Jill Lepore: The Whites of Their Eyes

Prologue: Party Like It's 1773 (pp. 2-8):

On the day I went to Gloucester, the Beaver was a skeleton, a ghost ship, but the Tea Party was the talk of the nation. It had started on February 19, 2009, one month after the inauguration of a new president, Barack Obama. Rick Santelli, a business commentator on a CNBC morning news and talk show called Squawk Box, was outraged by the economic policies of the new administration. "This is America!" he hollered from a trading room floor in Chicago, surrounded by cheering commodities brokers. "How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor's mortgage?" He was sure about one thing: "if you read our Founding Fathers, people like Benjamin Franklin and Jefferson, what we're doing in this country now is making them roll over in their graves." He wanted to dump some derivative securities in Lake Michigan. He wanted a new tea party.

Within hours, Santelli's call to arms was dubbed "the rant heard round the world," a reference to a poem written by Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1836 --

Here once the embattled farmers stood
And fired the shot heard round the world

-- on the occasion of the erection of a statue memorializing the men (including Emerson's grandfather) who faced the British in Concord in 1775. Almost overnight, Tea Parties sprang up across the country. The Chicago Tea Party adopted the motto "Revolution Is Brewing." [ . . . ]

Shawni Littlehale from Smart Girl Politics agreed. "Two hundred and thirty-three years ago," she said, "the silent majority got together in Boston, fed up with taxation without representation, and held a tea party." (The silent majority did no such thing. "Silent majority" used to be a euphemism for the dead. The phrase's meaning didn't change until about 1969, when Richard Nixon used it to refer to Americans who, he believed, supported the Vietnam War.) [ . . . ]

Elsewhere, activists stapled Lipton tea bags to their hats, like so many fishing lures. "Party Like It's 1773" read one sign. Newt Gingrich spoke at a Tea Party in New York. In Atlanta, where Fox News celebrity Sean Hannity broadcast from a rally attended by some fifteen thousand people, the show opened with a white-wigged reenactor dressed as an eighteenth-century minister -- black great coat, ruffled whit shirt -- who, in front of a backdrop of the Constitution and a flag of thirteen stars, said, before introducing "Citizen Sean Hannity": "The United States was formed by common people, risking all they had to defy an arrogant regime, taxing them into submission. And now that arrogance has returned, threatening the very foundation of our republic. My name is Thomas Paine." (I guess this wasn't the same Paine as the man who wrote, "All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolise power and profit.") All over the country, people turned up wearing tricorns and periwigs, cuffed shirts and kersey waistcoats, quoting the founders, waving copies of the Constitution, arguing that the time for revolution had come again." [ . . . ]

Every generation tells its own story about what the Revolution was about, of course, since no one is alive who remembers it anymore. But the Tea Party's Revolution wasn't just another generation's story -- it was more like a reenactment -- and its complaint about taxation without representation followed the inauguration of a president who won the electoral vote 365 to 173 and earned 53 percent of the popular vote. In an age of universal suffrage, the citizenry could hardly be said to lack representation. Nationwide, voter turnout, in November of 2008, was 57 percent, the highest since Nixon was elected in 1968. Something more was going on, something not about taxation or representation but about history itself. It wasn't only that the Tea Party's version of American history bore almost no resemblance to the Revolution I study and teach. [ . . . ]

What was curious about the Tea Party's Revolution, though, was that it wasn't just kooky history; it was antihistory.

(pp. 8-9):

To the far right, everything about Barack Obama and his administration seemed somehow alarming, as if his election had ripped a tear in the fabric of time. In August, the Department of Education announced that the president would be making a speech addressed to the nation's schoolchildren, about what a good idea it is to stay in school and to study hard. The speech would be made available to public schools, on C-SPAN, educational channels, and the White House's website. Jim Greer, then chairman of the Republican Party of Florida, said: "As a father of four children, I am absolutely appalled that taxpayer dollars are being used to spread President Obama's socialist ideology." Hannity said, "It seems very close to indoctrination." A pundit named Michelle Malkin, appearing as a guest on Hannity's show, added, "The left has always used kids in public schools as guinea pigs and as junior lobbyists for their social liberal agenda." Glenn Beck, a former talk-radio host who launched a show on Fox News the day before Obama was inaugurated, compared the president to Mussolini. Some schools refused to show the speech. Some parents kept their kids home that day. Here is the pith of the speech they missed: "No matter what you want to do with your life," Obama said, "I guarantee that you'll need an education to do it."

