wake the sleeping locals.
Mission accomplished.
Now, here's a funny thing.
If you look at Revere's own accounts, this is one of them,
you discover that he never actually made it to Concord that night,
because after leaving Lexington he was captured by the British.
In reality, it was the third rider who warned Concord
that the British were on the march.
But Longfellow's poetic version
guaranteed a place in history for Paul Revere.
The morning after Revere's ride, the local militia in Lexington
were ready and waiting for the British.
GUNFIRE
But the British Army overwhelmed the rebels.
A company of British soldiers then marched to the bridge
in the neighbouring town of Concord.
By the time the British got to the bridge,
there were 500 militia men waiting for them on this side
and battle broke out.
The British had only sent 100 soldiers.
They were pretty soon outnumbered, overpowered,
and they began to retreat back towards Boston.
73 British soldiers were killed in Lexington and Concord,
and 50 Americans.
At the battlefield in Concord
is a memorial to the American colonists who fought here.
These men were not professional soldiers.
They were the local militia.
In the colonies, all men were trained to fight
with their own muskets
to protect their communities in an emergency.
This statue celebrates the militia men as ordinary farmers.
He's just a regular bloke, if implausibly handsome.
The statue was put up 100 years after the battle,
and you can tell he's ordinary
because he's not wearing a military uniform
and, although he's carrying a musket,
he's brought his plough with him, too.
At the foot of the statue are lines of verse from the Concord Hymn,
written by the poet Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1837.
The poem talks about the Patriots as "the embattled farmers"
who "fired the shot heard round the world".
These are the little people taking on the forces of history.
They are amateurs taking on the professional British Army.
Once again, it's David and Goliath.
This image of brave farmers taking up arms to beat the British
has become a central part of the powerful mythology
of the American Revolution.
But it's a distorted version of what really happened.
So, these amateur soldiers,
were they the men who really defeated the British?
That's what we're supposed to think, isn't it? That is the ideal.
That's why we have the statue of somebody going back to his plough,
but in fact, the American leaders knew that they couldn't do that
with just militia troops, so they needed a professional army,
what became the Continental Army, to win the war.
Three months after Lexington and Concord,
Congress created the Continental Army.
At first, it united the local militias from across the colonies.
Take aim.
But under General George Washington,
it started recruiting and training as a professional army.
Fire!
So this Continental Army, this proper army, it won the war.
What happens next? There was great rejoicing.
Everybody was...celebrated the victory
and then the army disbanded.
This was because the United States felt it was safe
now that Britain was recognising its independence,
and because they did not want the expense
or the possible danger of professional forces hanging around.
What's the danger? They're here to keep us safe, aren't they? Tyranny.
Tyranny. The possibility of a military dictator
or an oligarchy of rich men
taking over our fine, fragile republic was the idea.
At the end of the war, even General George Washington
resigned his post and returned to his farm in Virginia.
A new nation would have no major professional army,
but men would continue to bear arms and serve in the local militia.
They felt that the ideal citizen was somebody who had land,
a family, a business, and was rooted in the community,
and not one of these restless soldiers obeying orders
from some higher power.
So, your ideal citizen owns his own gun.
At that time, yes. To be fully a member of the community
in its self-defence, you needed to be part of the militia,
and that usually meant having your own muskets.
This belief that the founders had in their citizen soldiers
was so important, it got enshrined in the new nation's Bill of Rights.
The Second Amendment says that having a militia
is absolutely necessary for security.
And it says that the people's right to bear arms
shall not be infringed.
This statement still forms the basis of US gun law to this day,
almost as if Americans are still living in the 18th century.
And to me, the irony is that it wasn't even
these normal blokes with guns who defeated the British anyway.
At Lexington and Concord, the first shots of war were fired.
GUNFIRE
But this wasn't yet a revolution to topple a king,
so now a new battle began over how to use the story
of the conflict to win support from George III.
Each side produced conflicting eyewitness accounts.
The British claimed that they weren't looking for a fight,
they just wanted to capture those military supplies.
They said that the American rebels fired first
so they were only acting in self-defence.
Also, the Americans abused the dead.
