The Whites of their Eyes

by Matt Braun

  Franklin was, as a printer, bold unto recklessness. He set as his task the toppling of the Puritan theocracy. He nearly managed it. A fuming Cotton Mather, minister of Boston’s Old North Church, dubbed Franklin and his writers the Hell-Fire Club and called his newspaper “A Wickedness never parallel’d any where upon the Face of the Earth!” Undeterred—and, more likely, spurred on—Franklin printed, in the pages of his paper, essay after essay about the freedom of the press. “To anathematize a Printer for publishing the different Opinions of Men,” the Courant argued, “is as injudicious as it is wicked.” For this, and much more, and especially for printing, about Mather, an “Essay against Hypocrites,” Franklin was tried for libel, and thrown in jail, twice.32

  Not long after Franklin started printing the Courant, he hired his little brother as an apprentice. In 1721, sixteen-year-old Benjamin Franklin broke upon the literary stage in the guise of a fictional character whose name was a parody of two of Cotton Mather’s more dreadful sermons, “Silentiarius” and “Essays to Do Good”:

  I am courteous and affable, good humour’d (unless I am first provok’d,) and handsome, and sometimes witty, but always, Sir, Your Friend and Humble Servant, SILENCE DOGOOD.

  As the sharp-tongued Widow Dogood, the well-drubbed Ben offered “a few gentle Reproofs on those who deserve them,” including Harvard students (the colony’s ministers-in-training), “Dunces and Blockheads,” whose blindness to their good fortune left the poor apprentice all but speechless. Young Franklin then did his caustic widow one better. He invented for her a priggish critic, “Ephraim Censorious,” who beseeched Mrs. Dogood to pardon young men their follies and save her scolding for the fair sex, since “Women are prime Causes of a great many Male Enormities.”33 Ahem.

  In 1723, a legislative committee charged with investigating James Franklin’s Courant reported, “The Tendency of the Said paper is to mock Religion, & bring it into Contempt, that the Holy Scriptures are therefore profanely abused, that the Reverend and faithful Ministers of the Gospel are injuriously Reflected on, His Majesty’s Government affronted, and the Peace and good Order of his Majesty’s Subjects of this Province disturbed.”34 Authorities ordered James Franklin to stop printing the Courant. But no one said someone else couldn’t print it. A notice in the next issue claimed that the paper was “Printed and Sold by BENJAMIN FRANKLIN in Queen Street.” As the younger Franklin later fondly recalled, “I had the Management of the Paper, and I made bold to give our Rulers some Rubs in it.”35

  Nevertheless, Benjamin Franklin bridled at working for his brother. He ran away in 1723 and made his way to Philadelphia, where he began printing the Pennsylvania Gazette. His brother James died in 1735. By the 1760s, Boston’s most spirited printer was a man named Benjamin Edes. In 1755, Edes, the son of a hatter from nearby Charlestown, took over the failing Boston Gazette with his lackluster partner, John Gill. Two years later, Boston’s selectmen scolded Edes for his impiety: “you have printed Such Pamphlets & such things in your News Papers as reflect grossly upon the received religious principles of this People which is very Offensive. . . . we therefore now Inform you if you go on printing things of this Nature you must Expect no more favours from Us.” Edes apologized, promising, in future, to “publish nothing that shall give any uneasiness to any Persons whatever.” But he didn’t stop. And with the passage of the Stamp Act, the Boston Gazette became the organ of the patriot opposition.36

  In August of 1765, a Boston mob attacked the houses of both the stamp collector, Andrew Oliver (Peter Oliver’s brother), and of Thomas Hutchinson, setting loose, fluttering to the winds, the entire manuscript of Hutchinson’s History of Massachusetts. “Mr. Hutchinson’s History contains a valuable collection of facts,” wrote Hutchinson’s neighbor and close friend, Andrew Eliot, minister of Boston’s New North Church, who rescued the pages from gutters and puddles.37 Beneath an elm forever after known as the Liberty Tree, the crowd hanged Andrew Oliver in effigy and tacked to the effigy a paper purporting to be his confession:

  Fair Freedom’s glorious cause I meanly quitted,

  betrayed my country for the sake of pelf,

  But ah! at length the devil hath me outwitted,

  instead of stamping others have hanged my self.