(pp. 14-15):

This book also makes an argument about the American political tradition: nothing trumps the Revolution. From the start, the Tea Party's chief political asset was its name: the echo of the Revolution conferred upon a scattered, diffuse, and confused movement a degree of legitimacy and the appearance, almost, of coherence. Aside from the name and the costume, the Tea Party offered an analogy: rejecting the bailout is like dumping the tea; health care reform is like the Tea Act; our struggle is like theirs. Americans have drawn Revolutionary analogies before. They have drawn them for a very long time. When in doubt, in American politics, left, right, or center, deploy the Founding Fathers. Relying on this sort of analogy, advocates of health care reform could have insisted that, since John Hancock once urged the Massachusetts legislature to raise funds for the erection of lighthouses, he would have supported state health care reform, because, like a lighthouse, health care coverage concerns public safety. That might sound strained, at best, but something like it has been tried. In 1798, John Adams signed an "Act for the relief of sick and disabled Seamen": state and later federal government officials collected taxes from shipmasters, which were used to build hospitals and provide medical care for merchant and naval seamen. In the 1940s, health care reformers used this precedent to bolster their case. Government-sponsored health care wasn't un-American, these reformers argued; Adams had thought of it.

(p. 16):

Historical fundamentalism is marked by the belief that a particular and quite narrowly defined past -- "the founding" -- is ageless and sacred and to be worshipped; that certain historical texts -- "the founding documents" -- are to be read in the same spirit with which religious fundamentalists read, for instance, the Ten Commandments; that the Founding Fathers were divinely inspird; that the academic study of history (whose standards of evidence and methods of analysis are based on skepticism) is a conspiracy and, furthermore, blasphemy; and that political arguments grounded in appeals to the founding documents, as sacred texts, and to the Founding Fathers, as prophets, are therefore incontrovertible.

(pp. 16-17):

They weren't even called the Founding Fathers until Warren G. Harding coined that phrase in his keynotes address at the Republican National Convention in 1916. Harding also invoked the Founding Fathers during his inauguration in 1921 -- "Standing in this presence, mindful of the solemnity of this occasion, feeling the emotions which no one may know until he senses the great weight of responsibility for himself, I must utter my belief in the divine inspiration of the founding fathers" -- in what is quite possibly the worst inaugural address ever written. ("It reminds me of a string of wet sponges," H. L. Mencken wrote. "It reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, or college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it.")

1. Ye Olde Media: containing reflections on nations founded in revolutions -- an introduction to our characters -- a history of the Stamp Act -- the birth, death, and resurrection of the newspaper -- its dire fate, of later -- and a visit to the Green Dragon Tavern (pp. 23-24):

Meanwhile, though, the Revolution was so brilliant and daring -- and, of course, so original and definitive and constitutive -- that everyone wanted to claim to have inherited it, especially when running for office or starting a movement or pushing through a piece of legislation. Beginning even before it was over, the Revolution has been put to wildly varying political purposes. Federalists claimed its legacy; so did Anti-Federalists. Supporters of Andrew Jackson's Democratic Party said they were the true sons of the Revolution. No, Whigs said: we are. The Union claimed the Revolution; so, just as fervently, did the Confederacy. In the 1950s, southern segregationists insisted that they were upholding the legacy of the Founding Fathers by adhering to the Constitution. "There is nothing in the United States Constitution that gives the Congress, the President,or the Supreme Court the right to declare that white and colored children must attend the same public schools," said Mississippi senator James Eastland. Advocates of civil rights countered that their movement carried the banner of the Revolution. "Our nation in a sense came into being through a massive act of civil disobedience." A lot of people talked about the 1964 Civil Rights Act as realizing, at long last, the promise of the Declaration of Independence. Lyndon Johnson compared Selma to Lexington and Concord. The 1965 Voting Rights Act was said to be an end to taxation without representation. "Black people are rebelling in the same way Americans did in the Boston Massacre," Stokely Carmichael said in 1966. That same year, when Johnston signed into law a bill establishing an American Revolution Bicentennial Commission, he used the opportunity to argue for American involvement in Southeast Asia. "Today, the Vietnamese people are fighting for their freedom in South Vietnam. We are carrying forward our great heritage by helping to sustain their efforts." One year later, at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta, King said, "We still need some Paul Revere of conscience to alert every hamlet and every village of America that revolution is still at hand." What all these people meant by "revolution," of course, was different.

(p. 38):

(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.")

(pp. 40-41):

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. "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 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."

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. And this time around, there was no sign of a reprieve.