They cut off their scalps.
Though the Americans said the British started it.
"They attacked unprovoked."
Also, they were thirsty for blood.
The British are supposed to have chucked pregnant women
out of their beds and killed unarmed people in their own homes.
Whatever really happened, American patriots hoped
that George III would intervene
when he understood the injustice against his colonial subjects.
The Patriots chartered a fast ship
to take their version of events to England.
It arrived two weeks before the British Army's own account.
In mid-1775,
the majority in America were still opposed to independence.
Their beef was with Parliament.
They remained loyal to George III.
But radicals, inspired by Enlightenment thinking,
wanted a revolution.
And they could only justify this if the King was seen
as a tyrant, acting against the interests of the people.
If America was going to make a go of it as an independent nation,
then the Patriot leaders needed to convince the people
that George III was a cruel tyrant.
In the 1760s, the King had been celebrated
for defending the colonists against Parliament.
As recently as 1770,
a statue to George III had been put up here,
in New York's Bowling Green Park.
But, in 1775,
further bloodshed in Boston convinced King George
of the Americans' treachery.
In August 1775, George III proclaimed
that his American subjects were now definitely in a state
of open rebellion
and that his troops must do their utmost to put it down.
Now, to the Americans who still saw themselves as loyal to George III,
this was a terrible blow.
Their king had just turned them into traitors.
At the opening of the British Parliament in October 1775,
the King repeated his accusations of rebellion.
And when the news reached America,
a piece of propaganda was about to make the King look even worse.
This is the Pennsylvania Evening Post
for the 9th of January, 1776.
This edition contains the whole of the King's speech.
It goes on for quite some time.
It finishes here on page 15, and down here is an advert
for a new pamphlet to be published on the very same day.
The topic is the tyranny of the monarchy.
The title of the pamphlet is Common Sense
and the author is Thomas Paine.
Thomas Paine was a British-born radical
who became a leading voice in both the American and French Revolutions.
He believed independence was the answer to America's problems.
Common Sense was his argument for a revolution.
Now, Thomas Paine was really brilliant at using simple,
persuasive language that appealed to a mass audience
and Common Sense became an almost instant bestseller.
In it, he never directly names King George III,
but, by implication, he was pretty rude about him.
Paine talks about the "Pharaoh of England"
and the "Royal brute".
He was casting George III as the villain of this story.
Within six months of the publication of Common Sense,
in July 1776,
the United States denounced the monarch
and proclaimed itself an independent nation.
America's Declaration of Independence is remembered
for its high ideals of liberty and equality,
but that's just one line.
The bulk of the document was a tirade of grievances
against a tyrannous King George.
After a public reading of the Declaration of Independence
here in New York, this little square got taken all to pieces.
There had been crowns on the top of these railings,
which were hacked off.
You can still see the marks of the blows.
And the metal statue of King George III that had stood in the middle
was pulled down, his head was cut off,
and his body was melted down and turned into musket balls
to be used against the King's own troops.
The toppling of King George's statue looks like a violent,
revolutionary act.
But this isn't the image of 1776
the Founding Fathers wanted us to remember.
In 1817, the US Congress commissioned
John Trumbull's painting, The Declaration Of Independence.
It hangs in the nation's Capitol Building
in Washington, DC.
It shows Thomas Jefferson presenting the draft of the Declaration
to Congress in Philadelphia.
At the moment of its birth,
the new nation was at all-out war with the British Empire.
But history paints the founding of the United States
as a calm, formal scene,
speaking of harmony and high ideals.
The Declaration of Independence was signed in this room.
It explains why America is fighting its war,
why it wants to be independent,
how it's going to form itself into a nation.
It's quite a practical document for the short term.
It explains how things are going to unfold.
But the values it presents for the long term
have turned it into almost a sacred text.
What makes us exceptional, what makes us American,
is our allegiance to an idea articulated in a declaration
made more than two centuries ago.
We hold these truths to be self-evident
that all men are created equal...
That they are endowed by their creator...
With certain inalienable rights.
Among these are life, liberty...
And the pursuit of happiness.
