The Whites of their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle over American History

by Jill Lepore

  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.

  “These meetings are just fun because we do everything else by e-mail,” Christen Varley told me. Varley entered politics by way of the blogosphere. “I’m from Ohio,” she said. “Massachusetts is a foreign country to me.” She moved to Massachusetts in 2004, for her husband’s job, and, although, with the exception of an internship with the Ohio Republican Party in 1992, she’d never been involved in politics before, living in Taxachusetts triggered something in her. “I started blogging in 2006, and in early 2009 I just thought we should have a Tax Day thing.” Varley’s old blog is called GOPMom: “Mom Knows Best!” She organized Boston’s three Tea Party rallies in 2009: Tax Day, the Fourth of July, and 9/12. Her concerns included “the myth of anthropogenic global warming.” Global warming she believed to be a conspiracy of the liberal media. She had been home raising her daughter, but in 2009 she took a job with the Coalition for Marriage and Family, a nonprofit formed to try to get a ban on same-sex marriage on the ballot. Its motto was “One Man, One Woman.” I asked her whether that didn’t amount to more government interference, but the problem, she said, was that the government had interfered so much already that it had nearly destroyed the family, and the only thing for it was to use the government to repair the damage.

  All evening, people came and went and milled about. Varley stayed put. Behind her hung a huge framed print, depicting a group of patriots, drinking in this very tavern—something, stylistically, between a Currier and Ives engraving and the label on Sam Adams beer. That beer label happens to have been drawn by Jean Paul Tibbels, illustrator of the American Girl doll books. You’d figure the guy on Sam Adams beer must be Adams, who was, briefly, a brewer, but it’s not. It’s a cartoon of a portrait of Paul Revere, painted by Copley in 1768. Copley painted Revere, a silversmith, in a waistcoat and shirtsleeves, sitting at his bench, working. A couple of years later, he painted Adams, too, but as a bewigged and learned gentleman, in a buttoned frock, standing at a desk strewn with papers, not the sort of man to sell beer.

  Varley was sitting, perfectly centered, in front of and just below that picture of the Sons of Liberty, which made it seem as if they were anointing her. That’s what had drawn all those photographers and television crews. I asked her what it meant to her that patriots had plotted here. “We admire their battle,” she said. “But we’re not melting down horseshoes for musket balls.”

  CHAPTER 2

  The Book of Ages

  WHEREIN WILL BE FOUND AN ACCOUNT OF AN

  EXTRAORDINARY ASSEMBLY—A DISPUTE BETWEEN

  MR. ADAMS AND MRS. WARREN—THE SUFFERINGS OF

  ANOTHER LADY—POOR RICHARD’S WAY TO WEALTH—A

  LATE MASSACRE IN BOSTON—ANOTHER ILL-CONSIDERED

  INVASION—A PLEA FOR PEACE—AND REFLECTIONS ON THE

  FALLACY OF PRESENTISM

  On March 20, 2010, the day before the U.S. House of Representatives was scheduled to vote on the health care bill, the Boston Tea Party held an Anti-Obamacare rally in front of Faneuil Hall. A few dozen people turned up. Most carried signs: “The Constitution SPEAKS.” Some waved flags of thirteen stars. Acolytes of Ayn Rand urged, “READ ATLAS SHRUGGED.” Christen Varley told a woman who showed up with a Hitler sign to leave. The place was bustling with tourists on their way to shop at Quincy Market. Austin Hess, wearing his tricorn and a mock–Obama campaign T-shirt that read NOPE instead of HOPE, summed up his objectives for the Tea Party movement: “I want to replace the current political establishment, get all incumbents out and replace them with fiscal conservatives who will abide by the Constitution.”

  Hess had moved to Massachusetts from Virginia three years before. “We’re trying to get back to what the founders had,” he told me. “We’re trying to bring people back to Boston’s roots. Liberty above all.” A nurse from Worcester who grew up in the Midwest and was registered as an Independent explained what getting back to those eighteenth-century roots meant to her: “I don’t want the government giving money to people who don’t want to work. Government is for the post office, and to defend our country, and maybe for the roads. That’s all.”

