In his farewell address, the late President Ronald Reagan reflected on the state of America as his country entered the 1990s: 

“Younger parents aren’t sure that an unambivalent appreciation of America is the right thing to teach modern children. And as for those who create the popular culture, well-grounded patriotism is no longer the style. Our spirit is back, but we haven’t reinstitutionalized it. We’ve got to do a better job of getting across that America is freedom—freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of enterprise. And freedom is special and rare. It’s fragile; it needs protection.” 

His words ring as true today as they did then. Reagan understood that what we teach children about America’s past directly influences the country’s future course. “So, we’ve got to teach history based not on what’s in fashion but what’s important,” he said. Americans need to focus “more attention to American history and a greater emphasis on civic ritual.” 

Newcomer production company Light A Candle Films has made Reagan’s plea their creed. Combining documentary footage with a dramatic story in a docudrama format, Light A Candle hopes to portray American history in a dynamic and accurate way. Their first docudrama focuses on The Battle of Bunker Hill. 

The Revolutionary War began with the gunshots “heard around the world” fired at Concord and Lexington, Massachusetts. Following these battles, the British were besieged in Boston by colonial militia men. When the colonists learned that the British planned to expand their control to Charlestown, they massed at Bunker Hill and Breed’s Hill in front of it, building fortifications in a single night. The next morning, the British attacked. The battle of Bunker Hill ensued, and was the first major battle of the Revolutionary War, America’s war for independence. It was at Bunker Hill that the British learned of America’s resolve to cling to their self-evident rights, even in the face of death. 

In high school I first heard the idea that American colonists were somehow wrong for revolting against the British. That the British were simply taxing the colonists to cover some of their expenses from the French and Indian War, which was fought on behalf of the colonists, sounded plausible. 

Matthew Spalding defeats this argument in his recent book “We Still Hold These Truths.” He writes on page 31 (his emphasis): 

The American Revolution began as a tax revolt. But it is important to understand from the start that the debate was never really over the amount of taxation (the taxes were actually quite low) but the process by which the British government imposed and enforced these taxes. As loyal colonists, the Americans had long recognized parliament’s authority to legislate from the empire generally, as with colonial trade, but they had always maintained that the power to tax was a legislative power reserved to their own assemblies rather than a distant legislature in London. 

Spalding continues, “In making this argument, the colonials were objecting to being deprived of an important historic right.” This right was laid down in the English Bill of Rights of 1689, which forbid taxation without legislative consent. The colonists argued that since they had no representation in parliament, these taxes “violated the traditional rights of Englishmen.” 

The film clearly points this out. Without representation, Parliament’s taxation amounted to little more than robbery. And that’s what unrepresented taxation—and in my opinion, much of the “represented” taxation that occurs today—amounts to: theft, no matter how justified a government believes it is. 

What the film did right was avoid trying to create a feature-length full-scale production. This film accomplishes what it sets out to do: defend the truth of what happened that day and keep the audience interested, delivering facts in an entertaining and informative manner. It would serve well as an educational tool. I would recommend the filmmakers avoid trying to make jokes or use cliché terms too often. No need to call a grown man “lad,” as one of the officers does. 

Light A Candle does not shy away from the fact that they work on a budget, a fact that is apparent when watching the film. The website reads: 

Now, we’re a small company … completely self-financed. We’re doing this because we believe in the subject matter and the mission. So we’re not beholden to anyone, and no one has a say in how we style our content. And because we are also self-distributing, we don’t have to ‘adjust’ historical facts to sell to a particular region or school system. 

Producer and director Tony Malanowski hopes it will educate young people about the true history of America. “We want to be the alternative to the revisionist, anti-American views that are being presented in many of our schools today,” he said. “By presenting the information in a narrative docudrama style, we make it easier to remember the facts, while also helping to offer a rich texture that can really make the historical period come alive, instead of just being dry dates and facts with no flavoring.” 

So far he has received good reviews from viewers, many of whom have told him that they watched the film with their children.

“If we can keep doing that in subsequent DVDs then I feel we will have hit the mark,” he said. 

While quality is often in the eye of the beholder, and the dramatic portion of the film could use some work, the documentary portion is solid, and the experts cited deliver thorough, informative historical commentary.