The Declaration of Independence has gone down in history
as a unanimous statement of the beliefs of a new nation.
But the writing of the Declaration
exposed a series of highly-charged disagreements.
The document had to satisfy the demands of people from 13 states
with opposing views on divisive subjects
like religion and slavery.
Professor Danielle Allen has studied the drafts of the Declaration
line by line.
So, the first draft had an incredible paragraph
condemning King George for a slave trade that was violating,
in the language of the draft, the "sacred rights
"of life and liberty of a distant people in Africa."
And that was cut out by Congress, that was a pro-slavery moment
where it was too much to say explicitly that Africans
had the same rights of life and liberty as everybody else.
But then we get the anti-slavery moment, which is in the phrase,
"Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness".
So, the tradition of thinking about rights and the law of nature
that emerged in the 17th and 18th century
often invoked the idea that what governments should do
is defend life, liberty and property.
In the American context, the concept of property had become
closely connected to a defence of slavery, so there was a debate
between the happiness concept and the property concept.
The happiness concept won.
It's a compromise concept, because the people who were against slavery
could see it as eroding the justification for slavery.
The people who were in favour of slavery could think,
"Yes, my enslaved people make me happy!",
so they too had a way of seeing themselves in the document.
Do you think that this is really a very clever document indeed,
because everybody can look at it and see what they want to see.
It's a beautiful compromise.
Well, we've forgotten these days, but one of the core elements
of democracy is compromise,
which is interesting, because often in the US we like to think,
"Oh, what was the original intent of the founders?",
and the fact is, there isn't a single answer to that,
because they had these moments of choice, they'd pick an action,
they agreed on the action, but for different reasons.
Even the Declaration's most memorable statement,
"That all men are created equal",
was open to interpretation.
Did the fact that everybody was equal, in the basic sense
of their wellbeing mattering,
mean that everybody should participate in political power?
And the answer to that question for them was no.
John Adams writes to his wife Abigail when she says,
"What about the ladies? Where are they in this?"
He writes to her and says, "Yes, your wellbeing,
"your life, liberty and happiness are a part of this,
"but we men, we will be in charge of ensuring that the government
"succeeds in delivering that."
Those white men with property who are going to control power.
Every 4th of July, the Declaration of Independence
is celebrated as the birth of the United States.
But it wasn't the end of the war.
America still had to beat the British on the battlefield.
But the Americans didn't have enough arms and ammunition
to win a war by themselves.
So, to get rid of one king, they turned for help to another -
King Louis XVI of France.
Within a week of signing the Declaration of Independence,
the American revolutionaries sent a copy to the French monarch.
The British were France's greatest enemy.
Raaarrr!
Raarr!
In 1756, Britain and France had gone to war
over territories in North America.
This became known as the Seven Years' War.
It was a battle for imperial supremacy.
But the British...came out on top.
And the French weren't happy about it.
France lost all of its Canadian colonies to Britain,
as well as parts of the Caribbean.
And all they had to show for their efforts was crippling debt.
Sacrebleu!
Imperial France saw the American War of Independence
as the chance to get its revenge.
In 1776, they began smuggling arms to support the Patriot cause.
Then, in 1778, the French joined the United States
as official allies.
The main thing that changed was the introduction
of the French Navy into the force. Mmm.
The British were always dependent upon their Navy to keep themselves
supplied from London,
to move troops around from place to place,
and with the French Navy now on American shores,
all of that was cut off.
Britannia no longer ruled the waves. Mmm.
And for them, it changed completely the nature of the war.
Do you think that America could have won
without this help from France? No, absolutely not.
America could never have won the war without France.
This is not the story of the plucky little Americans
with their muskets and their ploughs going out and having a go
against the mighty, evil British, is it?
And it never was true and it was never a good fit.
Erm, the Americans could never have brought themselves up
by their own bootstraps.
In fact, the real story of the American Revolution
is that the United States became the centrepiece
of an international coalition which together fought
to achieve a common purpose - to defeat a common adversary.
The last major land battle of the Revolutionary War was in 1781.
In Yorktown, Virginia, the British surrendered
to George Washington's army of American and French troops.
