Politics & Power Quote by David McCullough

McCullough slips a contrarian hook into what sounds like a routine project description: 1776, the year Americans are trained to treat as a birth certificate, becomes "the nadir". The move is quintessential McCullough - not iconoclastic for sport, but revisionist in the older, healthier sense: returning drama and contingency to a story embalmed by ceremony. By framing the Revolution through its worst moment, he signals an intent to puncture the myth that nations are founded by inevitability or moral clarity. They are, more often, founded by attrition, error, exhaustion, and luck.

The subtext is methodological. He is telling you where meaning lives: not in declarations but in logistics; not in marble Washington but in Washington under pressure - scrambling, retreating, managing a barely coherent army. "Washington and the army and the war" is a deliberate narrowing of lens. It rejects the comfortable abstraction of "the Founders" and replaces it with bodies, weather, supply lines, morale. McCullough's patriotism, when it shows up, is the unromantic kind: he treats survival as the true miracle.

Context matters, too. Coming late in his career, after biographies that made national history feel like narrative television, this framing reads like a corrective to a culture that uses 1776 as a slogan. Calling it the country's low point is an argument against triumphalist nostalgia: the nation begins not as a finished idea but as a near-failure. That tension is exactly what makes the story durable - and politically combustible.