The Champ is that rare film that features a pair of strong male leads doing masculine things in a masculine universe, but with nuanced and delicate characterizations that delve far deeper than the usual sports movie, tearing at the raw edges of what it means to be a parent in an imperfect world, to live through the tragedy of a broken family, and to suffer the premature loss of childhood innocence. On the surface, these subjects would seem ill at home in one of the most famous boxing movies of all time. But The Champ is not based on a true story, or cribbed from a famous novel — it was wholly conceived in the mind of the screenwriter. And not just any screenwriter, but the most prolific (and arguably one of the greatest) in Hollywood history. Who was he, you ask?

Well, first of all, he was a she.

Born in 1888, Marion Benson Owens grew up in San Francisco as the middle child of a no-nonsense ad executive, but soon developed into a rebellious little Bohemian with a variety of artistic pretensions. She was above all precocious and full of imagination. Whenever her aunt would invite other ladies over for séances (a favorite pastime in those days), young Marion would play the part of a possessed girl channeling spirits, inventing all manner of accents, characters, and stories with which to delight her audience. Her uncle, an old seaman, often took her along to visit his buddies in seedy bars and taverns. Watching the gruff men smoking, drinking, and cursing in their salty element, she gained early first-hand experience in the sort of masculine banter and swagger that decades later would grant The Champ so much verisimilitude.

Looking for ways to express her imaginative longings, Marion began to draw and to write poetry, things that failed to impress her down-to-earth businessman father and socialite mother. Their divorce when she was a teen imbued her soul with another of the painful elements that would later figure so prominently in The Champ. Among her parents’ friends was the great Jack London, the first millionaire author in history. Although it is unknown whether she read any of his seminal tales about boxing (The Game, “A Piece of Steak”) it is known that he heartily encouraged her writing endeavors, spurring her to submit what would become her first fledgling short story and poetry sales.

Marion’s early marriage to a magazine illustrator failed, as did a second to a steel magnate. By 1915 a series of transient jobs (including time spent in Europe as a WWI combat correspondent!) had ended with her in Los Angeles, nibbling around the edges of the molten Hollywood film industry. Meeting the famous actress Mary Pickford was a turning point, as they quickly began a warm friendship that would last over fifty years. Soon she was acting in bit roles for silent movies under the stage name “Frances Marion” (one of her distant relatives was Francis Marion, the legendary “Swamp Fox” of the Revolutionary War). The name would stick, and the former Marion Owens would be Frances Marion for the rest of her life.

Ultimately, acting wasn’t her forte. Her first chance to write for a movie came about due to a funny circumstance. The movies of 1915 were silent, yes — but amazingly, studios were getting complaints from lip readers who claimed that the words mouthed on-screen by the actors didn’t at all match the displayed dialogue cards. (Because there was no sound, actors could say anything — including plenty of things no lip-reading Christian ought to “hear”!) Directors began requesting scene-appropriate mock dialogue for the actors to use. The newly christened Frances Marion obliged, and began what would become a lifelong career and passion.

Within a few years Marion the writer was a hot property, penning a continuous stream of “scenarios” and making an obscene amount of money doing it. She became the personal screenwriter for her friend Mary Pickford, as well as the ghost-writer for Pickford’s newspaper column. In 1917 alone Marion cleared $50,000 for her scriptwriting chores. She wrote lightning-fast, sometimes cranking out a feature-length script in as little as three weeks. No one knows exactly how many movies she wrote during the teens and twenties. The Internet Movie Database has records for 150, but copyright filings at the Library of Congress reveal that to be a low-ball figure. The estimated totals published in various sources are all over the map, ranging as high as 325.

What isn’t in dispute is that Frances Marion remains the most prolific screenwriter in Hollywood history. During her tenure she was also the best-paid writer, man or woman. “She had more muscle than most women in Hollywood,” observed actress Gloria Swanson, “because she was a gold mine of ideas — ideas that could become stories that could become scripts that could become films that could save careers, lives, and corporations.” In 1926, Variety reported that Marion was to be given a staggering $100,000 to write exclusively for Sam Goldwyn. Still later, as M-G-M’s prize scenarist, she would be paid upwards of $30,000 per week. “I’ve been so glad to get the money,” she said, “that I never worried much about the credit.”