But the decisive role of Imperial France in the American victory
was very quickly played down.
The war was over, yet the battle to control the story
of the revolution was just getting started.
# Oooo-ooo-oooh... #
The early histories of the revolution told the story
almost as a morality tale with good triumphing,
and that's because the new nation was still finding its feet.
It needed stability and purpose.
Meanwhile, the French,
well, they were now having a violent revolution their own.
They were busy chopping each other's heads off.
Emerson wrote his Concord Hymn in 1837.
By this time, Americans saw themselves as triumphant underdogs.
His embattled farmers were celebrated in poetry,
set to the tune of an old psalm.
# By the rude bridge that arched... #
The revolution was becoming remembered as a sacred story
outlining America's God-given destiny
to lead others towards liberty.
In the 1840s, its conquest of Mexican
and Native American territory
was presented as the divine destiny
of an exceptional nation.
The idea that we controlled our own destiny
did not fit very well with the idea that we depended
upon European powers to support our birth
and so that part of the story became left out over time.
# Free
# Bid time and Nature gently spare... #
In the first half of the 19th century,
the nation's patriotism was growing ever stronger.
People were eager to tell stories of America's revolutionary heroes.
And if they don't exist, then why not make them up?
Mm-hmm!
Take the story of a woman named Molly Pitcher.
Legend has it that Molly wandered the field at the Battle of Monmouth
in 1778, bringing water to her husband
and his fellow soldiers.
Suddenly... GUNSHOT
Ah! Molly's husband is shot in the head.
He falls to the ground.
She drops her pail of water and she cries out,
"Lie there, my darling, I will avenge thee!"
Molly Pitcher bravely takes up her husband's position
at the cannon and battles on.
CANNON FIRE
The next morning, George Washington himself gives Molly a piece of gold
and assures her that her services will not be forgotten.
But, in some versions of the story,
George Washington also makes her a Sergeant.
And in others, the husband isn't killed,
he's only injured.
And in yet others, it's not a bucket that Molly's carrying around
the battlefield, it's a pitcher, and the thirsty soldiers shout out,
"Oi, Molly, we're thirsty! Bring your pitcher! Molly, pitcher!"
Molly Pitcher.
Molly is an appealing heroine
and her battle-scarred 19th-century image
still appears in 21st-century schoolbooks.
But Molly Pitcher is a fib.
You'll find lots of books about her, but there are no first-hand accounts
that place her at the Battle of Monmouth.
She's probably an amalgamation
of several brave Patriot women.
Some people think that she's Margaret Corbin,
a woman wounded in battle at Fort Washington
who received a war pension.
Others claim she's Mary Hays McCauley.
Mary even has a memorial
claiming her as the original Molly Pitcher.
But Molly's legend sprung up in the 1830s and '40s,
when the people who'd lived through the revolution were dying out.
Historians started collecting anecdotes second-hand
and historical accuracy was often sacrificed
in favour of a good story.
Fire!
The Liberty Bell is another late arrival
in the story of the birth of the United States.
The bell used to hang in the tower above Independence Hall,
where the Declaration of Independence was signed.
It was put up in 1753 to call politicians to meetings
and to alert the public to important announcements.
When the Declaration of Independence was first read in public
and the Liberty Bell was sounded in celebration,
a witness said it rang as if it meant something.
In our time, it means something still.
But the Liberty Bell's starring role in the American Revolution
only entered the story
71 years after the Declaration of Independence was signed.
In the 1840s, George Lippard was the bestselling author in America.
Lippard was best known for his sensationalist Gothic tales,
filled with gory murders and vice.
But in 1847, he turned his hand to historical fiction.
Lippard wrote a story that was set on the 4th of July, 1776.
He introduces the character of an old man in humble attire,
but he still has a gleam in his eye.
He's the kindly bell-ringer who's in charge of the Liberty Bell.
And then there's a young boy with flaxen hair
and laughing eyes of summer blue.
The story goes that the blue-eyed boy
had the job of signalling to the old man
to ring the bell when the men below declared independence.
And what a super-exciting moment it is.
