With the musical Hamilton such a huge hit on Broadway, it’s worth revisiting another show about the nation’s move to independence—1776.
Debuting in 1969, the smash hit 1776 was the brainchild of a former high school history teacher, Sherman Edwards. He had enough success as a songwriter that he was able to quit his teaching job and spent six years working on the score of a musical about the writing of the Declaration of Independence and the debate leading up to the passage of a resolution on independence by the Second Continental Congress.
The show won three Tony Awards—best musical, best director, and best featured actor—and beat out the likes of Hair, Promises, Promises, and Zorba. It ran for more than 1,200 performances on Broadway and is still popular in regional and community theaters nationwide.
The musical still has a following, from musical theater nerds (such as yours truly) to social studies teachers who use a film version of the show when teaching American history. It’s often shown on July 4 on the Turner Classic Movies channel (along with Yankee Doodle Dandy starring James Cagney as George M. Cohan).
While any show based on a historical event is going to take some factual liberties, some of the lines of dialogue and songs from 1776 come from the pens of the Founding Fathers themselves.
According to the website Mental Floss, lines from one of John Adams’ songs, “Is Anybody There?” come from a letter that Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail, on July 3, 1776, after the Continental Congress had passed the independence resolution on July 2: “Through all the gloom, I can see the rays of ravishing light and glory.” Since the meetings of Congress were held in secret, there were no records kept of the debate on independence. So Edwards drew on original letters and other accounts of the proceedings.
Many of the original cast members from the Broadway show, including William Daniels as John Adams, Howard da Silva as Ben Franklin, Ken Howard as Thomas Jefferson, and Richard Holgate reprising his Tony-winning role as Richard Henry Lee of Virginia, also starred in the 1972 film version. These clips are from the film.
This is the opening number, in which John Adams argues for independence while his fellow members of Congress, languishing in the Philadelphia heat, tell him they’ve had enough of his complaints.
This is a small-screen version of a song in which John Adams tries to convince Thomas Jefferson to write the declaration. It’s only a small square, but it gets the idea across.
A running joke in the show is that Adams is “obnoxious and disliked.” Yet historical author David McCullough disputes that, contending that Adams was one of the most respected men in the Congress. After Adams’ single term as president, he wrote an autobiography that talked about the rancorous relationship with Jefferson: “That I had been so obnoxious for my early and constant Zeal in promoting” independence. Adams’ description of himself as “obnoxious, suspected, and unpopular” also comes from an 1822 letter.
Other fun facts about 1776: Da Silva, who played Franklin, had been blacklisted in Hollywood in the 1950s after an appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee. President Richard Nixon tried to get one song removed from the show, “Cool, Considerate Men,” which was about conservative Southerners resisting the idea of independence (they danced as they sang about moving “to the right, ever to the right”). The song was actually cut from the film version and was only restored years later in a director’s cut.
The most fun fact? William Daniels, the Adams portrayer, went on to play a high school teacher and principal on the teen sitcom Boy Meets World. The name of his school? John Adams High School.
Happy Fourth of July, and be glad that we have a document, however flawed, that brought this country into existence, hatched from “The Egg,” as sung by Adams, Franklin, and Jefferson.