reminder that i’ve got a redbubble store now for the mentally strange 😏👍

Historical Hour With Hilary: 1x10

It’s been a couple weeks, so you can get up to speed here. But what we definitely want to do is head to September 25, 1780, and the most famous traitor in American history (justified or otherwise) for a whole lotta revelations about the Capture of Benedict Arnold...

It’s no secret that this is my favorite episode, and perhaps it’s then no surprise that the history that surrounds it is so fascinating (and terrifying): a mix of eighteenth-century parlor intrigue, Revolutionary War spy rings, plotted betrayals, secret societies, and much, much more, including some major connections to the present day. But it’s also the episode where we discover, alas, that the Time Team (or at least the screenwriters) Did Not Think This Through, and really should have figured this out at least eight episodes ago. I love that Rittenhouse is based on real history, and especially one guy, but, well. When it’s taken your heroes ten episodes to realize something that could have been solved in five minutes with a quick Google search, that, my friends, is called a plot hole. I will overlook it for the sake of things, but yes.

First things first: Benedict Arnold, the second man in Western history (after Judas Iscariot) whose name has become synonymous with “traitor.” (And zomgz, he betrayed America that’s really bad. /clutches pearls/). As Lucy points out in the episode, however, his reasons for doing so were complicated. The Battles of Saratoga in 1777 are cited in every single account of the Revolution as the turning point to victory for the Americans, and they were only won because of the nearly single-handed, overwhelmingly heroic efforts of Arnold. A monument to his wounded leg exists on the battlefield, and as we also see in the episode, it never fully healed. Congress didn’t recognize Arnold’s efforts, he was passed over for promotion, and he disapproved of the proposed alliance with the French. He had spent a great deal of money on the cause already and was hard up for funds, and his young second wife, Margaret “Peggy” Shippen Arnold, was a devoted Tory (and was almost certainly involved in helping him come up with the treason plan). It was on 23 September 1780 when the British spy with whom Arnold had been corresponding, Major John Andre, was caught and the plot to turn West Point over to the British was revealed, forcing Arnold to flee. On 25 September, he wrote to Washington pleading for mercy for Peggy, but he had of course made a grave mistake in jumping ship for the losing side, and the victorious Americans made sure to thoroughly revile him down the years. (Arnold’s family papers are now in Harvard University special collections.)

The technique that the Time Team uses to chase Arnold into enemy territory (pretending to be defectors as well) was the actual one used by John Champe, the man sent after Arnold on the orders of George Washington and his close associate, Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee, a talented cavalry officer from a prominent Virginia family. In one of the most monumental cases of irony in hindsight in history, Henry Lee is probably more familiar as the father of... Robert E. Lee. Yep. That Robert E. Lee. Let’s just let this sink in for a second. Robert E. Lee’s father helped George Washington try to catch a talented, high-profile general who had traitorously turned against his country during a war. (Henry Lee also gave the famous eulogy of Washington at his funeral in 1799.)

Awkward.

The Culper Ring of spies actually did play some part in the attempted apprehension of Arnold, as well as serving as Washington’s sophisticated intelligence network throughout the war, using code names, dead drops, encrypted messages, and other familiar tools of espionage to pass information through their associates in Long Island. So yes, they had a spy on the inside, that’s right... Hercules Mulligan! (Also: Mulligan’s slave, Cato, was one of the Culper Ring’s trusted agents as well, and no, he was not a free man. Just in case you forget that, you know, the Founding Fathers were slaveholders. Mulligan did, however, help found the New York Manumission Society with Alexander Hamilton and John Jay in 1785, so... he’s got that going for him?)

And now, therefore, we reach the Big Problem with this episode: David Rittenhouse (and not that he’s, at least in Timeless-verse, a horrible creeper). Because frankly, I gotta call serious, serious BS on a) Lucy not knowing about this guy to start with, and b) everyone being aware that “Rittenhouse” was a big part of whatever’s happening, but apparently not bothering to do so much as five minutes of a Google search. Because that would have answered their question right away, they could have headed to the eighteenth century, gotten this done much more efficiently, and... yes. I’m judging.