In 1919 Marion married for the third time, to an ex-Army Chaplin named Fred Thomson, who had been a military adviser on one of Mary Pickford’s pictures. Unlike her previous marriages, this one worked out exceedingly well — after a decade of trying, she had finally found true love. A few years later, when Marion called on her husband to fill in for a missing actor on one of the pictures she was directing (yes, she even directed a few films), he promptly became an overnight sensation. Thomson ended up starring in dozens of films, most of them written by his wife, and soon her husband was one of the most popular Western stars in America. The happy couple adopted one son, had another naturally, and built a sprawling twenty-four acre estate in Beverly Hills. Life was wonderful.

Then, in late 1928, tragedy struck in the form of a rusty nail on the floor of a horse stable. Thomson stepped on it, developed tetanus, and quickly sickened while his doctors flailed around trying to diagnose his illness. His death on Christmas Day (so emotionally similar to the one she was soon to write for The Champ) sent her into a tailspin. Forty years old and with two babies to raise, she was hospitalized several times for exhaustion and grief. A fourth marriage to director George W. Hill ended in divorce (soon after, Hill committed suicide), and with that Marion swore off marriage forever, dedicating herself to the raising of her sons while alleviating her loneliness with occasional flings and affairs.

It was in the aftermath of her beloved husband’s death that she wrote the movies for which she is best remembered. Sound had arrived, and dialogue suddenly had grown substantially in importance. Whereas before a screenwriter need only write small bits for subtitle cards, now they were required to invent whole monologues and long debates bristling with dramatic energy. A new set of rules regarding pace, length, and nuance were required. Techniques that worked wonderfully in the silent era now fell flat. Unlike many, Marion’s well-rounded and emotion-laden characters transferred well to talkies. With the support and encouragement of the brilliant young producer Irving Thalberg, she penned hit after hit for M-G-M, and in 1930 became the first woman to win an Academy Award for a non-actress category when she took home the statue for The Big House, a gritty prison film.

But it was in Mexico, on a research trip for an upcoming western, that she had the “Eureka!” moment that would result in a film even more memorable and close to her heart. She watched in fascination as a man got tossed out of a saloon along with his young son. The boy was angrily defending his drunken dad, calling him “the Champ!” This scene of familial loyalty and moxie from a little boy touched her, and when she got back she asked Thalberg if she could write a different story than the western they had been planning. As Thalberg was vacationing in Europe, he assigned Marion to Harry Rapf, one of M-G-M’s top producers. It was an inspired choice, for Rapf gave Marion additional ideas that ultimately nudged the story far closer to the one we now know and love.

Rapf’s friend, director Chuck Reisner, had told him some tales about the misadventures of his son Dinky with a horse at a Tijuana racetrack. Marion incorporated these into her plot, and added heaping portions of emotional resonance drawn from her own life — divorce, untimely death, the hole left by the absence of a parent. Her flair for melodrama was exquisitely developed by this point, honed to a razor’s edge by fifteen years of writing hundreds of silent films. The resulting screenplay featured a mix of powerful elements appealing to both males and females. Alcoholism especially was given a harrowing treatment (and this during Prohibition, which had not yet been repealed).

Many critics find weepy melodrama loathsome, but Marion prized the ability of movies to elicit strong emotions. Years later, in a book on screenwriting, she would say:

A character exists only in his emotions and sensations. Without the expression of feeling, he no more represents a living person than does a fleshless skeleton. If he does not realistically express some credible emotion himself, he will not be likely to arouse feeling in those who watch him. His own characteristics and the plot arrangement should set him in situations that plausibly arouse his own fear, hope, passion, desire, anger, love, jealousy or other emotion, and his own feeling should be expressed so realistically as to arouse emotion in the beholder.

After she finished the story proper, screenwriters Leonard Praskins and Wanda Tuchock were brought in to add dialogue and flesh out the scenes. According to Marion, surgically adding layers of witty banter and comedy to an outwardly dramatic movie is a tough business:

If anyone [believes] that we sit around holding our sides with laughter as one hilarious gag after another is suggested, they are gravely mistaken. We sit in a room and build our comedy scenes with concentration. It was grim work, and even when we thought we had hit upon what comedians call a “belly laugh,” nobody so much as cracked a smile.