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 (pp. 44-47):

"The history of our revolution will be one continued lye from one end to the other," John Adams once predicted. 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. [ . . . ]

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." [ . . . ]

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.") 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.

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.

(pp. 51-52):

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.

Franklin, who had launched his literary career as Mrs. Silence Dogood, loved pseudonyms, satires, and shams of every sort. Beginning in 1732, he had been printing Poor Richard's Almanack, using the pseudonym Richard Saunders. (The word poor in the title of an almanac was an eighteenth-century term of art, a promise that a book would be funny and a warning that it might be vulgar. Poor Richard's rivals included Poor Robin and Poor Will.) Almanacs forecast twelve months' worth of weather; Franklin knew this for nonsense: in 1741, Poor Richard predicted only sunshine, explaining to his Courteous Reader, "To oblige thee the more, I have omitted all the bad Weather, being Thy Friend R.S."

(p. 58):

The specter of slave rebellion wielded massive political power in the eighteenth century. Everywhere in the colonies, slaves who murdered their owners were subject to the most atrocious punishments meted out in the English-speaking world. In Antigua, in 1736, some black men convicted of conspiracy were roasted alive, others were broken on the wheel, and some starved to death. Five years later, thirteen black men were burned at the stake in New York City, and seventeen more were hanged, for conspiring to burn the city down and murder their maters. In 1755, a black woman convicted of poisoning her owner, a merchant from Charlestown, was burned at the stake in Cambridge; her coconspirator, a man named Mark, was hanged in an iron gibbet on Boston Neck. Some Sons of Liberty, like Otis and Appleton, might argue for an end to slavery, but New England was by no means seized with abolitionist fervor; slave owners in Massachusetts, as everywhere, lived in fear of insurrection. In 1879, a British captain stationed in Boston was indicted by a grand jury "for stirring up, exciting, and encouraging the Negro slaves in Boston to a conspiracy against their masters."

(p. 64):

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.) 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.

(pp. 65-68):

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. [ . . . ] 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." (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. [ . . . ] 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." People from the town handed out apples, sandwiches, sleeping bags, and blankest. 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 th 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. The time for revolution, they said, had come again. [ . . . ]

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 of 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.

3. How to Commit Revolution: containing a singular encounter with the nation's storyteller -- the misadventures 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 (pp. 72-74):

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." 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 our 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.

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 in 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. 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.

Lepore points out that as England was moving toward ending slavery (at least within England, in 1772), Massachusetts had the option of ending slavery (in 1771) to be more in line with England, or keeping it to pursue the option of union with the colonies. Ultimately it would be necessary for the American colonies to break with England in order to preserve slavery, which is what happened.

(pp. 85-87):

"The Destruction of the Tea is so bold, so daring, so firm, intrepid and inflexible," John Adams wrote, "that I can't but consider it as an Epocha in history." [ . . . ]

But for a while anyway, the dumping of the tea was less politically serviceable than what had happened three years before it. The Boston Massacre was commemorated every year from 1771 to 1783 with a public oration delivered before huge crowds. "Let all America join in one common prayer to heaven that the inhuman, unprovoked murders of the fifth of March . . . may ever stand on history without parallel," John Hancock said, when he gave the oration in 1774. No one gave any speeches on the sixteenth of December. And no one called it a "tea party," either. The dumping of the tea wasn't such a big deal. In 1823, the fiftieth anniversary of what had always been called, simply, "the destruction of the tea," passed without observance. Not so the rest of the semicentennial. The year 1825 saw the publication of the first historical novel set in Boston during the Revolution, Lydia Maria Child's The Rebels, and the laying of the cornerstone for the Bunker Hill monument. "Those who established our liberty and our government are daily dropping from among us," said Daniel Webster at the dedication. The Revolutionary generation was dying. The next year, when news reached Boston that John Adams and Thomas Jefferson had died on the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, July, 4, 1826, all the ships in the harbor lowered their flags to half-mast. [ . . . ]

What happened in Boston in 1773 was first called a "tea party," at least in print, in the title of a book published in 1834: A Retrospect of the Boston Tea-Party: With a Memoir of George R. T. Hewes.

(pp. 93-94):

In London, Samuel Johnson wrote a pamphlet called Taxation No Tyranny, in which he asked, "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among th drivers of negroes?" Meanwhile, in Boston, Wheatley wrote in a letter that was widely published, "In every human breast, God has implanted a Principle, which we call Love of Freedom; it is impatient of Oppression, and pants for Deliverance." She offered her own remarks about the nature of hypocrisy. "How well the Cry for Liberty and the reverse Disposition for the Exercise of oppressive Power over others agree I humbly think it does not require the Penetration of a Philosopher to determine."

