Saturday Class - The Culture That Shaped The Fight for Independence - April 11, 2026

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The Founding Fathers didn’t just fight a revolution — they were shaped by a cultural revolution that most Americans have never heard of.

Americans revere the Founding Fathers — but how many know the cultural tradition that forged them?

In this week’s Saturday Class, Chuck Park traces the extraordinary network of artists, composers, playwrights, and satirists — stretching from London to Philadelphia — who created the intellectual weapons that made American independence possible.

The fight that moved to America

In 1688, William of Orange seized England on behalf of the Anglo-Dutch-Venetian oligarchy. The resistance — led by Gottfried Leibniz and his allies Jonathan Swift, Dr. Arbuthnot, John Gay, and Alexander Pope — sparked one of the greatest periods of creative thought since the Renaissance.

When Queen Anne died in 1714 and the battle for Britain was lost, the focus shifted to America as the last bastion of republican hope.

The cultural arsenal

Chuck walks through the weapons these republicans deployed:

• Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) — a devastating satire of the British Empire’s false axioms, ridiculing Newton, Aristotle, and colonial looting while affirming that human beings are creatures of reason, not beasts.
• John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera — lampooned the corrupt Walpole ministry and became the longest-running production in London history.
• Handel’s music — a graduate of Leibniz’s University of Halle, Handel composed for Queen Anne and Queen Caroline (who studied directly under Leibniz). His music, alongside Bach’s, was carried to America by the Moravians in Pennsylvania.
• Franklin’s glass harmonica — invented in 1761 after Franklin spent weeks studying Moravian music in Bethlehem. Mozart and Beethoven later composed original works for it.

Benjamin West’s revolution in art

Benjamin West — deployed to London by Franklin’s circle — shattered the oligarchical rule that historical scenes had to be painted in Roman garb. His Death of General Wolfe (1770) portrayed real Americans in their own setting. It was a revolution.

West’s influence shaped three generations of American painters and innovators:

• Charles Willson Peale — painted Washington, founded America’s first public museum, and excavated the first mastodon discovered in America
• John Trumbull — his paintings of the Declaration of Independence and the Surrender of Cornwallis still adorn the Capitol rotunda
• Robert Fulton — painter turned inventor of the steamboat
• Samuel Morse — painter who gave us the telegraph and Morse code

From a hot air balloon to the Moon

Chuck closes with a striking connection: 243 years ago, Ben Franklin witnessed the first hot air balloon flight in Paris — humanity’s first step off the earth. When asked what good it was, Franklin replied:

“What good is a newborn baby?”

That same Promethean spirit drove yesterday’s Artemis mission around the Moon. Unless we recover the culture that made our founders who they were, we cannot complete the revolution they began.

Watch the class and discover the cultural tradition that armed the American Revolution.

—Promethean Action Editorial Staff

PS: The 2026 midterms will determine whether President Trump’s agenda survives and accelerates — or gets reversed and crushed.

Our Midterm Bootcamp is a semi-monthly training series equipping activists, candidates, and grassroots leaders with the ideas and messaging to win.

Next session: Friday, April 17 at 8 PM EST. Sign up and check your email for the Zoom link.