  All over the colonies, protesters followed Boston’s lead. One observer wrote in the New York Gazette, “Our Brethren in Boston have indeared themselves more than ever to all the colonies in America.”38

  John Singleton Copley, for one, did not find the riots endearing. Copley was born in 1738 in a tobacconist’s shop on the Long Wharf. He taught himself to paint, from books, since, by his lights, there was no art in America, but he yearned to see the great galleries of Europe. In September of 1765, he shipped a portrait of his half brother, Henry Pelham, to London, complaining to the ship’s captain that the Stamp Act had made “much noise and confusion among us Americans.” Copley’s portrait, Boy with a Squirrel, shows his brother with a pet, tied to a delicate golden chain that dangles over a glass of water, a metaphor for the colonies attachment to the mother country, across the ocean.39 Copley felt attached.

  But that chain was already strained. Edes refused to buy stamps for his newspaper and, at John Adams’s suggestion, changed the Gazette’s motto to “A free press maintains the majesty of the people.”40 “Working the political Engine,” is what Adams called writing for Edes, after a night spent at Edes’s shop, “Cooking up Paragraphs” for “the Next Days newspaper.”41 Paul Revere engraved Edes’s masthead. In 1765, Edes, Revere, Otis, Hancock, and the Adamses began calling themselves the Sons of Liberty. They met at a place called the Green Dragon Tavern.

  The Green Dragon Tavern is also where the twenty-first-century Boston Tea Party held its monthly meetings. A site on Boston’s Freedom Trail, just a few steps from Faneuil Hall along the trail’s signature red brick path, the Green Dragon billed itself as the “Headquarters of the Revolution.” The original building, from 1712, was named after a Green Dragon Tavern in London.42 By the front door, a painted statue of a redcoat, the Revolutionary equivalent of a tobacco store Indian, stood guard. The bartender called him Stanley because he stands outside. He brought him in every night. “Quartering the troops,” he said.

  Christen Varley ran the meeting I went to at the Green Dragon Tavern on March 11, 2010. She was the Boston Tea Party’s president. Fierce, cheerful, and determined, Varley, thirty-nine, wore her brown hair in a ponytail, and she was fed up, fed up with the federal government, with taxes and the bailout, with the whole kit and caboodle. “Our topic tonight is that our wonderful federal government is trying to cram health care and whatnot down our throats,” she told an audience crowded around a long table in a dimly lit bar that could pass for the set of Cheers and where a dozen Tea Partiers sat cheek-by-jowl with almost as many reporters, photographers, television cameramen, and onlookers. Muskets decorated the walls. A Harvard political science graduate student wandered around, trawling for a paper topic. Austin Hess’s girlfriend, Kat Malone, was wearing his hat, along with a red, white, and blue T-shirt celebrating the day Scott Brown was elected:

  1.19.10

  We the People

  HAVE SPOKEN.

  Malone, who was from Charlestown, was an avid reader. She’d been working her way through biographies of the Founding Fathers. Beginning in the 1990s, there had been a great glut of these books in the nation’s bookstores. They were lively and stirring and, generally, hagiographic; their stories were animated by heroes, larger than life, greater than the greatest generation, an inspiration, better men. Academic historians have criticized biographers for locating the explanation for events in character rather than, say, in larger historical forces, like ideas or politics or culture or economic and social conditions, an approach that has the effect of falsely collapsing the distance between now and then. That’s part of the reason why, beginning in the 1960s, many academic historians began writing, instead, about ordinary people, people like artisans, shopkeepers, slaves, and printers.43
But the charge had also been made that academic historians don’t care enough about character or, for that matter, about plot, or storytelling, or writing for anyone other than other academic historians. The family feud between historians and biographers had been going on for long time, without really getting anywhere. (Even Mercy Otis Warren weighed in. For her, history required “a just knowledge of character.”)44 Meanwhile, people like to read books about famous people, the eighteenth-century Harvard-educated elite, like Hancock, the Adamses, Otis, Hutchinson, and the Olivers. Malone had just finished reading a biography of Samuel Adams, and she had found it striking. “It’s the same exact issues, all over again,” she told me. “They didn’t like that the British government was trying to take over their lives.”