In March of 1775, Patrick Henry gave a yet more stirring speech: "Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!" The following November, Virginia's royal governor, Lord Dunmore, offered freedom to any slaves who would join His Majesty's troops in suppressing the American rebellion. Dunmore's proclamation would animate the passions of George Washington's own slaves. "There is not a man of them who would leave us if they believed they could make their escape," Washington's cousin wrote from Mount Vernon, adding bitterly, "Liberty is sweet."

(p. 95):

In 2010, nationwide polls reported that people who identified themselves as sympathetic with the Tea Party were overwhelmingly white, although estimates varied, and the Tea Party didn't appear to be much whiter than, say, the Republican Party. Whatever else had drawn people into the movement -- the bailout, health care, taxes, Fox News, and, above all, the economy -- some of it, for some people, was probably discomfort with the United States' first black president, because he was black. But it wasn't the whiteness of the Tea Party that I found most striking. It was the whiteness of their Revolution. The Founding Fathers were the whites of their eyes, a fantasy of an America before race, without race. There were very few black people in the Tea Party, but there were no black people at all in the Tea Party's eighteenth century. Nor, for that matter, were there any women, aside from Abigail Adams, and no slavery, poverty, ignorance, insanity, sickness, or misery. Nor was there any art, literature, sex, pleasure, or humor. There were only the Founding Fathers with their white wigs, wearing their three-cornered hats, in their Christian nation, revolting against taxes, and defending their right to bear arms.

(pp. 96-97):

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. 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."

There was, tough, 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.

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 (pp. 98-99):

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's 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 because 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." In the Tea Party, the fringe wasn't some shifty-looking riffraff carrying a creepy sign; it was the loudmouth holding the microphone.

(p. 103):

Even as Washington rode northward [to assume command of the Continental army], American forces outside Boston, learning that Gage planned to take a hill outside of 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.) The Americans had more than proved their mettle, but they lost the hill. The British burned Charlestown to the ground.

(pp. 112-113):

The National Center for Constitutional Studies was started in Utah in 1967, to promote originalism, the idea that the original intent of the framers is knowable and fixed and the final word. When the framers were still alive, people who wanted to know what they meant, by, say, a particular phrase, couldn't really ask them. Delegates to the Constitutional Convention pledged themselves to secrecy. And the more time passed, the remoter the Revolution, the more inscrutable the documents (even the meaning of the words changed), the greater the distance between now and then,t he more demanding the act of interpretation. In 1816, when Jefferson was seventy-three, many of his Revolutionary generation having already died, he offered this answer, when asked what the framers would suggest about how to deal with this problem. "This they would say themselves, were they to rise from the dead"; "laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind." (To paraphrase the historian Carl Becker, the question the Enlightenment asked was not, "What would our forefather do?" but "How can we make society better?") Jefferson put it this way: "Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human." In Federalist 14, Madison asked, "Is it not the glory of the people of America, that, whilst they have paid a decent regard to the opinions of former times and other nations, they have not suffered a blind veneration for antiquity, for custom, or for names, to overrule the suggestions of their own good sense, the knowledge of their own situation, and the lessons of their own experience?" They founders were not prophets. Nor did they hope to be worshipped. They believed that to defer without examination to what your forefathers believed is to become a slave to the tyranny of the past.

(pp. 116-117):

In 1857, in Dred Scott v. Sandford, the Supreme court, enslaved to the tyranny of the past, ruled that the framers had considered blacks "as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they have no rights which the white man was bound to respect." That's what Illinois senator Stephen Douglas and his Republican challenger, Abraham Lincoln, debated, the next year. "I believe that this government was made on the white basis," Douglas said. "It was made by white men for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever." Lincoln disagreed: "I believe the entire records of the world, from the date of the Declaration of Independence up to within three years ago, may be searched in vain for one single affirmation, from one single man, that the negro was not included in the Declaration of Independence," he said. "I think I may defy Douglas to show that any President ever said so -- that any member of Congress ever said so -- or that any man ever said so, until the necessities of the Democratic party had to invent that."