The resulting script was strange, the first of what would eventually be seen as a new genre, the “male weepie.” It’s a delicate balance: take the masculinity from such a script, and it’s just another Little Women type estrogen-fest. But take away Marion’s feminine melodrama, and it’s just another fight picture with shallow, cardboard heroes. As things turned out, audiences suffering through the Depression heartily embraced Marion’s heartfelt tale, and the script for the movie won the veteran screenwriter her second Academy Award.

Marion would continue writing for M-G-M until 1946. By then, in her late fifties, she was thoroughly disenchanted with the business. Most of her silent-era friends were dead or retired, and it was near impossible to get anything personal made anymore. Whereas The Champ had been pitched and developed at light-speed, now everything was homogenized by a legion of script doctors and production-code enforcers, assembly-line style. Writing in that environment was, in her words, “like writing on sand with the wind blowing.” The personal, heartfelt projects of yesteryear had given way to

the era of messages, of art; the intellectuals have taken over and the films aren’t simple and direct any longer. . . The poor people who write for the films! Film writers are like Penelope — knitting their stories all day just to have somebody else unravel their work by night.

Thus, with her children almost fully grown, she abandoned Hollywood and moved East to write novels and plays. Her last brush with Tinseltown was to adopt her Champ screenplay into a new vehicle for Red Skelton, changing the prizefighter of the original into a comedian and naming it The Clown (1953). Shorn of its hard-boiled masculinity, it bombed.

Frances Marion never worked in Hollywood again, and died in 1973 at the age of 84. In 1987, when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was attempting to create a display featuring real Oscars from every year of the awards’ existence, they were having a problem finding one for 1930. Marion’s son Richard came through by donating the statue she had received for writing The Big House. When asked about how his mother had displayed her Oscars during her life, he replied that she generally used them as doorstops.

One of Richard Thomson’s earliest memories of his mom was walking into her bedroom early in the morning to find that she already had been up for several hours writing. “Her hair was down,” he recalls, “but she was sitting up with papers all over her bed.” The most prolific screenwriter in Hollywood history — lonely, tinged by tragedy, yet still possessing a little girl’s imagination and heart — gutting out the stories that made a generation of Americans laugh and weep.

Next Saturday in For Conservative Movie Lovers, a look at the underrated actors who brought Frances Marion’s ardent effusions to Oscar-worthy life.

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

The go-to gal for information about Frances Marion is Cari Beauchamp, who over the last decade has single-handedly spurred a renaissance and reevaluation of the forgotten screenwriter. Her 1997 book Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood is the source from which most modern articles, including this one, glean substantive information about the author of The Champ. There’s also a Turner Classic Movies documentary film of the same name narrated by Uma Thurman and Kathy Bates. Beauchamp, a former press secretary for ex-California Governor Jerry Brown, is to be commended for shedding light on a much-neglected area of Hollywood history.

Another documentary on the early history of women in Hollywood is Reel Models: The First Women of Film. It might be asking a bit much for Big Hollywood readers to watch this given the narrators (Shirley MacLaine, Susan Sarandon, Hilary Swank, and Minnie Driver, plus Barbra Streisand introduces it). But if you can get past them, check it out for the content.

Frances Marion wrote a fair number of books in addition to her screenwriting output, two of which Big Hollywood readers may particularly wish to hunt down. How To Write and Sell Film Stories was published way back in 1937, and serves as a sort of Syd Field primer on writing for the big screen. Off with Their Heads! is her autobiography, and contains many stories about early Hollywood.

Jack London’s “A Piece of Steak” is one of the most affecting short stories you’ll ever read, penned by one of our very best authors. A harrowing boxing tale, it’ll put you in the proper mindset to fully appreciate what Frances Marion did with The Champ.

History serving “a social aim,” rather than chronicling the past in a detached manner, is what readers get in A People’s History of the United States. With any luck, “The People Speak,” the History Channel documentary based on the book that premieres this Sunday, will be, like so many Hollywood productions, unfaithful to the original. Given A People’s History of the United States’ infidelity to facts, this might be the only chance viewers have of seeing anything resembling an accurate retelling of history.

