Zooming Out on 1776: The Stories the Freedom Truck Leaves Out

By Jesse Hagopian Across the country, the federal government is sponsoring PragerU’s giant red-white-and-blue “Freedom Trucks” that are pulling into school parking lots carrying a polished story about the American Revolution — one carefully designed to celebrate freedom while burying the people excluded from it. They promise young people a journey through America’s founding, but the road they travel has been paved to steer them away from slavery, conquest, and the people who paid the highest price for the nation’s limited definition of freedom. In one PragerU video on the American Revolution, they tell students that the founders were “inspired by a conviction that the world could truly be a better place… that the long history of brutal kings and tyrants could come to an end, and that men and women could be free to pursue life as God intended.” They acknowledge the founders were imperfect, but insist that, when we “zoom out, they were pushing the world toward freedom.” But the problem is not that they zoom out — it’s that they don’t zoom out far enough. Because when you widen the frame to include Black people, Indigenous nations, and women, a very different story comes into view. In the video, slavery is never even mentioned — it is reduced to a vague reference to “imperfect men.” Nowhere in the entire video is there a discussion of the millions of people held in bondage, no recognition of the dispossession of Native nations, no acknowledgment that most people were excluded from the very freedom being celebrated. So what PragerU calls “zooming out” is really narrowing the lens — focusing only on those who benefited from the Revolution, while leaving everyone else out of the picture. Because when only the powerful are allowed into the story, history stops being an exploration of truth and becomes a celebration of power. But there is a way that zooming in can be useful, too. For example, let’s zoom in on the founding documents. When we look closely, we can see that these documents were written in ways that protected oppression. The Constitution didn’t just tolerate slavery — it strengthened it, counting enslaved people as three-fifths of a person to increase the political power of slaveholding states, while also requiring that people who escaped bondage be returned to those who claimed ownership of them. The founding documents also excluded most people from political participation. Voting and political power were largely reserved for white men with property. Women, Indigenous people, and Black people were shut out of the system entirely. At the same time, the founding helped expand settler colonialism and the dispossession of Indigenous nations. Independence removed British limits on westward expansion, opening the door to the seizure of Indigenous land. Even the Declaration of Independence itself referred to Native peoples as “merciless Indian savages,” revealing how the language of liberty was tied to a justification for conquest. And ultimately, these documents worked to secure the power of wealthy white men. The political system that emerged concentrated authority in the hands of elites, while presenting itself as a government of the people. And here’s what’s so important: the MAGA narrative often tells students that the founders were simply “men of their time” — as if no one back then could see what was wrong with slavery. But that’s not true. There were people living at that exact moment who forcefully argued that slavery was immoral and incompatible with freedom. In fact, the Zinn Education Project (coordinated by Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change) has a lesson called “The ‘Founding’ Documents We Don’t Learn About” that introduces students to those voices. One document students read is a 1791 letter by Benjamin Banneker to Thomas Jefferson, reminding him that the same man who declared that “all men are created equal” was also “detaining by fraud and violence so numerous a part of my brethren under groaning captivity and cruel oppression.” Banneker forced Jefferson to confront the hypocrisy of condemning British tyranny while enslaving human beings. In this lesson, students meet white people who spoke out against the hypocrisy of the elite. Samuel Hopkins, 1787 statement declared that Americans had said they would “rather… die than be slaves,” and yet many continued to “hold hundreds of thousands of their fellow men in abject slavery.” And at the Constitutional ratifying convention, Samuel Thompson went even further, criticizing George Washington for enslaving people who had “as good a right to be free as he has.” I have always taught my students about Thomas Paine, whose pamphlet Common Sense helped inspire the uprising against the British Crown. But Paine also condemned slavery. In 1775, wrote an essay where he asked how colonists could demand freedom for themselves while holding “so many hundred thousands in slavery.” The colonial elites were angered by Paine’s forceful denunciation of slavery and the hypocrisy of the American revolutionaries who used flowery language to speak about freedom while enslaving people. So when people say we can’t judge the founders by modern ideas about slavery, I assume then, would it be acceptable to judge them by one of the intellectual leaders of their own time. Students have a right to learn about abolitionists like John Brown, the Grimkie sisters, or the interracial Union Leagues during Reconstruction. The problem was never that no one knew better. The problem was that too many chose wealth and power over true freedom. The problem was never a lack of awareness; It was a lack of will. So when we critique the traditional narrative of 1776, we’re not rejecting the idea of freedom — we’re asking: freedom for whom? We have to ask the question: Is freedom the freedom to own other people, or is it the freedom to be free? And that question matters far beyond how we teach the past. The stories we tell young people about the American Revolution shape the kind of future they believe is possible. If students are taught that freedom was something fully achieved by heroic founders long ago, then democracy becomes something to celebrate passively rather than something ordinary people must continually struggle to achieve. If students learn the fuller history — that freedom in this country has always been contested, incomplete, and pushed forward by abolitionists, labor organizers, Indigenous resistance, women fighting for equality, and generations of ordinary people demanding that the nation live up to its promises — then they can begin to see themselves as participants in that unfinished struggle. The future we should want is not one built on mythmaking or enforced patriotism. We need an education that prepares young people to think critically, confront injustice, and imagine forms of freedom that include everyone. We should want students who are capable of asking difficult questions about power, inequality, and struggles for justice. That is the real promise of teaching honest history. Learning this history is not about making students “feel bad” about the past — on the contrary, it inspires them to learn about the many people who never accepted injustice and who refused to treat oppression as inevitable. When students learn about those struggles, they inherit not only the pain of the past, but also its courage, imagination, and possibility. They begin to understand that freedom has never been a gift handed down by powerful men, but something ordinary people have always had to fight to create. Authoritarians fear honest history for the same reason abolitionists, labor organizers, and freedom fighters embrace it: because people who understand the past are harder to rule through lies. Jesse Hagopian is the Zinn Education Project campaign director, associate editor for Rethinking Schools, and author of many books, including Teach Truth: The Struggle for Antiracist Education. Twitter Google plus LinkedIn