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

by Jill Lepore

  “The first book I brought home from kindergarten was about George Washington,” Hess told me. “I made my mother read it to me, the whole thing.” Like Beck, Hess believed that the teaching of American history in the nation’s public schools had been corrupted by ideologues from the left. (One of the more bizarre things about this was that the far right, in rejecting historical scholarship as a conspiracy of the left, had conflated the hucksterism of Jeremy Rifkin’s Peoples Bicentennial Commission with the distinguished research and writing of the century’s best historians, including Edmund Morgan, as if Morgan’s attempt to desegregate American history, to weave together the stories of liberty and slavery, were the same as Rifkin’s specious comparisons of OPEC and the East India Company.) Hess believed that he had resisted the left-wing indoctrination that was part of his public schooling. “As much as the textbooks we read in school were biased in favor of the New Deal, I was never really sold on it,” he said.

  The scholarship academic historians have written since the 1960s, uncovering the lives of ordinary people and examining conflict among groups and especially races, sexes, classes, and nations, was not without substantial shortcomings. Critics, both within and outside the academy, had charged scholars of American history not only with an inability to write for general readers and an unwillingness to examine the relationship between the past and the present, but also with a failure to provide a narrative synthesis, to tell a big story instead of many little ones. Those criticisms were warranted. They were also criticisms academic historians had made of themselves. Scholars criticize and argue—and must, and can—because scholars share a common set of ideas about how to argue, and what counts as evidence. But the far right’s American history—its antihistory—existed outside of argument and had no interest in evidence. It was much a fiction as the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, reductive, unitary, and, finally, dangerously antipluralist.60 It erased slavery from American history and compressed a quarter century of political contest into “the founding,” as if ideas worked out, over decades of debate and fierce disagreement, were held by everyone, from the start. “Who’s your favorite Founder?” Glenn Beck asked Sarah Palin. “Um, you know, well,” she said. “All of them.”61

  There was, though, something heartbreaking in all this. Behind the Tea Party’s Revolution lay nostalgia for an imagined time—the 1950s, maybe, or the 1940s—less riven by strife, less troubled by conflict, less riddled with ambiguity, less divided by race. In that nostalgia was the remembrance of childhood, a yearning for a common past, bulwark against a divided present, comfort against an uncertain future. “History is not a dry academic subject for us,” as Hess put it. “It is our heritage.”62

  CHAPTER 4

  The Past upon Its Throne

  CONTAINING AN EVENING AT THE GREEN DRAGON TAVERN—PAUL REVERE, AT A CLIP-CLOP—SCENES OF BATTLE—THE ARRIVAL OF GENERAL WASHINGTON—A SHORT HISTORY OF THE BALLOT—CONSTITUTIONAL COMPROMISES—THE ARGUMENT OF MR. LINCOLN—THE END OF AN UNPOPULAR WAR—MATTERS OF FAITH—AND REMARKS ON THE ORIGINS OF ORIGINALISM

  On Thursday, April 8, 2010, the Boston Tea Party held its regular monthly meeting in the Green Dragon Tavern, and the Boston Phoenix ran a cover story called “Tea Is for Terrorism.”1 There had been a great deal of talk at the last Green Dragon meeting about the importance of drawing the line between the real Tea Party and the crackpots. “I mean, when you see the picture of Obama with the Hitler mustache, it’s clear,” Varley had said. “Those are the LaRouche people.” So I kept thinking that more of the people I had met would distinguish their positions from the conspiracy theories that prevailed in and around the Tea Party, nationally—the “Birthers’ ” insistence that Barack Obama is not an American citizen, for instance—theories with which many of the people I had met did, in fact, disagree. Austin Hess had told me that during that very first Tax Day rally, on April 15, 2009, a reporter had come up to him and said, “So, do you hate Obama becaus he’s a Muslim?” Hess said he thought, “Huh? Obama’s not a Muslim.” He found the question maddening. “There will always be nuts who show up, but they don’t reflect the views of the movement,” he explained. But at that same rally, a featured speaker, talking about the president, goaded the audience, “When he informs us that we are no longer a Christian nation, are you going to go along with that?” (“No!” the crowd called back.) Varley didn’t want anyone holding Hitler signs, but at the Fourth of July rally she organized in 2009, an invited speaker rambled on about the “growing quasi-uber-state” and spoke of a “fascist government.”2 In the Tea Party, the fringe wasn’t some shifty-looking riffraff carrying a creepy sign; it was the loudmouth holding the microphone.