Through Zinn’s looking-glass, Maoist China, site of history’s bloodiest state-sponsored killings, transforms into “the closest thing, in the long history of that ancient country, to a people’s government, independent of outside control.” The authoritarian Nicaraguan Sandinistas were “welcomed” by their own people, while the opposition Contras, who backed the candidate that triumphed when free elections were finally held, were a “terrorist group” that “seemed to have no popular support inside Nicaragua.” Admitting some human rights abuses, Zinn writes that Castro’s Cuba “had no bloody record of suppression.”

Readers of A People’s History of the United States learn very little about history. They learn quite a bit about Howard Zinn. In fact, the book is perhaps best thought of as a massive Rorschach Test, with the author’s familiar reaction to every major event in American history proving that his is a captive mind long closed by ideology.

If you’ve read Karl Marx, there’s no reason to read Howard Zinn. In fact, reading the most important line of The Communist Manifesto makes a study of A People’s History of the United States a colossal waste of time. The single-bullet theory of history offered by Marx–“The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggle”–is relied upon by Zinn to explain all of American history. Economics determines everything. Why study history when theory has all the answers?

Thumb through A People’s History of the United States and one finds greed motivating every major event. According to Zinn, the separation from Great Britain, the Civil War, and both world wars—to name but a few examples—all stem from base motives involving rich men seeking to get richer at the expense of other men.

Zinn’s projection of Marxist theory upon historical reality begins with Columbus. According to Zinn, those following the seafaring Italian to the New World did so for one reason: profit. “Behind the English invasion of North America, behind their massacre of Indians, their deception, their brutality, was that special powerful drive born in civilizations based on private property,” maintains the octogenarian scribe.

A materialist interpretation continues with the Founding. “Around 1776,” A People’s History informs, “certain important people in the English colonies made a discovery that would prove enormously useful for the next two hundred years. They found that by creating a nation, a symbol, a legal unity called the United States, they could take over land, profits, and political power from the favorites of the British Empire. In the process, they could hold back a number of potential rebellions and create a consensus of popular support for the rule of a new, privileged leadership.”

Zinn sarcastically adds, “When we look at the American Revolution this way, it was a work of genius, and the Founding Fathers deserve the awed tribute they have received over the centuries. They created the most effective system of national control devised in modern times, and showed future generations of leaders the advantages of combining paternalism with command.” Rather than the spark that lit the fire of freedom and self-government throughout much of the world, he portrays the American Founding as a diabolically creative way to ensure oppression. If the Founders wanted a society they could direct, why didn’t they put forth a dictatorship or a monarchy resembling most other governments at the time? Why go through the trouble of devising a constitution guaranteeing rights, political participation, jury trials, and checks on power? Zinn doesn’t explain, contending that these freedoms and rights are merely a facade designed to prevent class revolution.

Zinn paints antebellum America as a uniquely cruel slaveholding society subjugating man for profit. Curiously, the war that ultimately results in slavery’s demise is portrayed as a conflict of oppression too. Zinn writes, “it is money and profit, not the movement against slavery, that was uppermost in the priorities of the men who ran the country.” Rather than welcoming emancipation, as one might expect, Zinn casts a cynical eye towards it. “Class consciousness was overwhelmed during the Civil War,” the author laments, placing a decidedly negative spin on the central event in American history. America is in a lose/lose situation. The same thing, according to Zinn, caused both slavery and emancipation: greed. Whether the U.S. tolerates or eradicates slavery, its nefarious motives remain the same. Zinn’s jaundiced eye fails to see the real issues surrounding the Civil War. Instead, he envisions the chief significance of the grisly conflict as how it allegedly served as a distraction from the impending socialist revolution.

By the time the reader reaches World War I, Zinn begins to sound like a broken record. “American capitalism needed international rivalry—and periodic war—to create an artificial community of interest between rich and poor,” the Boston University emeritus professor of history writes of the Great War, “supplanting the genuine community of interest among the poor that showed itself in sporadic movements.” Yet another diversion to delay the revolution!

“A People’s War?” is Zinn’s chapter on the war in which he served his country. Zinn suggests that America, not Japan, was to blame for Pearl Harbor by provoking the Empire of the Sun. The fight against fascism was all an illusion. While Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan may have been America’s enemies, Uncle Sam’s real goal was empire. Regarding America’s neutrality in the Spanish Civil War, Zinn asks:  “[W]as it the logical policy of a government whose main interest was not stopping Fascism but advancing the imperial interests of the United States? For those interests, in the thirties, an anti-Soviet policy seemed best. Later, when Japan and Germany threatened U.S. world interests, a pro-Soviet, anti-Nazi policy became preferable.” Reality is inverted. It’s not the Soviet Union that went from being anti-Nazi to pro-Nazi to anti-Nazi. Zinn projects the Soviet Union’s schizophrenic policies upon the United States. While Zinn awkwardly excuses the Hitler-Stalin Pact, he all but proclaims a Hitler-Roosevelt Pact.