  “The history of our revolution will be one continued lye from one end to the other,” Johns Adams once predicted.1 He was right to worry. In every nation, as in every family, some stories are remembered, others are forgotten, and there are always some stories too painful to tell. Adams expected that the Revolution, a messy, sprawling, decades-long affair, would, over time, be shortened and simplified. In the national imagination, the Revolution is a fable. Much of what most people picture when they think about the Revolution comes from the world of juvenilia—Johnny Tremain, paper dolls, elementary school art projects, and family vacations—which isn’t surprising, and wouldn’t be a problem, except that every history of a nation’s founding makes an argument about the nature of its government.

  People would make of the Revolution what they needed, Adams knew, and what they needed would rarely agree with how he saw it, or what he thought mattered. Adams was especially worried that the nation’s story of its origins might one day leave him out altogether. (Adams had worried that history would neglect him even before he accomplished anything of which anyone might take any note. One night in 1759, when he was twenty-four and just starting out, he woke up, seized with an aching void in his chest. He picked up his quill, reached for his inkpot, and wrote in his diary, “I feel anxious, eager, after something. What is it?” It was the same thing it always was: the pain of his insatiable ambition. “I have a dread of Contempt, a quick sense of Neglect, a strong Desire of Distinction,” Adams wrote that night.)2 In 1807, when Adams read Mercy Otis Warren’s History, twelve hundred pages in three volumes that devoted a scant four pages to one John Adams, his worst fears were realized. Sputtering with rage, Adams wrote Warren ten letters—some more than twenty pages long—of petty, rambling vituperation. Warren had assailed his character: “In the 392d page of the third volume, you say that ‘Mr. Adams, his passions and prejudices were sometimes too strong for his sagacity and judgment.’ ” She had neglected him: “You have carefully recorded the appointment of Mr. Jay to Madrid, in page 141, Vol. II, to have been on the 27th of September, 1779, yet have taken no notice of mine, which was on the 29th of the same month.” She would not even grant him alphabetic preeminence. When Warren listed Franklin, Jay, and Adams as ambassadors, Adams complained that his name ought to have appeared first in that list, as it had in their commission. “You will say, no doubt, that this is ‘sighing for rank,’ ” he sneered, anticipating her objection. “Very well: say so, Mrs. Warren. Make the most of it.”

  Against Adams’s abuse, Warren fought back. “Were she to write her History over again, and correct her errors, as you seem to wish her to do,” she answered, what must she write? “She must tell the world that Mr. Adams . . . had neither ambition nor pride of talents . . . ; that his writings suppressed rebellion, quelled the insurgents, established the State and Federal Constitutions, and gave the United States all the liberty, republicanism, and independence they enjoy; that his name was always placed at the head of every public commission; that nothing had been done, and nothing could be done, neither in Europe nor America, without his sketching and drafting the business, from the first opposition to British measures in the year 1764 to signing the treaty of peace with England in the year 1783.” Who would believe such rot? “Mr. Adams might indeed think this a very pleasant portrait, but I doubt whether the world would receive it as a better likeness than the one dra
wn” in her own history.3 Ah, but give it time, Mrs. Warren.

  In 2008, Adams was the subject of an Emmy Award–winning HBO miniseries, based on David McCullough’s Pulitzer Prize–winning biography. Independence was almost entirely Adams’s doing, HBO suggested, despite the fact that, to the American people, Thomas Paine was the most important promoter of independence; Adams’s crucial and, by all accounts, dazzling and stirring speech before the Second Continental Congress, urging independence, does not survive; and Adams didn’t write the document declaring it. (“I am obnoxious, suspected, and unpopular,” Adams told Jefferson, graciously offering the task of drafting the Declaration of Independence to the Virginian. He forever regretted this. “Jefferson ran away with all the stage effect,” Adams later complained, “and all the glory.”)4 None of this gave HBO pause: its Franklin was a buffoon, its Washington a sap-skull, its Jefferson distracted and, finally, deluded. Thomas Paine didn’t even have a part. HBO’s John Adams was animated as much by the man’s many private resentments as by the birth of the United States. It was history, with a grudge. “He United the States of America” was the miniseries’ motto, giving credit to Adams for . . . everything.5

