Gavin Newsom

And so we have a much more interesting, it's a very enormous variety of people.

People in my state of New Hampshire, where I've lived for the last 47 years, and Georgia feel like they're from different countries.

They're like...

The idea that someone like Washington or Thomas Paine or Thomas Jefferson or others that we don't know that much about.

Mercy Otis Warren is the first historian of the American Revolution, a friend of Abigail Adams.

It's nice when you have Meryl Streep reading off camera and bringing Mercy Otis Warren alive.

But they're talking about how it might be that we could not be an individual thing, but a one thing.

And that it's the first idea that Washington's really great as he's trying to inspire men to fight in the dead of night.

And often they're teenagers, children.

It's not all the militia men.

They're going back to plant their crops or to reap their crops.

And what happens is the Continental Army

becomes filled with narrative wells and teenagers and recent immigrants.

And so democracy becomes not the intention of the revolution.

It becomes a byproduct because all of a sudden you can't just win against the greatest power on earth without foreign help, the French.

but you also can't win unless you say we're going to give you something for the sacrifices that you've made and so what happens is that you emerge with a kind of fledgling democracy out of what was going to be a republic a kind of aristocracy the the right would say the elites who control everything but those elites are the guys that we're supposed to all agree that we like are

are George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin and Patrick Henry and James Mason and James Monroe and all of the so-called founding fathers.

And they are.

They're a remarkable group of people.

But you can't tell a complete story without the balls and strikes and everybody else who gets to come to bat.