  By now, word about Sarah Palin’s visit had gotten around. Two buses from the Maine Tea Party were already confirmed. Twenty thousand people might turn up, forty thousand. Who knew? But there was every reason to believe that the rally would also draw counterprotesters. Someone passed around a copy of the Dig, a free Boston weekly, which had sponsored an anti-Palin poster contest. “Oh No, I can see Sarah Palin From My Back Yard,” read one submission. Another:

  TEA PARTIES.

  OURS: REAL.

  YOURS: BULL.3

  I sat down with George Egan, the retired cop I’d met the month before, and his twin brothers, John and Joe. Their grandparents came over from Ireland in 1907. The Egan brothers grew up in Dorchester. They thought Palin was a pain. They couldn’t stomach former Massachusetts governor and presidential aspirant Mitt Romney, either. “I can’t wait to see how he’s going to lie his way out of Romneycare,” Joe said. George, kindly offering to explain to me, once again, his position on health care, told me this story: “My little girl, when she was three, she got real sick. Had to be in intensive care for ten days. Had to have a tracheotomy. I had shit for insurance. The hospital sent me a bill. Ten thousand dollars. I got a second job; I sent the hospital one hundred bucks a month. That was the right thing to do. This is wrong. People want something, they have to work for it.”

  George and Joe and John Egan had worked very hard, all their lives. They were mad about the bums—the bums on the streets, the bums in Washington. George said, “Every drug addict gets a check. We write those checks.” Joe said, “Stay out of our wallets. I don’t care: Democrat, Republican? I don’t care. Just less of them.” The Egans were some of only a handful of Boston Tea Partiers I met who were actually born in Massachusetts. They reminded me of a lot of people I’ve known all my life. The house where I grew up was a lot like the Egans’s, but Hess, who was wearing his “Don’t Tread on Me” T-shirt, figured me for a foreigner. “Jane Goodall, meet the man who’s going to beat Barney Frank,” he said, introducing me to Sean Bielat, who was running for Frank’s seat, as a Massachusetts member of the U.S. House of Representatives, in the fall elections. “She’s going to make a contribution to your campaign,” Joe Egan joked when I started scribbling notes on Bielat’s campaign brochure. “Really?” Bielat asked, lighting up. “No, of course not,” George said. “She’s from the People’s Republic of Cambridge.” Bielat wandered off.

  On April 14, 1775, General Thomas Gage received orders from London to arrest the leaders of the rebellion, the men who met at the Green Dragon Tavern.4 On a list of rebels who, the minute war broke out, were to be shot on sight, appeared a postscript: “N.B. Don’t forget those trumpeters of sedition, the printers Edes and Gill.”5 The Sons of Liberty went into hiding. On April 18, Joseph Warren, hearing that Gage planned to march to Lexington and Concord to seize the colonists’ stores of arms, gave Paul Revere and William Dawes orders to sound the alarm. After a lantern at the Old North Church gave the signal, Revere began his ride to warn everyone—including Hancock and Samuel Adams, who were in hiding in Lexington—that the redcoats were coming. “I set off upon a very good Horse; it was then about 11 o’Clock,” Revere later recalled, and soon “got nearly opposite where Mark was hung in chains.”6 (Even all those years later, the site of that slave’s execution remained a landmark.) Revere didn’t
issue this warning alone; he was aided by boatmen who rowed him across the Charles, by messengers who met him along the way, and by militiamen, who helped spread the word across the countryside, long before Revere got there. He reached Lexington about one in the morning and was then detained by British troops blocking the road to Concord. He wasn’t the only one to rush out of the city. Back in Boston, Benjamin Edes and John Gill hastily dissolved their partnership. Gill went into hiding. Under cover of darkness, Edes, alone, carted his printing press and types to the Charles River, where he loaded them onto a boat moored at the bank and rowed through the night.7