The little boy, swelling his little chest,
raised himself on tiptoe and shouted a single word,
"Ring!"
Now the old man is young again, his veins are filled with new life.
Backward and forward with sturdy strokes,
he swings the tongue, the bell speaks out!
Everybody goes absolutely wild.
The bell speaks to the city and to the world.
It's a great story.
It's the Hollywood version of the 4th of July
before Hollywood even exists.
And it's also entirely made up.
It sounds like heresy, but there's no evidence at all
that the Liberty Bell was rung on the 4th of July, 1776.
On July the 8th, some of the city bells were rung
to announce the public reading of the Declaration,
but the steeple at the old statehouse was in disrepair,
so it's unlikely that Old Liberty was ever rung that week.
But you can't keep a good story down.
Five years later, a significant historian called Benson Lossing
published his Pictorial Field-Book of the American Revolution,
and he too included the "blue-eyed boy"
giving the signal to ring the bell.
Two years after that,
and a biography of George Washington is published,
complete with the "bright-eyed boy".
So, in less than a decade, Lippard's historical fiction
has become accepted as historical fact.
Thanks to Lippard, the Liberty Bell has become
a central part of the American story.
The body of Abraham Lincoln was brought to Philadelphia
to lie in state next to the Liberty Bell
after his assassination in 1865.
In 1917,
its image helps to raise $21 billion for the US war effort.
Thank you, all.
And its legend has continued into the 21st century.
And each of the founders coming here
would know the ring of the Liberty Bell.
It rang to announce the first public reading
of the Declaration of Independence.
But in the late 19th century,
a new symbol of the revolution was forged,
and it would eclipse even the Liberty Bell
in the national consciousness.
The Statue of Liberty is a symbol of the American Revolution
at its biggest and boldest.
Liberty, the central idea from the Declaration of Independence,
was reimagined as a 300-foot goddess...
..armed with a guiding light
and a tablet bearing the revolutionary date -
July 4th, 1776.
But her meaning has never been set in stone.
She's come to represent all kinds of different things.
The revolutionary alliance with France,
America enlightening the rest of the world
and a nation that welcomes immigrants.
Each of these things, though, comes with its own little fibs.
The Statue of Liberty was a gift from the French
to celebrate their almost forgotten alliance in the American Revolution.
But this wasn't a gift from the French Government.
It was a message to it, to guard against tyranny.
The Frenchman who proposed the statue, Edouard de Laboulaye,
was worried about the lack of democracy in his own country.
He wanted a statue to honour the United States
as an example of a successful republic.
But this great American symbol wasn't originally designed
for the United States.
The sculptor, Frederic Auguste Bartholdi,
had been planning to build a similar statue for Egypt.
He travelled to Egypt and he showed his designs
of a gigantic figure of a woman to stand at the entrance
to the Suez Canal,
and she was to be veiled in the Egyptian fashion,
she was to hold high a lantern and she was to represent Egypt
carrying the light of progress to Asia.
And this idea excited the Egyptians initially,
but the expense was so high and they were expected to pay for it.
They turned it down.
So, he just redesigned it so it would be a European figure,
it would be a Roman goddess instead,
and that it would represent freedom and not progress.
The Statue of Liberty was unveiled in 1886.
But to some, a statue celebrating the ideal of liberty was misleading.
Women protested at the unveiling ceremony.
She might be Lady Liberty, but she still couldn't vote.
While African-Americans pointed out that liberty and equality
still weren't realities for them.
Soon, a new meaning for the Statue of Liberty emerged.
During fundraising to build the statue,
a well-known Jewish poet called Emma Lazarus
had written a poem to raise money.
Lazarus was an advocate for refugees
and her poem gave Lady Liberty a new political message.
Lazarus's poem was called The New Colossus.
In it, she showed Lady Liberty
almost standing on the doorstep of America, welcoming people in.
The line that everybody remembers goes,
"Give me your tired, your poor,
"your huddled masses,
"yearning to breathe free."
Nearly 20 years after the opening, Lazarus's friends had a verse
from that poem engraved on a plaque at the base of the statue.
And now the poem was all the more resonant.