  The history of the Revolution hasn’t been one continued lie from one end to the other, as Adams would have it, but it’s certainly been changeable, as, in fact, it ought. History is an endlessly interesting argument where evidence is everything and storytelling is everything else. That John Adams and Mercy Otis Warren didn’t see eye to eye on Adams’s contribution to American independence might not seem of any great consequence, but it’s a good illustration of how two people—even two people who lived through it—can read the same evidence differently. The telling of history is, by its very nature, controversial, contentious, and contested; it advances by debate. This doesn’t make history squishy, vague, and irrelevant. It makes it picky, demanding, and vital. American history, though, is beset by this paradox: historical analysis is unstable because, like all scholarship, it must be forever subject to interpretation and revision and, especially, to new evidence, new vantage points, and new avenues of investigation, but history plays a civic role too, and a nation born in revolution looks for stability, tranquility, and permanence, even in its own past. And, because of the nature of the Constitution, the founding bears a particular burden: it is a story about what binds Americans together—We the people, do ordain—but it also serves as the final source of political authority, the ultimate arbiter of every argument, the last court of appeal. No history can easily or always bear that weight.

  “History is not the Province of the Ladies,” John Adams concluded, after reading Warren’s History.6 In the eighteenth century, even writing wasn’t the province of women. “The confusion & distres those Opresive Actts have thrown us Poor Americans into is un Discribable by me,” Benjamin Franklin’s sister, Jane Mecom, wrote to him from Boston, the month after the Stamp Act went into effect. Mecom could read—“I read as much as I Dare,” she once wrote to her brother—and she could write, if not well. “I have such a Poor Fackulty at making Leters,” she apologized. Franklin would have none of it; he knew his sister’s pride well enough not to credit her humility. “Is there not a little Affectation in your Apology for the Incorrectness of your Writing?” he teased her. “Perhaps it is rather fishing for Commendation. You write better, in my Opinion, than most American Women.”7 He was, sadly, right.

  Born in 1712, Jane Franklin was the youngest of seven daughters; Benjamin, born in 1706, was the youngest of ten sons. Jenny and Benny, they were called when they were little. Their father was a candle-maker and soap-boiler. One of the Franklin children drowned in a tub of suds, at the age of three, when everyone was so busy making soap and dipping candles that no one saw him fall in. Jenny and Benny had very different childhoods. In early America, boys learned to read and write; girls were taught to read and stitch. Boys held quills; girls held needles.

  I am obnoxious to each carping tongue

  Who says my hand a needle better fits

  wrote the Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet. In 1710, only two in every five women in New England could sign their names, and most could do no more writing than that. (To sign your name is one thing; to write prose is quite another.) Massachusetts Poor Laws required masters of apprentices to teach “males to write, females to read.” In 1744, a poem in the Boston Evening Post had a husband saying to his wife, concerning the education of their daughter,

  Teach her what’s useful, how to shun deluding

  To roast, to toast, to boil and mix a pudding

  To knit, to spin, to sew, to make or mend,

  To scrub, to rub, to earn and not to spend.

  Teaching girls to write was frivolous. Even teaching them to read could be dangerous: it might make them poor wives. “My wife does hardly one earthly thing but read, read, read, almost from the time she gets up, to the time she goes to bed,” wrote an essayist in the American Magazine in 1769. “I hope all unmarried tradesmen, when they have read this letter, will take special care how they venture upon a bookish woman.”8

  After her brother Benjamin ran away from home, Jane Franklin married her next-door neighbor, Edward Mecom, a saddler. She was fifteen; he was twenty-seven. Unlike her brother, she never wrote an autobiography, but she did keep a tiny, fourteen-page notebook she called her “Book of Ages.” In it, she recorded the births and deaths of her children. It begins,

  Josiah Mecom their first Born on Wednesday June the 4: 1729 and Died May the 18-1730.9

  Josiah Mecom died before his first birthday. Jane Mecom gave birth eleven times more. All but one of her children died before she did.