The question debated by Lincoln and Douglas was historical, but the founding documents couldn't settle it because the founders hadn't settled it. Even the Civil War didn't setle it. "Have You Ever Seen the Words Forced Busing in the Constitution?" That was a sign carried in Boston, on March 5, 1975, at a reenactment of the Boston Massacre on its 205th anniversary. In 1974, Judge W. Arthur Garrity, a federal district court judge, mandated the integration of Boston's public schools -- requiring the forced busing of children, from one neighborhood to another. White antibusing activists turned up at Bicentennial events in force. As J. Anthony Lukas reported in Common Ground, "Opponents of busing saw themselves as victims of the same oppression which had beset eighteenth-century Bostonians and said they were fighting for the same right to control their own lives. State Representative Ray Flynn warned, 'The sacred principles on which this nation was founded are threatened by a new tyranny, a tyranny dressed in judicial robes.'" On the day of the 1975 Boston Massacre reenactment, four hundred antibusing protesters in colonial garb marched to the Old State House carrying a coffin marked "R.I.P. Liberty, Born 1770 -- Died 1974." When the reenactors portraying Preston's grenadiers fired, all four hundred protesters fell to the ground."

(pp. 120-121):

Even as Marshall was making that speech, the banner of originalism was being taken up by evangelicals, who, since joining the Reagan Revolution in 1980, had been playing an increasingly prominent role in American politics. "Any diligent student of American history finds that our great nation was founded by godly men upon godly principles to be a Christian nation," Jerry Falwell insisted. In 1987, Tim LaHaye, an evangelical minister who went on to write a series of best-selling apocalyptic novels, published a book called The Faith of Our Founding Fathers, in which he attempted to chronicle the "Rape of History" by "history revisionists" who had systematically erased from American textbooks the "evangelical Protestants who founded this nation." Documenting this claim was no mean feat. Jefferson posed a particular problem, not least because he crafted a custom copy of the Bible by cutting out all the miracles and pasting together what was left. LaHaye, to support his argument, took out his own pair of scissors, deciding, for instance, that Jefferson didn't count as a Founding Father because he "had nothing to do with the founding of our nation," and basing his claims about Benjamin Franklin not on evidence (because, as he admitted, "There is no evidence that Franklin ever became a Christian"), but on sheer bald, raising-the-founders-from-the-dead assertion. LaHaye wrote, "Many modern secularizers try to claim Franklin as one of their own. I am confident, however, that Franklin would not identify with them were he alive today." (Alas, Franklin, who once said he wished he could preserve himself in a vat of Madeira wine, to see what the world would look like in a century or two, is not, in fact, alive today. And, while I confess that I'm quite excessively fond of him, the man is not coming back.)

(pp. 122-123):

Precisely what the founders believed about God, Jesus, sin, the Bible, churches, and hell is probably impossible to discover. They changed their minds and ggave different accounts to different people: Franklin said one thing to his sister, Jane, and another thing to David Hume; Washington prayed with his troops, but, while he lay slowly dying, he declined to call for a preacher. This can make them look like hypocrites, but that's unfair, as are a great many attacks on these men. They approached religion more or less the same way they approached everything else that interested them: Franklin invented his own, Washington proved diplomatic, Adams grumbled about it (he hated Christianity, he once said, but he couldn't think of anything better, and he also regarded it as necessary), Jefferson could not stop tinkering with it, and Madison defended, as a natural right, the free exercise of it. That they wanted to preserve religious liberty by separating church and state does not mean they were irreligious. They wanted to protect religion from the state, as much as the other way around.

Nevertheless, if the founders had followed their forefathers, they would have written a Constitution establishing Christianity as the national religion. Nearly every British North American colony was settled with an established religion; Connecticut's 1639 charter explained that the whole purpose of government was "to mayntayne and presearve the liberty and purity of the gospel of our Lord Jesus." In the century and a half between the Connecticut charter and the 1787 meeting of the Constitutional Convention lies an entire revolution, not just a political revolution but also a religious revolution. Following the faith of their fathers is exactly what the framers did not do. At a time when all but two states required religious tests for office, the Constitution prohibited them. At a time when all but three states still had an official religion, the Bill of Rights forbade the federal government from establishing one.

5. Your Superexcellent Age: chronicling a gathering on the common -- the curious history of the Pledge of Allegiance -- Common Sense -- independence -- the evacuation of Boston -- an attempt to steal the bicentennial -- some vexing remarks made by the former governor of Alaska -- an age of Paine -- the fates of our several characters -- and a surprising prophecy (pp. 127-128):

Next came a call to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.