  At daybreak, some seven hundred redcoats reached Lexington, where they found about seventy armed minutemen waiting for them. “Lay down your arms, you damned rebels, and disperse!” one British officer shouted. Outnumbered, the minutemen began to retreat. “Damn you, why don’t you lay down your arms!” The British fired, killing eight. They marched on to Concord where Reverend William Emerson had called out the minutemen, urging them: “If we die, let us die here.” Two minutemen did die that day—“Twas for the future that they fought,” the poet James Russell Lowell once wrote—and, at Concord Bridge, three British soldiers fell. Lowell once visited the redcoats’ graves, and wrote:

  They came three thousand miles, and died

  To keep the Past upon its throne.8

  Boston, occupied by the British and surrounded by the colonial militia, was now a city under siege. Thousands fled. Sixty-three-year-old Jane Mecom packed what she could onto a wagon. (She ended up in Rhode Island, until, in the fall, Benjamin Franklin, upon his return from London, traveled to Washington’s headquarters in Cambridge and brought his sister back to Philadelphia with him.)9 Andrew Eliot grieved. “The unhappy situation of this town, which, by the late cruel and oppressive measures gone into by the British Parliament, is now almost depopulated,” he wrote. His wife and eight of his children fled, but Eliot felt he had no choice but to stay in Boston to preach to those left behind: “Nothing keeps me from leaving the town but the obligation I am laid under not to leave so many people without ordinances.”10 Of a population of fifteen thousand there were, in a matter of days, only three thousand people left in the city. Most were loyalists, like Henry Pelham, who wrote to Copley of “all the Horrors of a Civil War.” British troops gutted the Old South Meeting House, burned the pews and pulpit, and used the floor to exercise their horses. They chopped down the Liberty Tree and used it for fuel. A party of soldiers broke into Edes’s print shop on Queen Street, and, failing to find him, they seized his son instead. Eighteen-year-old Peter Edes spent months as a prisoner of war. He watched from the window of his cell while a fellow captive, a Boston painter, was dragged to the yard and beaten until, broken, he finally called out, “God bless the King.”11

  Across the river in Watertown, Benjamin Edes set up a makeshift printing shop, with whatever supplies he could find. On June 5, he started publishing the Gazette again, on lumpy paper, with gunky ink. In Cambridge, Harvard students were sent home. Some seven hundred American soldiers were quartered in Massachusetts Hall, in Harvard Yard. The contents of Harvard’s library were carried to Andover for safekeeping.12 John Hancock and John and Samuel Adams headed to Philadelphia, to the Second Continental Congress, which convened on May 10. Hancock was elected president; John Adams nominated George Washington to command a Continental army. Even as Washington rode northward, American forces outside Boston, learning that Gage planned to take a hill outside the city, decided to try to hold a line at Charlestown, on Breed’s Hill. On June 17, shots were fired in what came to be called the Battle of Bunker Hill. Lost in that battle were 140 Americans, including Joseph Warren, and 226 British. (“Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes!” is the order allegedly given by Israel Putnam to the colonial militiamen. But there’s not much evidence Putnam ever said that. That story comes from Parson Weems and didn’t enter textbooks until the Civil War.)13 The Americans had more than proved their mettle, but they lost the hill. The British burned Charlestown to the ground. “Town consumed. oh!” Andrew Eliot wrote, frantically, in the almanac that served as his diary, where he recalled Virgil: “Diem horrendum! bella horrida bella!”14

  On July 3, 1775, George Washington took command of the Continental army on the Cambridge Common. In 1875, on the one hundredth anniversary of that day, James Russell Lowell read a poem, on that same spot—“Here, where we stand, stood he”—about “the seamless tapestry of thought . . . that binds all ages past with all that are to be.”15

  After Sean Bielat learned that I was from Cambridge and moved to the next table, I asked Austin Hess what he thought would happen in the midterm congressional elections in the fall. “November will be a bloodbath,” he said, confident of an anti-incumbency victory at the ballot box. I’m not sure about the seamless tapestry of thought that binds all ages past with all that are to be, but historians do like to think about where things come from, including things like ballots and universal suffrage, which are more things that, if we were getting back to what the founders had, we wouldn’t have.

