Saw this a long time ago in grade school and remembered it being fairly patriotic (at least as a kid in the 80s could think about it). Found a copy at a used book store and watched this last night (it's available on YouTube for free supposedly but won't show on my Brave browser).

Basically it's a musical about the events of the second continental congress debating about declaring independence from Britain and ultimately culminating with the signing of the declaration.

As a whole, the movie is still pretty decent if not overly long at nearly 3 hours (the restored song doesn't help) and I think does a good job at trying to ground the first continental congress to show what kind of wheeling and dealing probably went on.

While watching it, I did a little web searching on some of the actors of the film and the film itself which was supposedly a "restored" version. Restored version?!

What I hadn't realized was that there a massive and, mostly hidden, controversy about the film at the time.

This was based on the stage play of the same name that came out in the late 60s and while re-watching the film I realized that this was actually a film of its time, replete with songs about the dead soldiers giving their lives for the rich (aka Vietnam War themes), and an all too long and histrionic song about excluding the slaves from the Declaration of Independence to get buy in from the southern colonies. While the latter is a historical fact, the song is riddled with contemporary themes, specifically calling out "black" slavery (as if there wasn't any white slavery happening at the time) and recasting the argument in contemporary civil rights terms that were common in the late 60s.

But the clencher is a song in the play called "Cool, Cool, Considerate Men" - This is a song led by the southern colonies (the slave holding ones, naturally) who sing about "moving to the right, never to the left" to insure that the "property holders" stay rich and powerful. Nevermind the fact that political lines of "right and left" weren't established at the time, the playwrights put into the play a song about the conservatives du jour keeping da poor man down!

In fact, when they performed the play for Nixon at the White House, he specifically asked for the song to be removed as it was an obvious sleight on half the country. They refused. (Shades of Hamilton, y'all?)

So when the movie was made in 1972, Nixon was a huge friend of Jack Warner of Warner Bros. Studios who had made the movie. Nixon asked for the song to be cut again and, over the complaints of the playwrights and director, Warner did just that and as wikipedia points out - " Warner also wanted the original negative of the song shredded, but the film's editor kept it in storage unaltered.[10] "

That negative was restored and added back to the film for the blu-ray release.

Showing that, once again, the leftists have been injecting their messaging into media for a long, long time and/or capturing events in history they like and recasting them as their ideas exclusively. Note they did a musical revival of 1776 in 2022 with, naturally, the entire cast being female, non-binary or trans.

Links: Youtube of the movie - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7x9cv1FsyA wikipedia of the movie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1776_(film) wikipedia of the musical https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1776_(musical)