"I pledge allegiance to the flag --"

The original pledge was written by Francis Bellamy, the former pastor of Boston's Bethany Baptist Church. Bellamy, a socialist, was the vice president of the Society of Christian Socialists; his sermons and lectures included "Jesus the Socialist" and "Socialism and the Bible." He was also the cousin of Edward Bellamy, whose 1888 novel, Looking Backward, 2000-1887, imagined a man born in Boston in 1857 falling asleep in 1887 and waking up in the year 2000, to find a socialist utopia, a city with no more poor, with a public square -- a Boston Common -- on every corner, "open squares filled with trees, among which statues glistened and fountains flashed."

"-- and to the Republic, for which it stands --"

Francis Bellamy wrote the Pledge of Allegiance for children, to recite at school; it wasn't meant for grown-ups. It was published in a Boston children's magazine, the Youth's Companion, in 1892, on the occasion of the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus's discovery of America.

"-- one nation --"

It became the national pledge in 1942.

" -- under God --"

"Under God" was added in the 1950s.

"-- indivisible --"

In the 1970s, white antibusing activists in Boston recited an antipledge: "We will not pledge allegiance to the order of the United States District Court, nor the dictatorship for which it stands; one order, under Garrity, with liberty and justice for none."

"-- with liberty and justice --"

At a meeting in Boston in 1976, a group calling itself the Bicentennial Ethnic Racial Forum drafted a new pledge, swearing allegiance to "one nation of many people, cultures, languages, and colors." That went nowhere. The next year, Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis vetoed a law requiring teachers to lead schoolchildren in daily recitations of the pledge. His veto became a partisan weapon during the presidential campaign of 1988, the campaign in which "liberal" became a smear. "What is it about the pledge that upsets him so much?" then vice president George Bush asked at a rally, in a particularly effective attack on his "card-carrying member of the ACLU" opponent.

"-- for all."

(pp. 131-132):

In Philadelphia, the Continental Congress set about declaring independence. John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Robert Livingston, and Roger Sherman served on a committee charged with drafting a declaration. [ . . . ] Jefferson drafted the declaration. [ . . . ] (Independence -- rebellion -- was extraordinary, a last resort. It required an elaborate justification, abuses compiled, compounded, over years and years.) Last on Jefferson's list, in his original draft, was slavery. In a breathless paragraph, his longest and angriest grievance against the king, Jefferson blamed George III for slavery ("He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery"), for colonists' failure to abolish the slave trade ("determined to keep open a market where men should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce"), and for Dunmore's Proclamation ("he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he had deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another"). Jefferson's fellow delegates could not abide it. To some, it went too far; to others, it didn't go half far enough. And as everyone knew, it was they, and not the British, who were most vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy. They struck it out almost entirely; all that's left is "he has excited domestic insurrections among us" (which Franklin wrote). Abigail Adams complained to John: "I cannot but feel sorry that some of the most manly sentiments in the declaration are expunged."

(p. 137):

The former governor of Alaska arrived. She grabbed hold of the microphone. "I love Boston," she said. It's "the town that the Sons of Liberty called home." She spoke of the city's history: "You're sounding the warning bell just like what happened in that midnight run and just like with that original tea party back in 1773." She talked about life in the United States: "Is that what Barack Obama meant, when he promised the nation that they would fundamentally transform America?" she asked. "Is this what their 'change' is all about? I want to tell him, 'Nah, you know, we, we'll keep clinging to our Constitution, and our guns, and religion, and you can keep the change."

In the far right, where originalism has slipped into fundamentalism, where historical scholarship is taken for a conspiracy and the founding of the United States has become a religion, it's not the past that's a foreign country. It's the present.

(pp. 139-140):

During the war, tens of thousands of slaves left their homes, escaping from slavery to the freedom promised by the British, and betting on British victory. They lost that bet. They died in battle, they died of disease, they ended up someplace else, they ended up back where they started, and worse off. (A fifteen-year-old girl captured while heading for Dunmore's regiment was greeted by her master with a whipping of eighty lashes, after which he poured hot embers into her wounds.) When the British evacuated, thousands of blacks went with them, in port after port. In Charleston, after all the ships were full, British soldiers patrolled the wharves to keep back the flocks of black men, women, and children frantic to leave the United States rather than be taken back up into slavery. A handful managed to duck under the redcoats' raised bayonets, jump off the docks, and swim out to the last longboats ferrying passengers to the British fleet -- whose crowded ships included the aptly named Free Briton. Clinging to the sides of the longboats, they were not allowed on board, but neither would they let go; in the end, their fingers were chopped off.