  Doug Bennett, a graduate of Valley Forge Military College who was running for Boston City Council, was at the Green Dragon to court voters. He fumbled in his pockets and handed me a crumpled slip of paper. On it, he had penciled a stanza from Oliver Wendell Holmes’s 1873 “Ballad of the Boston Tea-Party,” which he recited, with feeling:

  No! Ne’er was mingled such a draught

  In palace, hall, or arbor,

  As freeman brewed and tyrants quaffed,

  That night in Boston Harbor!45

  I sat down next to George Egan, a soft-spoken Boston cop, retired and living on a pension. He told me he’d been a Democrat until “Kennedy killed that little girl” (1969, Teddy, Mary Jo Kopechne, Chappaquiddick) and had never worked on a political campaign until Brown’s, but then he threw himself into it because “the government is out of control.” Around the table, everyone was gabby and excited. There was much talk of voter guides, primaries, and the November elections and, in the nearer term, an activist training session run by the American Majority, where, Varley said, “we will learn how to be conservative activists and learn to do what the other people have been doing for the last forty years.” She had an important announcement: the Tea Party Express would be bringing the former governor of Alaska and John McCain’s erstwhile running mate, Sarah Palin, to Massachusetts on April 14, for a rally on the Boston Common, the day before the Tax Day protest on the Washington Mall. (The Tea Party Express was funded by a political action committee called Our Country Deserves Better, which was launched during the 2008 election, when it sponsored a “Stop Obama” bus tour.) Palin’s visit, Varley said, was good news, “no matter what you think of her.” She talked about the game plan for the big day: “The Obama Hitler sign. Let’s look out for those people, and make sure people know, they’re not us.” Someone ventured that the problem was that too few people know that the “tea” in Tea Party is an acronym. Blank stares, all around. “Taxed Enough Already. People need to know that’s what we stand for.”

  Edward Wagner, a middle-aged Republican from Jamaica Plain, agreed. “We need to disabuse the public of some of the more exotic rumors out there.” Like everyone I met at the Green Dragon, Wagner was chatty, but he didn’t trust the press or, at least, he didn’t trust what the far right called the “lamestream media,” including the Boston Globe. “I saw people’s eyes start out of their heads on the twentieth,” Wagner said, talking about the day Brown was elected, “because they had read the Globe poll, and the funny thing is, they believed it, they believed the liberal media.” Austin Hess later told me, “I don’t read books; I read blogs.” I once asked Hess what he thought of Glenn Beck. (A 2010 New York Times / CBS News poll reported that “63 percent of self-described Tea Party supporters gain most of their television news from Fox, compared with 23 percent of all adult Americans.”)46 “He’s given to hyperbole and he’s a bit emotional,” Hess said, “but, substantively, I haven’t yet found anything I disagree with him about.” Patrick Humphries, a software engineer from Bedford, a town out past Lexington, told me on another night that he got much of his news from the Drudge Report, which he read every day at lunch. “The media is filtered in this country,” Humphries said, but “the new media has made it so the old media can’t get away with it anymore.” The old media wasn’t just old. It was dying.

  “It will affect Printers more than anybody,” Benjamin Franklin warned Parliament about the Stamp Act, a piece of legislation that turned out to be Britain’s first and arguably its worst mistake in trying to manage the American colonies (“Grenville’s greatest blunder,” Arthur Schlesinger Sr. once called it).47 Printers, more than anybody, better than anybody, could fight back. When Massachusetts’ governor, Francis Bernard, who believed that Benjamin Edes’s Boston Gazette “swarmed with Libells of the most atrocious kind,” threatened Edes and Gill with prosecution, John Adams urged the printers on. Do not, he told them, “suffer yourselves to be wheedled out of your liberty by any pretences of politeness, delicacy, or decency. These, as they are often used, are but three names for hypocrisy, chicanery, and cowardice.” Tories took to calling the Gazette the “Weekly Dung Barge.”48 Edes, though, wasn’t easily wheedled out of anything. Ramsay, in his History, wrote, “It was fortunate for the liberties of America, that News-papers were the subject of a heavy stamp duty. Printers, when uninfluenced by government, have generally arranged themselves on the side of liberty, nor are they less remarkable for attention to the profits of their profession.”49

