Ed. Note. In celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the National Endowment for the Humanities, over the next year, we will be publishing articles on different aspects of the Endowment and its contributions lo history and the humanities.
Two years ago, the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities and Public Policy, a state program of the National Endowment for the Humanities, decided to commission a film on Shays’ Rebellion. This was an unusual move for the Massachusetts Foundation, which customarily receives proposals for various humanities projects but never before had defined the subject first and then invited interested parties to compete for the grant.
An award of $50,000 was eventually made by the MFHPP to Randall Conrad and Christine Dall of Calliope Film Resources of Cambridge. Additional funding for the project was then obtained from other sources, including several of the other humanities councils in New England. The final product of all of these efforts will be unveiled this month as A Little Rebellion Now and Then, a thirty-minute docudrama on Shays’ Rebellion, has its premiere in Springfield. Congressman Silvio Conte and historian James MacGregor Burns will be on hand to offer comment for the occasion.
The Foundation’s motives for commissioning a film on Shays’ Rebellion were both obvious and shrewd. The members of the MFHPP board wanted to focus attention on the role of their own state during the bicentennial celebration of the US Constitution. But Shays’ Rebellion also had special appeal, apart from its location. Unlike the framers of the Constitution, who almost of necessity have become national icons, Daniel Shays and the backcountry farmers of western New England remain obscure figures. After all, their uprising against the merchants and lawmakers of Boston failed miserably, while the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia succeeded brilliantly. But the very brilliance of the framers’ achievement makes the bicentennial anniversary of the Constitution more a cause for celebration than understanding. Shays’ Rebellion, on the other hand, forces a reconsideration of the controversies that the post-revolutionary generation felt so deeply and thereby imposes a rough, unlacquered finish to an era otherwise predisposed to shine.
As the film makes clear, the indebted farmers of western Massachusetts thought they were protecting their property from unjustified seizure by eastern merchants and politicians; they compared their rebellion in 1787 to the rebellion against unjust taxation by the British Parliament in 1776. The lawyers and creditors of Boston thought they were putting down a mob of insurgents who posed a serious threat to economic stability and social order. One group saw itself as carrying forward the radical spirit of the American Revolution. The other saw itself as securing the gains of the Revolution and the moderate Whig values on which they believed the new nation had been founded. Shays’ Rebellion, then, was more than a local conflict between western and eastern Massachusetts. It was a clash between classes and cultures, between different understandings of the American Revolution, between competing definitions of property, legality, and authority.
From the very beginning, the members of the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities believed that the debate over these issues and the dialogue between these conflicting values constituted the essential tension that Shays’ Rebellion embodied and the film about it had to recapture. Ultimately, A Little Rebellion Now and Then does not seek to resolve the debate, but rather to recover its vitality and allow viewers to see some of their most cherished convictions represented on both sides of the argument.
The terms of the grant from the Massachusetts Foundation required that scholarly consultants be deeply involved in the project from the drafting of the script to the editing of the film. James Henretta, formerly head of the New England Studies Program at Boston University and now at the University of Maryland, provided his perspective on the social and economic history of the period. Marion Starkey, a distinguished popular historian, offered her extensive knowledge of local history. David Szatmary, author of the most recent scholarly book on Shays’ Rebellion, made a major interpretive contribution (i.e., the rebellion as a clash between traditional and modern cultures). Viewers of the film must be the final judges of this project’s effectiveness in recreating a crucial moment in American history, but the collaboration of filmmakers, professional historians, and the state humanities council in a common effort to make a sophisticated historical interpretation accessible to the general public seems a model of its kind.
Residents of Massachusetts interested in viewing A Little Rebellion Now and Then should contact their state humanities council at 1 Woodbridge Street, South Hadley. Prospective viewers in other localities should address their inquiries to: Calliope Film Re sources, Inc., 35 Granite Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139-4738.
Joseph Ellis is Professor of History' and Dean of the Faculty at Mount Holyoke College, and a former board member of the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities and Public Policy.
