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

by Jill Lepore

  Unhappy BOSTON see thy Sons deplore,

  Thy hallow’d Walks besmear’d with guiltless gore.

  While faithless P-----n and his savage Bands,

  With murd’rous Rancour stretch their bloody Hands;

  Like fierce Barbarians grinning o’er their Prey,

  Approve the Carnage and enjoy the Day.

  On March 7, in a city of fifteen thousand people, twelve thousand showed up for the funeral of the massacre’s first four victims (Patrick Carr still lingered), who were buried beneath a single gravestone, in the Old Granary Burying Ground, just steps from the Common. The “letter’d Stone shall tell,” Wheatley wrote, “How Caldwell, Attucks, Gray, and Mav’rick fell.”46

  “All the government does is take my money and give it to other people,” Austin Hess told me, the day of the Anti-Obamacare rally, in March of 2010. Hess’s own salary was paid by the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security. He worked at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory, in Lexington, where he studied chemical and biological warfare. The next time I saw him, I asked him about that. “I’m not an anarchist,” he said. “It’s not that I think all government is bad.”47

  The remarkable debate about sovereignty and liberty that took place between 1761, when James Otis argued the writs of assistance case, and 1791, when the Bill of Rights was ratified, contains an ocean of ideas. You can fish almost anything out of it. (Almost anything, but not everything. There are fish that just weren’t around in the eighteenth century, although that doesn’t stop people from angling for them. Glenn Beck once said that George Washington was opposed to socialism.)48 Tea Partiers liked to describe their movement as a catchall—Austin Hess identified himself as a libertarian, Christen Varley described herself as a social and fiscal conservative—but it didn’t catch everything. Opposition to military power didn’t have a place in the twenty-first-century Tea Party. It did, however, have a place in the Revolution, and also in its Bicentennial, which, before the Tea Party, was the last time so many Americans got so agitated about early American history.

  In the 1960s, Lyndon Johnson’s fifty-member American Revolution Bicentennial Commission didn’t get much done. “My view is that the bicentennial should be a vehicle for social change,” said Richard Barrett, an executive director of Johnson’s commission. The study of African American history was on the rise. Colleges and universities had begun founding “black studies” departments. Bostonians had started a “Negroes’ Freedom Trail.” Black nationalists, though, thought the whole idea of celebrating American history was a travesty. “We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock, my brothers and sisters,” Malcolm X said. “Plymouth Rock landed on us.” Johnson’s commission wrestled with all this, without much success. When Nixon took office in 1969, Barrett left. The new administration, he said, “is not prepared to deal with the kind of problems I’d like to see dealt with.” Then, too, by 1969, Martin Luther King Jr. was dead. So was Malcolm X. So were John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy. Was this really a good time to embrace revolution? The New York Times called the commission “hopelessly incompetent.” Jesse Jackson called on black Americans to boycott the Bicentennial. To his own commission, Nixon appointed men who had worked on his campaign. Not long after, an antiwar activist named Jeremy Rifkin established a Peoples Bicentennial Commission, in protest, arguing that “in the 1970s the White House and Corporate America are planning to sell us a program of ‘Plastic Liberty Bells,’ red, white, and blue cars, and a ‘Love It or Leave It Political Program.’ ”49

  On May 4, 1970, the Ohio National Guard fired into a crowd of unarmed Kent State students protesting the U.S. invasion of Cambodia, killing four. This caused a lot of people to think about the Boston Massacre, not least because its two hundredth anniversary had only just passed. To a generation outraged by the Vietnam War, the argument against a standing army looked interesting, all over again. Amid the chaos, the Bicentennial was seized by the antiwar movement. After Kent State, college students papered their walls with posters of Revere’s engraving.50 The week after the shooting, a Kent State student told the New York Times, “They told King George or whoever that guy was, ‘Look, leave us alone.’ And he said no. And they said, ‘Come on, leave us alone or there’s going to be trouble.’ And he still said no. So they said, ‘All right, mother,’ and they picked up a gun and started killing a bunch of British and tossing tea in the Boston harbor. And that’s what’s happening here.”51 In May of 1970, Howard Zinn was among about a hundred antiwar protesters arrested for blocking the road to a Boston army base. Brought to trial, Zinn told the court he was acting “in the grand tradition of the Boston Tea Party.”52 (Zinn’s People’s History of the United States is a product of the Bicentennial, too.) The following year, on Memorial Day weekend, hundreds of veterans marched, or wheeled their wheelchairs from Concord to Lexington, as if undertaking a piece of Paul Revere’s ride in reverse. “This present hour in history is again a time when the people are trying to secure the liberty and peace upon which the country was founded,” the Vietnam Veterans Against the War said. The National Park Service disagreed; its man in Lexington was sure that the “minutemen would be appalled.” John Kerry said he wanted to “force the country to admit the mistake it has made in Indochina in the name of democracy.” In Lexington, the veterans pitched camp on the Battle Green. Signs demanded the recall of the troops: “1781, Red Coats Go Home, 1971 Yankees Come Home.”53 People from the town handed out apples, sandwiches, sleeping bags, and blankets. In the morning, police in riot gear arrested five hundred people. Each veteran had agreed to give his “name, serial number, date of birth—April 18, 1775.” Citizens from Lexington and Concord collected money to get the veterans out on bail. Back in Boston, veterans marched to Bunker Hill, where they laid down their arms—tossing toy guns into a pile—and then to the Common, where Senator Eugene McCarthy, the antiwar presidential candidate of 1968, gave a speech, telling the crowd that it was bearing witness to life and peace.54 The time for revolution, they said, had come again.