The reader learns that the Second World War was really about—surprise!—money. “Quietly, behind the headlines in battles and bombings,” Zinn writes, “American diplomats and businessmen worked hard to make sure that when the war ended, American economic power would be second to none in the world. United States business would penetrate areas that up to this time had been dominated by England. The Open Door Policy of equal access would be extended from Asia to Europe, meaning that the United States intended to push England aside and move in.” Yet, this didn’t happen. The English Empire expired, but no American Empire took its place. Despite defeating Japan and helping to vanquish Germany, America rebuilt these countries. They are now America’s chief economic rivals, not its colonies.

The profit motive certainly is central to numerous major events in American history. The discovery of gold at Sutter’s Fort in 1848, for example, undeniably stands as the primary reason—alongside the favorable outcome of the Mexican War—for the subsequent population explosion in California. The Gold Rush is one of several historical occurrences that conform to Zinn’s overall thesis. Even a broken clock is right twice a day. For every major figure or event whose catalyst was economic interests, scores were sparked by some unrelated concern.

To question Zinn’s method of analyses is not to say that economics does not influence events. It is to say that one-size-fits-all explanations of history are bound to be wrong more than they are right. History is too complicated to find a perfect fit within any theory. For the true believer, this inconvenience can be overcome. When fact and theory clash, ideologues choose theory. To the true believer, ideology is truth. Time and again, A People’s History of the United States opts to mold the facts to fit theory, leaving the reader to wonder what “people” he is referring to in the book’s title. Dishonest people? Left-wing people? Delusional people?

“Unemployment grew in the Reagan years,” Zinn claims. Statistics show otherwise. Reagan inherited an unemployment rate of 7.5 percent. By his last month in office, the rate had declined to 5.4 percent. Had the Reagan presidency ended in 1982 when unemployment rates exceeded 10 percent, Zinn would have a point. But for the remainder of Reagan’s presidency, unemployment declined precipitously. While Zinn teaches history and not mathematics, one needn’t be a math whiz to figure out that 5.4 percent is less than 7.5 percent. Despite unleashing an economy that created nearly 20 million new jobs during his tenure, Reagan continues to be smeared by historians—and it’s not hard to figure out why. Reagan’s free market polices were anathema to Marxists like Zinn. Upset at the pleasant way things turned out—Reagan’s policies unleashed an economy that continuously grew from late 1982 until mid 1990—historians prefer to rewrite history.

These are but a few of Zinn’s errors, which curiously seem to always bolster the left-of-center position. No error goes against the grain of the author’s general thesis. Every author makes mistakes. Zinn, it seems, would make less of them if he used his mind rather than his ideology to do his thinking.

By now one might be thinking: On what evidence does Zinn base his varied proclamations? One can only guess. Despite its scholarly pretensions, the book contains not a single source citation. While a student in Professor Zinn’s classes at Boston University or Spelman College might have received an “F” for turning in a paper without documentation, Zinn’s footnote-free book is standard reading in scores of college courses.

More striking than Zinn’s inaccuracies—intentional and otherwise—is what he leaves out.

Washington’s Farewell Address, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, and Reagan’s “tear down the wall” speech at the Brandenburg Gate all fail to merit a mention. Nowhere do we learn that Americans were first in flight, first to fly solo across the Atlantic, and first to walk on the moon. Alexander Graham Bell, Jonas Salk, and the Wright Brothers are entirely absent. Instead, the reader is treated to the exploits of Speckled Snake, Joan Baez, and the Berrigan brothers. While Zinn highlights immigrants that went into professions such as ditch-digging and prostitution, he excludes success stories like Alexander Hamilton, John Jacob Astor, and Louis B. Mayer. Valley Forge rates a single fleeting reference, while D-Day’s Normandy invasion, Gettysburg, and other important military battles are left out. In their place, we get several pages on the My Lai massacre and colorful descriptions of U.S. bombs falling on hotels, air-raid shelters, and markets during 1991’s Gulf War.

