As the long Fourth of July weekend evaporates and some vanishing number of Americans pause to consider the history on which it stands, there can’t be a better destination for such reflections than the freshest book from Bellevue native Tom McMillan. “The Year That Made America” is a revelatory examination of the precarious and deathly hazardous political pathways leading to the Declaration of Independence, which, it happens, first appeared in its full glory in a Philadelphia newspaper 249 years ago today, July 6, 1776. McMillan is already five books deep in his latest career, but his own history is of a rich and authentic American ethos as well, unless listening to Tennessee Ernie Ford’s civil war songs in the backseat on childhood vacation trips that always included historical sights somehow falls outside the definition. An obsessionWhen I first met Tom, he was a hyper-skilled Pittsburgh sports writer who’d soon enough transform into a Penguins executive for the next generation, and just for the record, I hope he knows that I don’t consider Hyper-Skilled Sportswriter-turned-Penguins Executive-turned-Author to be in the running for Media Label of the Year. (“Polish Hill Sex Trafficker” is the leader in the clubhouse). The origin story for what McMillan calls his “final stage obsession” begins in a Fox Chapel movie theater in 1993, where Jeff Daniels and Martin Sheen among others worked their way through 4½ hours of “Gettysburg.” “I went on a Tuesday night; I went by myself — there aren’t a lot of people you can say, ‘Hey you wanna go see a 4½ movie of the Civil War?’” he remembered this week. “So I went there that Tuesday night; I drove to Gettysburg that Friday, and I’ve had the illness ever since.” McMillan would come to write two books on the Civil War, another, “Our Flag Was Still There,” on the story of the flag at Fort McHenry, and one on 9/11, “Flight 93.” But another part of the origin piece is about escape, of course, because as he’s right to explain, “For most people who are sports fans, sports is their escape from real life, and I think a lot of people who are sports fans don’t understand that when you work in sports, you need an escape from it. And history was my sports.” A certain love of knowledge has always been evident in the author, with an invisible bank of it perpetually at the ready. McMillan tends to talk in bursts. When he makes a point, you can feel that there are three or four more that are equally compelling that just didn’t make it out of his mouth. Not everyone was a patriotWhat he’s done here with “The Year That Made America,” is adapt his accessible 21st century writing style to monumental centuries-old events. Describing a young Thomas Jefferson writing in the second-floor front parlor of a Philadelphia house in June of 1776, he writes, “The work included three draft versions of a constitution for Virginia, various committee reports, private letters home, official correspondence, and, for a time in the second full week of the month, the Declaration of Independence.” The Declaration was approved on July 2, the day John Adams assumed would become our national holiday, but wasn’t printed until the 4th, the date that appears at the top of the document (hence the Fourth of July), got its first full display on the 6th, as noted, and wasn’t read in public until the 8th in Philadelphia, the 18th in Boston, and not until August in some cities in the South. McMillan’s research brought a flood of surprises on the writing process, the astoundingly successful editing process (a quarter of it was cut), but perhaps none so enduring as how close the colonies came to backing off on the whole matter, and how little was immediately known externally about what they’d just done. “This is about the political struggle of the first seven, eight months of 1776 and how close it came to not happening when it did,” he said the other day. “There wasn’t this groundswell of patriotism by everyone — on the night of July 1 there were still four colonies that weren’t going to vote for independence, it was that close in timing, just fascinating political battles in the moment.” No coverageThey were about to affix their names to treason against the King of England, which was notably more hazardous than lighting firecrackers. The colonies voted 12–0 for independence, with New York abstaining. Out in the street, Philly went about its business. “Even the newspapers in Philadelphia weren’t covering the Continental Congress,” McMillan said. “They were purposely trying to be secretive; they were committing treason. The single reference to the vote on independence on July 2 was that it was ‘agreed to.’ The Philadelphia Evening Post squeezed one line onto the fourth and final page of its July 2 evening edition with no headline: Today the Continental Congress declared the colonies free.”
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