  “What ails the American spirit?” Newsweek asked, on the cover of its Fourth of July issue, in 1970. In the wake of Kent State, Newsweek posed that question to six historians. Yale’s Staughton Lynd insisted that there was no such thing as an American spirit, but, except for that, no one quibbled with the question; everyone agreed that something was terribly wrong and that, whatever it was, it was unprecedented. The University of Rochester’s Eugene Genovese declared “a state of spiritual crisis.” Daniel Boorstin, later the librarian of Congress, offered a diagnosis of amnesia: “We have lost our sense of history.” Andrew Hacker, then at Cornell, worried that the idea of citizenship was dead. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. stated the problem as “the velocity of history”; things were changing too much, too fast.

  Richard Hofstadter’s answer was bleakest. He was concerned that, in an increasingly secular age, young people on both the right and the left were bringing a religious zeal into politics: “This I think is a dangerous way of thinking, because when you try to get existential values out of politics, which has to do with wholly different things, I think you’re heading for an increase in fanaticism.” Kent State left Hofstadter despairing (he was also dying, at the age of fifty-three, of leukemia). “We’ll be lucky to get out of this situation without further polarization and a strong right-wing reaction,” he told Newsweek. “Part of our trouble is that our sense of ourselves hasn’t diminished as much as it ought to.”55 Four months later, Richard Hofstadter was dead.

  For all the periwigs, the Tea Party’s Revolution, in the wake of Barack Obama’s election, had very little to do with anything that happened in the 1770s. But it did have a great deal to do with what happened in the 1970s. The Tea Party’s Revolution was the product of a reactionary—and fanatical—version of American history that took hold during the crisis over the Bicentennial, a reaction to protests from the left. That reactionary history simmered for decades and went, for the most part, unchallenged, because 1970 marked the end of an era in the writing o
f American history: Hofstadter would turn out to have been one of the last university professors of American history to reach readers outside the academy with sweeping interpretations both of the past and of his own time.

  For much of its history, the American historical profession has defined itself by its dedication to the proposition that looking to the past to explain the present—and especially to solve present-day problems—falls outside the realm of serious historical inquiry. That stuff is for amateurs, toadies, and cranks. Historians decry the fallacy of “presentism”: to see the past as nothing more than a prologue to the present introduces evidentiary and analytical distortions and risks reducing humanistic inquiry into shabby self-justification. Hofstadter recognized the perils of presentism, but he believed that historians with something to say about the relationship between the past and the present had an obligation to say it, as carefully as possible, by writing with method, perspective, skepticism, and an authority that derived not only from their discipline but also from their distance from the corridors of power. Schlesinger had left an appointment at Harvard to join the Kennedy administration; Hofstadter begged off a place in the Johnson administration; he would have found that unseemly.56 (Schlesinger once wrote in his diary, “I am vaguely juxtaposed against Dick Hofstadter—the power-loving stablemate of statesmen as against the pure, dispassionate, incorruptible scholar,” and then admitted, with admirable honesty, “There is something in this.”) But, even if Hofstadter didn’t defect from the university to the hurly-burly of politics, he found himself at odds with his colleagues. His knack for sweeping interpretation set him apart from his guild and earned him criticism, especially the captious kind. “The historians will have a field day with it,” he wrote to a friend about one of his books, The American Political Tradition, “but I am in hopes that some of the non-academic people will like it.”57

  The Bicentennial—a carnival of presentism—helped make the position Hofstadter once occupied, which was always fragile, impossible. Historians mocked the Bicentennial as schlock and its protests as contrived but didn’t offer an answer, a story, to a country that needed one.58 That left plenty of room for a lot of other people to get into the history business.