As noted in that link above, David Rittenhouse was a famous astronomer, clockmaker, inventor, philosopher, professor at the University of Pennsylvania (there is the David Rittenhouse Laboratory on campus, and the popular Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia) and was widely admired by Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and others. He made a beautiful orrery (model of the universe) that’s still on display at UPenn. You can join the Rittenhouse Astronomical Society, and there’s a crater named Rittenhouse on the moon. He clearly exists in the Timeless verse, in his proper historical moment, so what, Lucy, who knows everything about even obscure American historical events, just... doesn’t know about this guy at all? Even if we allow that fictional Rittenhouse may have tried to suppress records about itself post-1780, David had already given a lecture to the American Philosophical Society on February 24, 1775 that so impressed them that copies were ordered printed out and distributed to the delegates of the Constitutional Convention. In it, Rittenhouse muses on the possibility of extraordinary achievements in the name of mankind, and also (unlike his slave-owning fictional counterpart) decries slavery, in the context of imagining the possibility of contact with aliens from other planets:

Our religion teaches us what philosophy could not have taught, and we ought to admire with reverence the great things it has pleased divine Providence to perform, beyond the ordinary course of nature [such as time travel, one wonders?] for man, who is undoubtedly the most noble inhabitant of this globe. [...] Happy people! and perhaps more happy still, that all communication with us is denied. We have neither corrupted you with our vices, nor injured you by violence. None of your sons and daughters, degraded from their native dignity, have been doomed to endless slavery by us in America, merely because their bodies may be disposed to reflect or absorb the rays of light, in a way different from ours. (pp. 565-66).

Hmm. It’s hard to escape the feeling that poor ol’ Dave Rittenhouse has gotten a bit of the shaft in Timeless’ version of him (though that lecture is definitely creepy in the eighteenth-century-idealism way if you read it through). Rittenhouse seems considerably based on the Illuminati (yes, they’re real too), a secret society founded in Bavaria in 1778, and which was considered to really get going in 1780, the way Rittenhouse is in Timeless canon. It held to the same project of wanting its members to benevolently exercise power from the shadows for the betterment of all humankind (and thus their “illumination” or enlightenment). It was quickly suppressed, and almost immediately accused of plotting to overthrow various governments, as the eighteenth-century version of Alex Jones would like to tell you in his 1798 book, Proofs of a conspiracy against all the religions and gouvernments of Europe, carried on in the secret meetings of Free Masons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies. They were also blamed for inciting the French Revolution, in the 1801 On the Influence Attributed to Philosophers, Free-masons, and to the Illuminati, on the Revolution of France.

Conspiracy theories! Ah, those go way back. So, Rittenhouse isn’t real, right? Just a fictional version of a small group of powerful and dangerous crazy guys who control America today, and that’s not actually...

Oh, shit.

The “Fellowship” or “the Family,” the subject of an absolutely terrifying 2008 book by award-winning journalist and Dartmouth professor Jeff Sharlet, is the most powerful right-wing (and I mean hard right wing) conservative Christian political lobby group in Washington. They are just like Rittenhouse, but you know, real: they take a vow of secrecy, no public information is available from them, they count a huge number of American senators/congressmen, corporate executives, government officials, and international politicians among their ranks, they feel they are above the law, and they’ve been responsible for funding dictators and bloody regimes throughout the world. Remember Uganda’s heinous “Kill The Gays” bill? Yeah, that was them. The Family is described as “anti-labor, anti-gay, and pro-life. It is also anti-communist, but not necessarily a firm believer in democracy. Rather, it favors a totalitarianism for Christ, a sort of Christian theocracy. In foreign policy, it promotes a “soft” U.S. expansionism.”

The Los Angeles Times attempted to examine their membership and other document records (before the archives were sealed) and corroborated many of the claims in Sharlet’s book (and the Harper’s article he released before it). That bastion of radical left-wing journalism, Newsweek, wrote in September 2009:

The Fellowship, as this group is called, has the slimmest scrap of a Web site. Nothing about its organizational structure is visible to the public: not its board of directors, nor its executive team, nor its mission statement, nor its 200 subsidiary ministries, nor its national or global membership. (For, as its surrogates tell me, there are no "members.") [...] The Fellowship is 75 years old. It organizes the National Prayer Breakfast, an annual event attended by 3,000 people from all over the world who pay hundreds of dollars per ticket to pray, ecumenically, with the president himself. Some of the world's most powerful people are included in its circles—as regulars or merely occasional participants. It flies business and political leaders abroad to meet with other "friends"— heads of state and local despots—in the name of Jesus. But it is in the midst of a PR crisis: Sharlet has leveled certain substantive charges that demand answers.

Defenders of the “Family” insist it’s a completely innocuous Christian advocacy group, certainly not like those crazies Focus on the Family or Christian Coalition, that promotes cross-party unity and prayer, and that this is all a paranoid left-wing view of their activities. Having read Sharlet’s book, I can concede there are times when he comes off pretty alarmist. But on the whole, his research is thorough, his conclusions are terrifying, and when the organization itself admits that’s pretty much what it does (it denied that it existed until 2009, which isn’t suspicious at all for your nice little Capitol Hill prayer group), and there’s bupkis that we can do about it, since it’s still going on right now... I mean?

Sleep tight, kiddies!

Next week: We head to the World’s Fair 1893, and the Devil in the White City.