In 1892,
an immigration centre had opened on neighbouring Ellis Island.
Lady Liberty would now be forever connected with the idea
of the United States welcoming immigrants from all over the world.
Do you think that the key to her success
in becoming this symbol of America is the fact that she's so flexible?
She can mean almost anything to anybody, can't she?
Yes, scholars have called her a hollow icon,
and that means that because she's really empty inside,
she can be filled with anyone's notion
of what liberty means to them.
That did transform her into having all kinds of new meanings,
like a symbol for immigrants,
a symbol for American nationalism,
a symbol for all sorts of ideas.
What started out as a powerful symbol of the French alliance
in the War of Independence had been overtaken by another story.
But in the 20th century, there would be new opportunities
for the story of the revolution to shape the American landscape.
JAZZ MUSIC
Jazz-age New York was the era of the skyscraper -
an emblem of a country looking to the future.
But at the same time,
American architecture was also looking to the past.
Churches, post offices, schools were being built in a style
known as Colonial Revival.
George Washington High School was built in 1925,
just five years before the Chrysler Building opened.
The name of the school refers to the American Revolution
and so too does its design.
That red brick and those white columns
and especially the bell tower on top,
they all remind me of Independence Hall in Philadelphia,
or some of the 18th-century buildings of Boston.
JAZZ MUSIC
Now, anybody could live in a home or eat in a diner
that looked like 1770s America.
The Colonial Revival was pitched as a truly American-style.
You were supposed to look at it and somehow feel the special qualities
of the Founding Fathers.
Their courage, or maybe their virtue.
It was used for public buildings to show people how to be American.
In fact, architecture could be a way to make America great again.
But this is an idealised version of the revolutionary era.
It comes complete with heroic Founding Fathers
who embody the Declaration's high ideals of liberty and equality.
And it's another distortion of the truth.
In the heart of Philadelphia, next to Independence Hall,
is the site of the President's House.
Long before the White House as we know it existed,
George Washington, as President, lived here.
But the house that existed on this site
has a darker side to its story,
because the unpalatable truth is that Washington was a slave-owner.
At the time of his death in 1799,
there were over 300 slaves
working on Washington's Virginia plantation.
Nine slaves worked for him here in Philadelphia.
When the foundations of the President's House
were discovered in the year 2000, a campaign started
to have Washington's Philadelphia slaves remembered at the site.
Now, their names are carved in stone here
and their story is recorded.
But only after an eight-year battle
fought by activists like Michael Coard.
Why do some Americans, and some very powerful Americans,
not want to think of Washington as a slave-owner?
It shakes the very foundation of American history.
If there were ever a man-god in American history,
it's George Washington.
George Washington is the foundation of what America represents,
so if you find out that at the very core,
at the very foundation, this man had such a horrific blemish,
that blemish being slavery, people don't want to admit the truth.
If he's flawed, then America's flawed.
How did George Washington treat his slaves?
Well, any person who enslaves any other person automatically
treats them bad by enslaving them, that's the first thing.
But even beyond that,
George Washington was a miserable miser
when it came to his enslaved population.
He was notorious for having them run around in rags,
having them hungry, having them emaciated.
In 1780, there was something called
the Pennsylvania Gradual Abolition Act.
They passed a law saying, "Hey, if you bring enslaved human beings
"into this state and you hold them for six straight months,
"at the end of that six-month period,
"they could petition for their freedom." Yes, yes.
So, what George Washington would do is wait for five months, 29 days,
take them across state lines and then bring them back.
Now, people say, "Well, yeah, he kind of skirted the law."
No, he didn't just skirt the law, he broke the law.
Nobody wants to hear that about our great hero George Washington.
Absolutely! Oh, my goodness!
And it's so funny, because if you want to say George Washington
was a great general, you can say that.
If you want to say George Washington was a great president,
you can say that. But can you be a great human being
when you hold 316 fellow human beings in brutal bondage
and play the type of games he did
with Pennsylvania's Gradual Abolition Act?
Why is it important to tell this story
about George Washington, slave-owner?
It's important in order for America and ultimately the world
to be able to move toward racial healing.
