I think many Americans assume that
autocratic states rest exclusively on fear, that subjects of a
repressive dictator or oligarchy obey only because they and their
families will otherwise suffer terrible punishment. Those familiar
with the history of monarchies recognize, however, that dictatorships
(hereditary or otherwise) also rest on a kind of popular magical
thinking, a widespread belief that supreme rulers have powers
superior to those of mere mortals. Only a few centuries have passed
since Britons believed their sovereign's touch could cure scrofula;
only a few decades since Japan was ruled by an actual deity; and only
a few years since North Koreans paid their final tribute to Dear
Leader Kim Jong Il, whose sacred birth was attended by supernatural
omens.
In Domination and the Arts of
Resistance (1992), James Scott observes that this tendency to ascribe
super-human traits or virtues to monarchs certainly applied to
imperial Russia. He quotes Lenin's contempt for Russian peasants'
superstitious monarchism, their tendency “naively and blindly to
believe in the Tsar-batiushka [Deliverer]” and petition him for
redress (p. 97). Accompanying their faith in the Tsar-Deliverer,
however, was the peasantry's complementary belief that any evils done
in the tsar's name were actually the work of corrupt officials.
Peasants could resist those officials while retaining their loyalty
to the tsar, confident that “if the tsar only knew of the crimes
his faithless agents committed in his name, he would punish them and
rectify matters.” The reactionary worship of a
semi-divine monarch could lead to insurrectionary, even revolutionary
action.
A similar dynamic drove the decade
of colonial uprisings preceding the War for American Independence.
Opponents of the Stamp Act, the Townshend Acts, the military
occupation of Boston, the Tea Act, and the Coercive Acts assumed (or
persuaded themselves) that these impositions came not from the king
but from a corrupt Parliament. His Majesty was good and patriotic,
but in the colonies, away from his watchful eye, his evil ministers
tried to plant their boots on freeborn English colonists' backs. Thus
Patrick Henry, denouncing the Stamp Act, simultaneously pledged to
defend George III to his dying breath. Sons of Liberty settling in
Pennsylvania's Wyoming Valley gave their new townships such patriotic
names as Hanover (after Britain's ruling dynasty) and Kingston. New
Yorkers erected an equestrian statue of the king in 1771, well into
the imperial crisis. As late as 1775, the American rebels referred to
the British forces fighting them in Boston as “the ministerial
army,” not the king's army.
Brendan McConville pointed out (The
King's Three Faces, 2006) that American monarchism had not come over
in the Mayflower, bur rather had been built by colonial and imperial
elites. By putting royal images in their homes (on tea sets
and objets d'art), celebrating royal birthdays, and burning the
king's enemies in effigy on Pope's Day, the leaders of colonial
society imbued their followers with affection for a distant and artificial* British monarchy. The colonists, however, viewed
the king much as Russian peasants viewed the tsar: a benevolent
father-figure who would right the wrongs perpetrated by aristocrats
and officials. Rebellious slaves, for instance, invoked the king's
aid against their masters, and rebellious white colonists considered
their resistance to tax collectors and soldiers entirely consistent
with loyalty to the king.
The big change, as Pauline Maier reported (American Scripture, 1997), came in early 1776, when colonial newspapers reported that George III had declared the
colonies in rebellion and withdrawn his royal protection. The king
had now publicly proclaimed himself the colonists' enemy. Common
Sense, published at the same time, made it safe to discuss the
superstitious absurdities that underlay devotion to a monarch,
and the Declaration of Independence pointedly indicted the king (not
the Parliament) for abuse of power. Later in the War of Independence,
the new loyalty oaths that the rebels forced upon former royalists
helped dissolve the bonds of duty that still bound many to the
Hanoverians. Yet the desire to follow or at least show affection for
a monarch persisted in the United States into at least the 1780s –
for I agree with Forrest McDonald's argument (Novus Ordo Seclorum,
1985) that residual king-worship explains Americans' celebration of
the French royal family and their naming of towns and counties for
the Bourbons. Arguably, it took the “party war” of the 1790s, in
which “monocrat” became a deadly epithet, and the rise of a
post-Revolutionary generation to bury American monarchism for good.
Until the early nineteenth century, monarchism was as American as
corn cakes or witchcraft trials.
So, Happy Independence Day, and God
Save the Queen.
* The Hanoverian dynasty was imposed on Britain by act of Parliament, and its first
two rulers didn't speak English particularly well
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