  On Election Day every November, I walk around the corner to vote in the basement gymnasium of a neighborhood elementary school, beneath a canopy of basketball hoops. At a table just inside the gym, a precinct volunteer hands me a piece of white paper about the size and weight of a file folder. I enter a booth built of aluminum poles, tug shut behind me a red-, white-, and blue-striped curtain, and, with a black marker tied by a string to a tabletop, I mark my ballot, awed, every time, by the gravity, the sovereignty, of the moment. That I vote, and almost everything about how I vote, was unimaginable by the Founding Fathers.

  The word “ballot” comes from the Italian ballota, or ball, and in the 1600s, a ballot usually was a ball, or at least something ballish, like a pea or a pebble, or, not uncommonly, a bullet. Colonial Pennsylvanians voted by tossing beans into a hat. Elsewhere, people voted with their voices—viva voce—or with their hands or, literally, with their feet, walking to different sides of a room, or a town common, for different candidates. Every town, county, and colony, and later, every state, determined its own method of voting. Casting a vote only rarely required paper and pen. Everyone knew how everyone else voted. Casting a “secret ballot” was considered cowardly, underhanded, and despicable. Paper voting, when it started, wasn’t meant to conceal anyone’s vote; it was just easier than counting beans.16

  The first recorded colonial use of paper voting comes from Massachusetts: in 1629, church members in Salem elected their pastor by writing his name down on slivers of parchment. In 1634, John Winthrop, the colony’s first governor, was elected “by paper”; thirteen years later, a Bay Colony law dictated voting “by wrighting the names of the persons Elected.”17 The federal Constitution of 1787 left the conduct of elections up to the states: “The times, places and manner of holding elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by law make or alter such regulations.” Further than this limited federal oversight the framers would not go. And even this needed Madison’s insistence, during the Constitutional Convention, that “it was impossible to foresee all the abuses” that states might make of unimpeded power over the conduct of elections.18

  And, of course, in establishing the federal government, the Constitution made a compromise on the fundamental question about suffrage that had started the Revolution in the first place: taxation without representation. How were the people to be represented? Should the states, big and small, have equal representation in Congress, or should they be represented according to their size? Madison argued that the states were divided “not by their difference of size . . . but principally from the effects of their having or not having slaves.” Over this question, South Carolina threatened to walk out, one of its delegates declaring, “You must give each state an equal suffrage, or our business is at an end.” At a dinner meeting at his house, Benjamin Franklin proposed what became known
as the Connecticut Compromise. In the Senate, states would have equal representation; in the lower house, representation would be proportionate to population, one representative for every forty thousand free people; slaves would count as three-fifths of a person. Only the lower house would have the power to tax. The three-fifths clause held the country together, by perpetuating an institution many delegates to the convention despised. Its consequences were horrible to contemplate. “What will be said of founding a Right to govern freemen on a power derived from slaves”? was the question posed by John Dickinson. Gouverneur Morris stated it squarely: “The admission of slaves into the representation, when fairly explained, comes to this: that the inhabitant of Georgia and South Carolina who goes to the coast of Africa and, in defiance of the most sacred laws of humanity, tears away his fellow creatures from their dearest connections and damns them to the most cruel bondage, shall have more votes in a government instituted for protection of the rights of mankind than the citizen of Pennsylvania or New Jersey who views with a laudable horror so nefarious a practice.” At the end of the convention, George Washington went home to Virginia and began laying a plan to manumit his slaves.19