(pp. 141-142):

In 1777, Vermont became the first state to outlaw slavery. That same year, John Adams defeated a bill put forward in the Massachusetts legislature, to do the same. Slavery ended in Massachusetts in the 1780s, with vague court rulings, reinforced by the weight of public opinion." [ . . . ]

Twenty thousand mourners came to Franklin's funeral, but his fate, in the American imagination, is a dreary tale. "Early to Bed, and early to rise, makes a Man healthy, wealthy and wise," Franklin had written in "The Way to Wealth." "The sorrow that that maxim has cost me through my parents' experimenting on me with it, tongue cannot tell," Mark Twain once wrote. By the time Twain was writing, in 1870, Poor Richard's parody, the useless advice to a wayward nephew, was taken literally. Of the thrifty, frugal, prudent, sober, homey, quaint, sexless, humorless, and preachy Benjamin Franklin, the prophet of prosperity, Twain wrote, "He was a hard lot." To his twee reputation, Franklin's breathtakingly vast, cosmopolitan, enlightened, revolutionary life seemed to matter not at all. As Poor Richard once said, sometimes "Force shites upon Reason's back."

(pp. 146-147):

Four years later, Paul Revere died in Boston. His obituary made no mention his ride. Neither had Ramsay or Warren, in their histories. Neither the ride nor Revere was famous until Longfellow wrote his poem in 1860 -- as a commentary on the coming war -- after which Revere became a legend. Paine's fare had been weirder. In 1800, a New York Republican Society resolved: "May his Rights of Man be handed down to our latest posterity, but may his Age of Reason never live to see the rising generation." That's more or less what's happened. So wholly has The Age of Reason been forgotten that Paine's mantle has been claimed not only by Ronald Reagan but also by the Christian Coalition's Ralph Reed, who has quoted him, and by North Carolina senator Jesse Helms, who in 1992 supported a proposal to erect a Paine monument in Washington, DC. In 1974, Jeremy Rifkin's Peoples Bicentennial Commission published a manifesto called Common Sense II: The Case Against Corporate Tyranny, which, while left, not right, has a lot in common with Glenn Beck's Common Sense: The Case Against an Out-of-Control Government. Thomas Paine, Beck once said on his show, was the Glenn Beck of the American Revolution. Paine's not rolling over in his grave, though. In 1819, ten years after he was buried, his bones were dug up, and they've since been lost. All things considered, that might be for the best.

(pp. 148-149):

Many eighteenth-century men of letters shared Thomas Paine's views about religion, certainly his anticlericalism, and even his skepticism. Very many, like Samuel Adams, most vehemently did not. And, of course, and especially outside the republic of letters, very many Americans, including Mercy Otis Warren, Phillis Wheatley, and Jane Mecom, were devout Christians. Faith, in the end, was all Jane Mecom had. Paine's views on religion were radical. But a commitment to religious liberty, religious pluralism, and the separation of church and state was not.

(pp. 149-151):

In 1783, when the Treaty of Paris ended the war, American seamen lost the protection of Britain's treaties with the so-called Barbary States: Algiers, Tripoli, Morocco, and Tunisia. Over the next decade, more than seven hundred American sailors were captured and held as slaves in North Africa. [ . . . ] In May of 1979, just three months before The Algerine Captive was published, John Adams signed the Treaty of Tripoli, freeing the American captives in North Africa. Its Article 11, an assurance that the United States would never engage in a holy war, declared, in no uncertain terms, that "the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion."

People on the far right often argue that the idea of a "wall of separation" between church and state wasn't built until the 1830s and 1840s; Tyler was dead by then, but he seems to have thought that wall had been built at the Constitutional Convention. Invoking Islam to argue for religious liberty was an eighteenth-century commonplace, practiced by writers as different as Johnson, Montesquieu, and Voltaire, but Royall Tyler spoke and wrote about religious liberty all his life, from the pulpit, from the bench, and from his writing desk. Nor was Tyler's life a battle between reason and faith. Early and easily he reconciled his Enlightenment rationalism with his Episcopalian faith. [ . . . ]

By 1814, Tyler had retired both from the bench and from his law professorship at the University of Vermont. Three years later, he prepared for publication a treatise called The Touchstone; Or a Humble Modest Inquiry into the Nature of Religious Intolerance. Here again he argued, "A State Religion always has, and ever will be intolerant." That same year, Tyler wrote an essay in which he declared that "all upright ministers -- all, of every domination, . . . will ever condemn a connexion of church and state, as an unhallowed profanation of their character and calling."

