DOCUMENTARY | Documentary tells the story of one of the least-known Founding Fathers
How many signers of the Declaration of Independence can you name? John Hancock … Ben Franklin … Button Gwinnett—
I’m done. Well, after watching the new hour-long documentary Benjamin Rush: The American Revolution’s Indispensable Doctor, I’m up to four of the 56 signers, and I won’t soon forget this Philadelphia physician. The documentary’s writer and host, Joseph Loconte, calls Rush “the most important Founding Father that most Americans have never heard of.” Rush was also the “father of American psychiatry,” an ardent abolitionist, and a devout Christian.
Because Rush lived a significant portion of his life in Philadelphia, Loconte tells Rush’s story through on-camera visits to museums and historical sites around the City of Brotherly Love. Loconte also treks through Boston and sips beverages in the two cities’ bars and coffee shops near locations where Rush and other revolutionaries charted America’s independence from Britain. Loconte talks fast, keeps interviews brief, and covers a lot of history in 60 minutes.
Some highlights from this daring doctor’s life: Rush was a “pioneer in the humane treatment of the mentally ill” who hypothesized that depression wasn’t only a mental condition but could have physical and hereditary causes. He introduced basic hygiene techniques to the Continental Army, remained in Philadelphia during a devastating yellow fever outbreak to care for the sick instead of fleeing the city, and trained 3,000 other physicians during his career.
Rush asserted that all people should enjoy the liberties the colonies would be fighting for. Three years before he signed the Declaration of Independence, Rush wrote that “the plant of liberty cannot thrive long in the neighborhood of slavery.” Rush even gave the title Common Sense to Thomas Paine’s famous pamphlet, in which Paine opined, “The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind.” Many revolutionary leaders didn’t share Rush’s (or Paine’s) commitment to ending slavery, however, and the documentary notes that many of the Constitution’s framers avoided the topic of slavery during debates inside the new United States Congress (of which Rush was not a member).
The film left me with two distinct impressions, one about Rush and the other about the country he helped forge. It’s clear Rush’s regard for the equality of all people was an outworking of his deep Christian faith. (“Nothing but His blood will wash away my sin,” Rush wrote in his journal.) Politicians, on the other hand, regularly gerrymander the biological boundaries of people groups to empower their own and exclude others.
Secondly, the nascent, fragile union of American states might have splintered in the five years between the end of the Revolutionary War and the final ratification of the Constitution if the abolition of slavery had been an article in the Constitution. As University of Pennsylvania chaplain Charles Howard says in the film, “Sometimes the right political move is the wrong moral move.” Politics and morality still clash on the front lines of America’s cultural battlefields today.
Bob Brown is a movie reviewer for WORLD. He is a World Journalism Institute graduate and works as a math professor. Bob resides with his wife, Lisa, and five kids in Bel Air, Md.
