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Later this year, PBS will release the filmmaker Ken Burns’ latest retelling of American history: a 12-hour series on the Revolutionary War. Burns likes to say it is the most important historical event of the last 2,000 years, and you might be surprised that after beloved series on jazz, baseball, the Civil War, Vietnam, and just about every other mythic American story, it took him this long to turn his camera toward the nation’s founding.
The timing is just right: This weekend marks the 250th anniversary of the start of the Revolutionary War—a struggle that, Burns said at a screening on Thursday, “has been encased in amber, bloodless, as if we’re trying to protect the big ideas.” He was speaking to a packed, lunchtime auditorium of high schoolers and retirees in Lexington, Massachusetts, where the “shot heard round the world” was fired 250 years ago this Saturday.
Burns is disciplined in his refusal to talk about current events, which might reflect the wisdom of self-interest, since the president has called his longtime network PBS a “radical left monster” that must be defunded. But it is also part of his timelessness. History doesn’t repeat itself, Burns says, it rhymes, and it is up to the viewer to pick out those rhymes. The film begins with a rhyme that rings as loud as cannon fire, a quote from Thomas Paine’s reflections on the struggle for independence: “The strength and powers of despotism consist wholly in the fear of resisting it.”
Every year, Lexington—a prosperous suburb 10 miles from Boston—commemorates its role in history with a dawn battle reenactment, a pancake breakfast, and a parade. To fete the supersized 250th anniversary, a committee of local burghers has been meeting every few weeks for four years, preparing for as many as 100,000 people to show up this weekend. These meetings were occupied with the mostly apolitical questions of local organizing, such as: “Could we get Maya Lin to do a sculpture?,” “Do we know anyone who could represent the British Royal Family?,” and “What do you do when the winning entrant in a logo competition for high schoolers cribbed the design from a business called Patriot Woodworks?”
Not so much: How does this patriotism get expressed at a moment when liberals are feeling none too proud of their country? Things got off to a symbolic start on Thursday evening, when a commemorative arch reading “Welcome to the Birthplace of American Liberty” collapsed into pieces on stage.
In a broader sense, Lexington is offering us a preview of the year to come, when President Donald Trump will preside over the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. That semiquincentennial birthday celebration promises to be a jingoistic show of American power and righteousness, history as taught by Trump. But could the story of the American Revolution also give the country’s flag-waving birthday party a subversive edge?
I asked Mona Roy, the vice chair of the nonpartisan organizing committee, if this did not feel like a strange moment to be organizing a flag-waving parade. She did not miss a beat. “Waving the American flag, to me, means taking responsibility for making America the best it can be,” she responded.
She pointed out that Lexington’s Battle Green had also been the site of a famous 1971 demonstration against the Vietnam War, led by a young John Kerry, which concluded with more than 400 people being arrested. It was the largest act of civil disobedience in Massachusetts history. The journalist Bill McKibben, whose father was arrested that day, later raised the flag at the bicentennial in 1975. “The flag means only what the country means, and maybe that meaning can change back again,” he wrote of that experience in 2022. “We get the chance to shape some of what our history stands for with our actions now.”
A child of immigrants and a racial and disability justice activist, Roy offered an argument for what she called “reflective patriotism.” Lexington’s 250th, she told me, “challenges us to grapple with our founding ideals—liberty, representation, and resistance to tyranny—and asks how we’re living up to them today. … True patriotism demands both love of country and the courage to reckon with its flaws.”
It’s a line of argument that was popular during Donald Trump’s first term, when liberals managed to claim for themselves not just the Statue of Liberty (symbol of immigration) but the American flag itself (in contrast to Republicans’ preferred “thin blue line” flag). Positioning the anti-Trump resistance as the true heir to American values was a good strategy and helped make the president’s policies unpopular.
In that respect, the festivities that Massachusetts calls “Patriots’ Day” weekend present an interesting challenge. Hamilton aside, the imagery and language of the American Revolution have been deeply right-coded in recent years. Look at the Minutemen Project, a group of civilian immigration enforcers founded in 2004, or the Tea Party Movement, founded in 2007, or the appropriation of the Gadsden flag, or various Second Amendment jurists who see, in the ragtag militias of Lexington and Concord, a justification for the continued sale of AR-15s. For that reason, Lexington Green has been a repeat gathering spot for the far-right Oathkeepers group, which played a role in the Capitol Riot on Jan. 6, despite the town’s deep-blue politics (in addition to the anti-war liberals, it is now one-third Asian American).
Most people in Massachusetts don’t see Patriots’ Day this way; for them, it’s just a day off, a costume parade their parents used to take them to, and the Boston Marathon. The gear of choice is still a Tom Brady jersey.
Still, the sense that the American Revolution is a conservative inheritance is widespread, and liberals haven’t always had an easy time hitching their wagons to this story. “Everybody uses the past. Politicians on all sides use the past in discourse to prove points and gain votes,” Andy Schocket, a historian at Bowling Green and the author of Fighting Over the Founders, told me. “But it’s especially hard for liberals because slavery was also such a big part of the American Revolution, and we have mountains of evidence indicating that a lot of white Americans revolted at least in part because they saw the institution of slavery threatened.” It’s a more complicated story if you care about that sort of thing.
Not everyone is content to let this year be business as usual. As Mona Roy and the Lex250 Commission finalized its invitations to the four living presidents, a group of local dissidents formed Lexington Alarm!, which is dedicated to “upholding the values the Lexington Militia fought for.”
One of the principal organizers is Toby Sackton. He’s a 40-year Lexington resident, a retired editor of news about the seafood industry turned local agitator. He wants to avoid, “a commemoration that doesn’t recognize the parallels between what was happening in 1775 and some of the things we’ve seen in the first hundred days of Trump.”
“We want to point out those parallels,” he said. “We don’t think it’s appropriate that people claim to be devoted to the American Revolution and do not stand up for the same things—due process, free speech, the rule of law, not centralizing decision-making in a single person.”
He encouraged me not to see this effort, the work of two-dozen neighbors organizing over the past month, as an objection to the official commemoration, which, he noted, has been planned since long before Trump took office. So far, his group has distributed 700 signs for Saturday’s parade—not bad for a town of 35,000—which quote from the language of the Revolution (Paine again: “In America, the law is king!”) and let viewers draw their own conclusions.
The source material, in other words, is so strong that it doesn’t need any editorializing. As the journalist Josh Marshall put it on this week about a different 200-year-old document: “Anyone who has read the Federalist Papers in their totality knows that somewhere between a third and a half of the essays are very specifically talking about Donald Trump.”
A powerful example of this phenomenon occurred during Donald Trump’s first year in office, when NPR live-tweeted, with no commentary, the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 2017. Some conservative users took it as an attack on Trump, and it reads much the same way today. “Cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world”? “Transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences”? Americans may mistake those 249-year-old grievances for last week’s headlines.
One group of people who wouldn’t? Immigrants seeking citizenship, who are required to study the document for their citizenship test. Some will be in Lexington on Tuesday, when the 250th birthday of that first skirmish concludes with a new tradition: a naturalization ceremony.
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