As we approach the 250th anniversary of our country in 2026, we need to inculcate a love of our country and of its history. A people cannot be motivated to fight for their nation in the present if they have no affection for its past. So, how do we do it?
There is no doubt that Americans need more education in our founding documents—the fine points of the Constitution and the soaring oratory of the Declaration of Independence—but what they need most are stories.
We humans live not by philosophy but by narrative. It is in stories that we see ourselves. We need more patriotic books, movies, and series by which we can see what was great. The success of the musical Hamilton shows it is still possible. But we should also turn to some of the classics. I suggest Esther Forbes’s 1943 historical novel for young adults, Johnny Tremain.
Forbes (1891-1967) was the daughter of a Massachusetts judge father and a scholar of the American Founding era mother. She became an editor at Houghton-Mifflin, as well as a historian and writer of historical novels.
In late 1941, she had just finished a straight biography, Paul Revere and the World He Lived In. It would win the Pulitzer Prize. She began Johnny Tremain on December 8 of that year—the day after Pearl Harbor. It would win the Newbery Medal for children’s literature, be used in school curriculums widely, and be made into a movie by Disney in 1957 (still available via several services).
Forbes’s motivation was, in part, to do some of the imaginative work she could not do in her straight historical work, and primarily to give young men who would be fighting for their country something to motivate them. In her Newbery Medal acceptance speech, she wrote that she “wanted to show that these earlier boys were conscious of what they were fighting for and that it was something which they believed was worth more than their own lives. And to show that many of the issues at stake in this war are the same as in the earlier one. We are still fighting for simple things ‘that a man may stand up.’”
What is the story about? Johnny Tremain, a fourteen-year-old orphan and silversmith’s apprentice in the Boston of 1773, is a young man with pride that verges on arrogance. Because of that arrogance, one of his fellow apprentices plays a prank on him that ends up burning Johnny’s hand and ending his burgeoning career.
With his injured hand, he has few options. Rab, a slightly older boy who works for a newspaper, takes Johnny under his wing, teaches him to work with horses, and introduces him to the Sons of Liberty, those colonists longing for independence who have been meeting secretly at the printer’s building. In addition to the fictional characters in the book, we meet Paul Revere, Samuel Adams, John Adams, John Hancock, Dr. Joseph Warren, and James Otis. Eventually, Johnny will have a part in the Boston Tea Party and Paul Revere’s midnight ride.
While Johnny had been apolitical, he comes to support the patriots, in large part motivated by the desire for ordinary people to have liberty. Forbes’s comments in her award speech cite the most famous line in the book: “that a man can stand up.” They come from a speech by Otis during one of the secret meetings. Asking the assembled what they are fighting for, Sam Adams responds that the rights of Americans with regard to taxation are the reason.
Otis demurs: “No, no. For something more important than the pocketbooks of our American citizens.”
To Rab’s intervention that it is “the rights of Englishmen—everywhere,” Otis says that this is not enough. The American Revolution is “For men and women and children all over the world.” Otis concludes his long speech by declaring: “We give all we have, lives, property, safety, skills… we fight, we die, for a simple thing. Only that a many may stand up.”
One can see how Forbes was connecting the understanding of the Founding with the goals of Americans at war with Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. While some on the right (for a variety of reasons) have grown skeptical or even tired of some of the universalist language of the Revolutionary era, it is historically accurate to depict our country as motivated by a desire to be a city on a hill. And it is certainly right (no matter what one’s philosophical position on “natural rights” is) to see the desire for the freedom to live one’s life according to one’s conscience and have a say in one’s rulers.
Forbes’s book has been criticized by some figures for being simplistic. But what is powerful about it is that it is not. Certainly not a “neutral” book, Johnny Tremain neither reduces all life to politics nor paints characters in black and white. Instead, it gives us a sense of a healthy patriotism that also acknowledges the humanity of the British soldiers, the Tory Americans, and those who were themselves undecided. Its telling of the motivations of the Founders is not one of men in white wigs simply agreeing. Sam Adams is a bit skeptical about James Otis’s oratory even if the author of the book is in favor of it.
Johnny Tremain is a complex story that rewards adult readers as well as younger readers. It does not simply mouth pieties and ignore hard realities. The general humanity of the British military and their forbearance are highlighted—there is no overegging the charge of “tyranny,” even on the part of James Otis. Johnny’s injury is gruesome. The deaths of a friend of Johnny on the American side as well as that of a British soldier trying to desert are difficult to read. Forbes confessed she made it hard in order to help prepare young men who would themselves see death in Europe or the Pacific. Nor does it stint on the difficulties of life for those who were not wealthy colonists but down-and-out in Boston.
Despite latter-day critics on the left who complain that the desire for a man to be able to stand up is not specifically applied to the black slaves in the story, Johnny Tremain treats those characters as dignified. One slave woman is a key informant to Johnny about the movements of the British. Another’s kindness bucks up the hero at a critical moment. I was thus not surprised when, while reading the book at a park, a young black man saw it and told me it was one of his favorite books. “I’ve read it five times!” he said.
Forbes’s story succeeds because it is a cracking story and painfully honest about the difficulties of the Revolutionary period and about growing up. While not jingoistic, it evokes a sane and balanced patriotism that our country desperately needs in its younger generation, too often taught that the Founding was simply about racism and other “isms.” It would be well if more adults and young people read it to catch the thrill of the beginnings of this country.
David P. Deavel teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. A past Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute, he is a Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative. Follow him on X (Twitter) @davidpdeavel.
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