How do readers learn about U.S. history with all these omissions? They don’t.

Daniel J. Flynn is the author of A Conservative History of the American Left (Crown Forum, 2008) and Intellectual Morons: How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall for Stupid Ideas (Crown Forum, 2004), from which this essay is adapted. Copyright © 2004 by Daniel J. Flynn.

A number of my ancestors served in the Continental Army, mostly with New York, Massachusetts and New Jersey units. One of those wrote the letter below which is now kept in the Revolutionary Era Documents section of the New Jersey Historical Society.  The letter was written by Captain William Gifford of the Third New Jersey Regiment to his best friend, Colonel Benjamin Holme of the New Jersey Militia. I thought this 4th of July weekend would be a good time to read it again…

Camp at Valley Forge Jan. 24, 1778

D. Col.

I should have wrote you before now, had it not been for our Expectations of going to Jersey for Winter Quarters, — but I fancy we may give up our notions of Jersey & Content ourselves in these Wigwams this winter, — We are encamped about Twenty Miles from Philad. at a place called the valley Forge, along the Schuylkill. The Army is divided into Two lines front & Rear, besides Corps de Reserve, and possess very
Commanding and defensible ground, we are fortifying the Camp as fast as possible, tho’ we are under no apprehensions of a visit from the Enemy, (Tho’ such a report is current in Camp) but I am very sensible they know  better things, if they shou’d come I trust in God we shall be able to give them a warm reception, perhaps a total defeat, We have a large Army in every respect fit for Action, Tho’ some are very bare for clothes, I wish with all my heart our State wou’d make better provision for out Brigade, respecting Clothing & other necessaries than they do, if they had any Idea of the hardships we have & do undergo, they Certainly wou’d do more us, [sic] than they do, I assure you Sir we have had a very Severe Campaign of it, Since we came in this State,– our Men are in huts 16 by 18, Covered with Oak Shingles, and now are pretty Comfortable — since they have got to live in ‘em, we lay in Tents until the 20 instant; an instance of the kind hardly ever known in any Country whatever, but what ca’t brave Americans endure, Nobly fighting for the rights of their injured country. –

I Congratulate you on the arrival of 8 ships from France under Convoy of a 40 Gun Frigate at a port in Maryland, their Lading is uncertain but supposed to have necessaries for the Army. –

As you are acquainted with Captain Lee of Horse, I will mention Some thing that happened [to] him a few Nights past. On the 19 ins about day break, 200 of the enemies Horse surrounded his quarters, with the intent to take him by Surprise, — but Captain Lee’s vigilance baffled their designs by industriously posting his men in their Quarters, although he had not a sufficient number to allow one for each Window, he Obligated them disgracefully to retreat after Repeated & fruitless attempts to force their way into the House, leaving Two killed and four wounded, their Wounded they took off. –

We received no other damage than a Small patrole of Horse, Consisting of four fell unfortunately in their hands, as they were returning from their post, & Lieu. Lindsay Slightly wounded in the wrist. — The
Commander in Chief has returned Cap. Lee, his officers & Soldiers of his Troop, his warmest thanks in general orders for their good Conduct and Superior bravery. — Captain Lee had in House but a Corporal and 4 privates. –

Perhaps you will think I have forgot you, in not writing to you oftner than I do, I must confess I have been careless about writing, but I assure you Sir it’s owing to my not having time or Paper to write on, I
shou’d be ungrateful to the last Degree, if ever I forget you my best friend. — I wrote you immediately after the Action of Short Hills, and likewise after the Battle of Brandywine, in the first I mentioned the
Person at Morris-Town, which I think wou’d be agreeable in every respect. –

When I shall have the Pleasure of seeing you is uncertain — if you have a Safe opportunity send me warm[est] breeches & Stockings [take] great care of the Linen as that article is very dear and hard to be purchased,  Colonels Ogden and Martin, with a number of other inferior officers of this Brigade have Resigned. –

I Shall be very fond of hearing from you when an opportunity offers, my best respects to Col. Jn. Holm Cap. Sayre, Jenny, Geo[rge] and your family & remain D. Col. your assured friend to serve you if in me lay. –