Everyone at Princeton should be required to read British historian Andrew Roberts’ book The Last King of America.  It is a defense of George III demonstrating that all but two charges against him in the sacrosanct Declaration of Independence were totally false propaganda.  Our founding fathers were not above propaganda and slander.  King George, of all the Hannoverian kings of Britain, was a constitutionalist and a believer in limited monarchy.  The Americans were divided over him and only a minority bought the pro-independence propaganda.  

I always taught my own students, long before the appearance of this book, that George was not a tyrant and that the Declaration was a fraud.  In some places especially in New England some of the loyalists were allowed to continue after independence as good Americans.  In other places especially in the South the loyalists were harassed and driven out; they went to Canada, the Caribbean, and back to Britain — so much for American love of diversity.

In recent days I have become much less anglophilic, not becase of George III, but because I see that Britain has all the defects and irrationalities that we have in America.  There are British Trumps as well as out own Trump.  We like to claim a certain superiority, we got this from Britain actually; but in the last analysis all nations are more similar than dissimilar, more reprehensible in their politics than admirable.  We are all Poles, and Hungarians, and Russians, not better, no worse.

Norman Ravitch *62
Savannah, Ga.