  She also struggled, desperately, to stay out of the places you could go, in eighteenth-century Boston, if you didn’t have any money: debtors’ prison, the Manufactory House (a workhouse), and an almshouse run by the Overseers of the Poor. In 1763, 1764, and twice in 1765, the sheriff of Boston came to Jane Mecom’s house, looking for her husband and threatening to take him to debtors’ prison. But before the sheriff could catch him, Edward Mecom died. “Nothing but troble can you hear from me,” Jane Mecom wrote in September of 1765. “It Pleased God to Call my Husband out of this Troblesom world where he had Injoyed Litle & suffered much by Sin & Sorrow.” In December, while Franklin was in London, answering parliamentary inquiries about the Stamp Act, his sister wrote to him: “my Income suplys us with vitles fiering candles & Rent but more it cannot with all the Prudence I am mistres of, but thus I must Rub along till Spring when I must strive after some other way but what at Present I cant tell.” Edward Mecom left his wife with nothing but debts, not least because, long before he died, he had lost his mind. Whatever ailed him, it was heritable. When Jane’s son Peter fell prey to the Mecom madness, Benjamin Franklin paid a farmer’s wife to take care of him.10

  Whenever I hear people like that nurse from Worcester talk about getting back to what the founders had, which she believes to be a government that won’t give money to people who don’t work, I think about Peter Franklin Mecom: he was tied up in a barn, like an animal, for the rest of his life. I don’t want to go back to that.

  Benjamin Franklin had hopes for another of his nephews, his namesake, to become a printer. “The way to wealth, if you desire it, is plain as the way to market,” Franklin wrote, in “Advice to a Young Tradesman from an Old One”: “It depends chiefly on two words, industry and frugality.”11 I think Franklin wrote that advice for Benjamin Mecom. He placed him in an apprenticeship in New York. “I have a very good opinion of Benny in the main,” Franklin wrote his sister, “and have great hopes of his becoming a worthy man, his faults being only such as are commonly incident to boys of his years, and he has many good qualities, for which I love him.”12 In New York, the young apprentice proved ungovernable. Franklin next arranged for him to take over a printing business in Antigua. Still, he was worried. “In my opinion, if Benny can but be prevailed on to behave steadily, he may make his fortune there,” he wrote Jane, but “without some sh
are of steadiness and perseverance, he can succeed no where.”13 In sending his nephew to Antigua, Franklin made the same arrangement that he had made with other junior partners: Franklin supplied the printing house and the types in exchange for one-third of the profits. But when Jane Mecom moved to a house on Hanover Street, in Boston’s North End, Franklin proposed different terms: Benjamin Mecom need pay his uncle no more than a small amount of sugar and rum, so long as he would pay his mother’s rent.14 Unfortunately, in Antigua, Mecom printed little and sold less. It wasn’t long before Franklin began warning a bookseller in London not to front him too much inventory. “Pray keep him within Bounds,” Franklin cautioned, “and do not suffer him to be more than Fifty Pounds in your Debt.” He had by now begun to apologize for his errant nephew: “He is a young Lad, quite unacquainted with the World.”15

  Mecom failed in Antigua, and returned to New York. But Franklin didn’t abandon him. In 1757, when Franklin was stuck in New York, waiting to sail to England, he furnished his nephew, Benjamin Mecom, with a horse, to ride to Boston, where Franklin had established for him another printing shop. In New York, Franklin also wrote his sister three letters. And he wrote a new will, leaving to her both the mortgage on a house in Boston, and his share of their father’s estate.16 Finally, he wrote an essay that came to be called “The Way to Wealth.” The reason Rick Santelli thinks Benjamin Franklin would be rolling over in his grave over Americans paying their neighbor’s mortgages is because “The Way to Wealth,” Franklin’s most famous essay, has been read as if Franklin were the Founding Father of free enterprise. But “The Way to Wealth” was, among other things, a set of rules Franklin was giving to his poor, profligate, and unsteady nephew. And it was also something of a parody of just that kind of advice as, finally, not worth much.