  The Stamp Act—the “fatal Black-Act,” one printer called it—was set to go into effect on November 1, 1765.50 In October, colonists convened a Stamp Act Congress in New York, where delegates drafted and signed a declaration, asserting, above all, “that it is inseparably essential to the Freedom of a People, and the undoubted Right of Englishmen, that no Taxes be imposed on them but with their own consent, given personally, or by their Representatives.”51 On October 10, 1765, a Baltimore printer changed his newspaper’s title to the Maryland Gazette, Expiring. Its dread motto: “In Uncertain Hopes of a Resurrection to Life Again.” Later that month, the printer of the Pennsylvania Journal replaced his newspaper’s masthead with a death’s head and framed his front page with a thick black border in the shape of a gravestone. “Adieu, Adieu!” whispered the ghastly Journal. On October 31, the New-Hampshire Gazette appeared with black mourning borders and, in a column on the front page, lamented its own demise, groaning, “I must Die!” Shrieked the Connecticut Courant, quoting the book of Samuel: “Tell it not in Gath! Publish it not in Askalon!”52 The newspaper is dead!

  Or, not quite dead yet. “Before I make my Exit,” gasped the New-Hampshire Gazette, “I will recount over the many good Deeds I have done, and how useful I have been, and still may be, provided my Life should be spar’d; or I might hereafter revive again.” The list of deeds was long and wonderful; it ran to four columns. Nothing good in the world had ever happened but that a printer set it in type. “Without this Art of communicating to the Public, how dull and melancholy must all the intelligent Part of Mankind appear?” It’s a fair question, before and since. But besides the settling over the land of a pall of melancholy and dullness, what else happens when a newspaper dies? In one allegory published during the Stamp Act crisis, a tearful Liberty cried to her dying brother, Gazette, “Unless thou revivest quickly, I shall also perish with thee! In our Lives we were not divided; in our Deaths we shall not be separated!”53

  The day the Stamp Act went into effect, Edes draped his Gazette in black mourning ink and Bostonians staged a Funeral for Liberty, burying a coffin six feet under the Liberty Tree. In his paper, Edes reported on similar funerals held all over the colonies. Everywhere, the story ended the same way. In Portsmouth, New Hampshire, “a coffin was prepared, and neatly ornamented, on the lid of which was inscribed the word Liberty, in capitals, aged one hundred and forty-five years, computing the time of our ancestors landing at Plymouth.” But then, lo, a reprieve, otherworldly: the eulogy “was scarcely ended before the corpse was taken up, it having been perceived that some remains of life were left.”54

  The old media, or what Edward Wagner called the “liberal media,” used to be known as the mainstream media, and its notions of fairness date to the eighteenth
century. The elusive pursuit of journalistic objectivity only began in the nineteenth century, but the best eighteenth-century printers had standards, too.55 “The Business of Printing has chiefly to do with Men’s Opinions,” Benjamin Franklin wrote, in “An Apology for Printers,” in 1731. Printers were bound to offend, Franklin explained, but his conscience was clear so long as he published a sufficient range of opinion: “Printers are educated in the Belief, that when Men differ in Opinion, both Sides ought equally to have the Advantage of being heard by the Publick; and that when Truth and Error have fair Play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter.”56

  In 2009, while the Tea Party was forming, the newspaper was dying, all over again. This was more than a coincidence; it was a cause. The decline of the newspaper had destabilized American politics. A website called the Newspaper Death Watch kept count, with a column titled “R.I.P.” One hundred and forty-five newspapers either stopped publishing a print edition or shut down entirely that year. Nearly six hundred newspapers laid off employees. On an average day in 2009, forty newspaper employees lost their jobs.57 And this time around, there was no sign of a reprieve.