Epilogue: Revering America (pp. 152-155):

On Sunday, April 18, 2010, three days after the Tea Party Express left Boston, George Pataki rode into town. Pataki, the former Republican governor of New York, was thinking about running for president; he was in need of a Founding Father. In Boston's North End, he positioned himself in front of an equestrian statue of Paul Revere. He was there to launch "Revere America," a nonprofit "dedicated to advancing common sense public policies rooted in our traditions of freedom and free markets that will once again make America secure and prosperous for generations to come." Its goal was "to harness and amplify the voices of the American people to give them a greater say in fighting back against the threats to freedom posed by Washington liberals." [ . . . ]

The motto of Revere America was "Respecting Our History. Protecting Our Future." The Founding Fathers George Pataki wanted Americans to worship fought a Revolution, he believed, for the sake of free markets. That's not what the Revolution meant to Jane Mecom. In the summer of 1786, when Mecom was living in that house that would one day be demolished to make room for the statue of Paul Revere, she wrote a letter telling her brother [Ben Franklin] that, in Boston, the Fourth of July -- the nation's tenth birthday -- was overshadowed by yet another wonderful celebration: the opening of a bridge to Cambridge. She loved the new bridge so much -- "it is Really a charming Place" -- that she described it for him. "As you Approach to it it is a Beautiful Sight with a Little Vildg at the other End the Buildings all New the Prospect on Each Side is Delight full." The day of Harvard's commencement, she told him, so many people crossed the river that the toll gatherers took in five hundred dollars. And then, musing on another crop of Harvard graduates, Jane Mecom ventured an opinion, something she didn't often do, about what it meant to have been deprived of an education, an opinion -- a revolutionary opinion -- about inequality. She had been reading a book by the Englishman Richard Price. "Dr Price," she reported, "thinks Thousands of Boyles Clarks and Newtons have Probably been lost to the world, and lived and died in Ignorance and meanness, merely for want of being Placed in favourable Situations, and Injoying Proper Advantages." Thousands of Isaac Newtons were out there, living and dying in poverty, ignorance, and obscurity. The chances for escape weren't good. "Very few we know," she reminded her brother, "is able to beat thro all Impedements and Arrive to any Grat Degre of superiority in Understanding." [ . . . ]

In the world into which Franklin and his sister were born, very few beat through. Of their father's seventeen children, Benjamin was the only one. That world was changing. Massachusetts had already abolished slavery. In 1789, Boston, for the first time, mandated the education of girls. Franklin's escape, America's birth, an age of revolutions, made possible a new world, a world of fewer obstacles. Franklin liked to think of his life as the story of America, and in a way, he was right. He never finished his autobiography. And maybe that's because he knew that, since he had made his life into an allegory for America, it could have no ending. The Revolution is the story of America because it is the story of beginning.

(pp. 156-157):

On April 30, Glenn Beck launched a series called "Founders' Fridays." He began with Samuel Adams. He lamented the founders' fall from greatness: "Our Founding Fathers were once revered in this country as divinely inspired, courageous visionaries. But now, after the past one hundred years of 'enlightenment,' we've come to realize that they were nothing but old, white, racist, heathens." He explained his purpose: "In order to restore the country, we have to restore the men who founded it on certain principles to the rightful place in our national psyche." On the next Founders' Friday, May 7, Beck reported that the ratings were so good during that first show that he was thinking about extending the series. It seems like America, for some reason or another, is interested now in our Founding Fathers and meeting who they really, truly are." He introduced his guests, Earl Taylor, president of the National Center for Constitutional Studies, and Andrew Allison, coauthor of The Real George Washington. He urged viewers to read Washington's old words. "When you read these guys," Beck said, "it's alive. It's like, you know, reading the scriptures. It's like reading the Bible. It is alive today. And it only comes alive when you need it." Just like Jesus in the Gospels.

(pp. 157-158):

On May 11, the executive board of the nine-thousand-member Organization of American Historians passed a resolution urging the Texas School Board to reconsider its proposed amendments to the state's social studies curriculum and instead "adopt a history curriculum that reflects the understanding of history developed by the historians and history teaches of Texas." [ . . . ] The day the Organization of American Historians released that statement, the governor of Arizona signed into law a bill prohibiting the state's public schools from offering courses in ethnic studies. The new bill was targeted at a Mexican American studies program in the Tucson school district that, according to the Associated Press, was believed by the state's head of public education to teach "Latino students that they are oppressed by white people."

posted 2011-08-12