  CHAPTER 3

  How to Commit Revolution

  CONTAINING A SINGULAR ENCOUNTER WITH THE NATION’S

  STORYTELLER—THE MISDAVENTURES OF MR. NIXON—A

  FURTHER ACCOUNT OF THE PURSUIT OF LIBERTY—THE

  TRAVELS OF PHILLIS WHEATLEY—A SPIRITED DEBATE AT

  OLD SOUTH MEETING HOUSE—ACTS, INTOLERABLE—AND

  MORE THAN ONE PARTY OF TEA

  Shawn Ford used to work for a place called Paragon Tours and Travel. Then he tried retail. One day in the 1980s, he was laid off from his job at Jordan Marsh, a department store in Downtown Crossing. “I walked to the Boston Common and was sitting there drinking a Coke,” he told me, “and a trolley went by and I said, ‘Well, that’s something to do for the summer.’ ” He took a job at Old Town Trolley, with forty-three trolleys, the largest sightseeing fleet in Boston, making fourteen stops, including Faneuil Hall, the Old State House, and Fenway Park, the oldest major league ballpark in the country.1 Sometimes, Boston seems to be sinking under the weight of its own history.

  Old Town Trolley was owned by Historic Tours of America, a heritage-for-profit outfit founded in the 1970s by three entrepreneurial Floridians who called their company “The Nation’s Storyteller.” Historic Tours of America has hosted two million visitors a year at attractions in six cities and sold wares at twenty-five gift shops, or “historically themed retail environments.” It was also the owner of the Boston Tea Party Ship, the Beaver, that boat that was tied up in Gloucester. Ford was vice president of international and domestic sales. I went to see him in March of 2010, in his office on the second floor of a warehouse on Dorchester Avenue in South Boston. Ford, nattily dressed, took me into a conference room to show me a promotional DVD about the plan for an ambitious expansion of the site on the Congress Street Bridge. Drum and fife music played during the opening scenes, over footage of the Beaver, before she was towed away.

  “Today there are few symbols of American freedom more recognizable and compelling than the Boston Tea Party,” said the narrator.

  “Gosh, that guy’s voice is really familiar,” I said. “Who is that?”

  Ford smiled. “Frank Avruch.”

  The name didn’t ring a bell.

  “Because of its significance to American history, and relevance to current events,” Avruch went on, “the Boston Tea Party Ship and Museum has played a continuing role in political protests, education, historical interpretation, and the advancement of patriotic ideals.”2

  “Who?”

  “He used to be Bozo the Clown,” Ford said. Avruch was Bozo, on Boston television, in the 1970s.

  After the Beaver gets back to Boston, Ford said, it will tell the story of “why we are such a great country.”

  “Our children have been taught to be ashamed of their country,” Richard Nixon said, on January 20, 1973, in his second inaugural address. “At every turn, we have been beset by those who find everything wrong with America and little that is right.” The Bicentennial could help fix that: “Let us pledge together to make these next four years the best four years in America’s history, so that on its 200th birthday America will be as young and as vital as when it began.”3 Meanwhile, in How to Commit Revolution American Style, Jeremy Rifkin of the Peoples Bicentennial Commission was insisting, “It makes no sense for the New Left to allow the defenders of the system the advantage of presenting themselves as the true heirs and defenders of the American Revolutionary tradition. Instead, the revolutionary heritage must be used as a tactical weapon to isolate the existing institutions and those in power.”4

  And so it went, back and forth, the battle over the Revolution. Nixon, though, was distracted. Five men had broken into the Watergate hotel on June 17, 1972. Over the next weeks and months, an FBI investigation had tied the burglars to the Committee to Re-elect the President. As the two hundredth anniversary of the dumping of the tea approached, Nixon’s Bicentennial Commission, mired in controversy, failed in every attempt to organize a national celebration. A $1.2 million plan to build a bicentennial park in all fifty states had been abandoned, as had plans for a world’s fair to be held in Philadelphia. In Massachusetts, Kevin White, Boston’s mayor, and a man with presidential aspirations, was determined to make the Bicentennial a highlight of his administration; he set up his own commission, Boston 200, and searched for corporate sponsors. That’s when those three Boston businessmen bought an old Baltic schooner and had her refitted as an English brig, an undertaking funded by the makers of Salada Tea.

  On the Fourth of July, 1973, the New York Times reported that an investigation into Nixon’s Bicentennial Commission by the Government Accounting Office and the House Judiciary Committee had found a “startling lack of concrete ongoing programs.”5 That same day, at an event sponsored by another rival to Nixon’s commission, the Afro-American Bicentennial Corporation, James Earl Jones read Frederick Douglass’s 1852 speech, “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro,” at Douglass’s house, in Washington, DC:

  What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.6

  This, presumably, was just the kind of thing Nixon was talking about, this finding everything wrong with America. It wasn’t invented by the New Left i
n the 1960s. It was quite old, in fact. Nixon’s Bicentennial Commission wanted to offer a different history, one not only without Frederick Douglass but also at considerable variance with the best emerging scholarship, including the work of David Brion Davis, whose The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution won the National Book Award in 1976, while Edmund S. Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom was a runner-up.7 But removing slavery from American history, even from eighteenth-century Boston, takes some doing, and means misunderstanding the Revolution, not least because, as Davis and Morgan argued, slavery made liberty possible.