We might not ever reach that kumbaya moment
where we all come together as a human species,
but at least we can begin to respect one another.
And you respect people when you find out where they came from,
what they're about.
In order to reach the truth you have to tell the truth,
and you have to tell the truth at the beginning.
The beginning of American political history is George Washington.
You've got to tell the truth, the whole truth
and nothing but the truth.
# Oooo-oooh ...#
In the 21st century,
a battle still rages to decide whose version of history gets told.
# Oooo-ooo-oooh... #
And in 2015, that story stepped on stage
on Broadway.
# Alexander Hamilton
# My name is... #
Hamilton is a ground-breaking retelling
of the birth of the United States as a hip-hop musical.
# Just you wait, just you wait
# When he was ten, his father... #
Created by Lin-Manuel Miranda, it's based on the life
of Founding Father Alexander Hamilton.
George Washington's right-hand man on the battlefield
and Treasury Secretary in his Cabinet.
It's been praised by critics and presidents,
won 11 Tony Awards, a Grammy,
and a Pulitzer Prize.
To its fans, the musical Hamilton is a revolution in itself.
It tells the story of the American Revolution,
but all the historical characters are played by actors of colour.
The only white one plays poor old King George III.
So, the stage is full of African-Americans,
Puerto Ricans and Chinese-Americans.
There's a big sign on the front of the theatre,
and it says, "History is happening here in Manhattan."
Hamilton's racial diversity has made the story of the Founding Fathers
more accessible for modern Americans.
But historian Lyra Monteiro believes that this masks the inequalities
at the heart of a revolution fought for liberty and equality.
I saw the show the week it opened on Broadway
and I was blown away by, you know, the quality of it as a work of art.
But immediately I was, like, "Wait a second, this is not..."
It's not cool that these guys are so cool, right?
By turning the Founding Fathers into these, you know,
interesting, cool, clever, exciting, you know, relatable guys, right,
in suggesting that they're just the same as, you know,
African-Americans who were raised in the projects,
it ends up obscuring, really, how much that founding moment
was about the oppression of everyone who wasn't a white man.
It was not a revolution for everybody.
These are definitely people who did not want the ancestors
of the performers onstage
to count as citizens in the nation they created.
Do you think it's possible that there could be a generation
of school kids who go away thinking that all of the Founding Fathers
were great guys, just like Obama?
Yeah! I think there's a real possibility of that.
And I think there's a real problem with that too, though,
because it continues to perpetuate this idea that
in order to have a rightful claim to power in this country,
a rightful claim to be in this country,
you have to show that you have a claim to the country's past, right?
And so black men and Latino men representing the founders
is a way of saying, "Look, we belong here too.
"We're as American as white people."
And I think that's kind of shitty.
I don't think that we should have to, you know,
look back to that always in order to make a claim that we belong,
because, ultimately, we're still leaving other people out.
But isn't it "just" a musical? How much does it matter?
Sure, it's just a musical,
but it's a musical about a very...
erm, intensely symbolic moment in American history
that has an impact on how Americans understand ourselves.
At the centre of the story of Hamilton
is a line which becomes the final song -
"Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?"
# Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?
# President Jefferson, I give him this... #
This show is explicitly asking questions
about who gets to write history.
# Who lives, who dies, who tells your story? #
Who controls the narrative of the founding era?
And in a story where some of American history's
biggest fibs abound, this can surely only be a good thing.
# Every other Founding Father's story gets told
# Every other Founding Father gets to grow old... #
The history of the American Revolution has been mythologised,
distorted, reimagined
and sometimes just made up.
And that's partly because it's such an inspiring moment in time.
America has such a powerful national mythology.
It makes Americans feel good about their country
and it's how their country presents itself to the world.
But if history teaches us anything at all,
it's that we have to ask questions.
Who is telling us the story?
How are they spinning it?
And could they be telling us fibs?
Next time, the American Civil War.
You are darling, darling!
Was Abraham Lincoln really fighting to end slavery?
Lincoln always did what was in the best interest of his race.
I'll uncover the fibs in the story of a conflict
that continues to divide the United States.