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The Whites of their Eyes
THE WHITES
OF THEIR EYES
The Public Square Book Series
P
RINCETON
U
NIVERSITY
P
RESS
Ruth O’Brien, Series Editor
OF THEIR EYES
The Tea Party’s
Revolution and the
Battle over
American History
JILL LEPORE
Copyright © 2010 by Jill Lepore
Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work
should be sent to Permissions, Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press,
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In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press,
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All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lepore, Jill, 1966–
The whites of their eyes : the Tea Party’s revolution and the battle over American history / Jill Lepore.
p. cm. — (The public square book series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-691-15027-7 (hardcover : acid-free paper) 1. United States—History—Philosophy. 2. United States—Historiography—Social aspects. 3. United States—Historiography—Political aspects. 4. United States—History—Revolution, 1775–1783—Influence. 5. United States—History—Errors, inventions, etc. 6. Tea Party movement. 7. Fundamentalism—United States. 8. Evangelicalism—United States. 9. Right-wing extremists—United States. I. Title.
E175.9.L46 2010
973.3'115—dc22
2010030251
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
Parts of this book were originally published in
The New Yorker
.
The spelling, capitalization, and punctuation of eighteenth-century writing have been left, whenever possible, as they were in the original.
This book has been composed in Sabon
Printed on acid-free paper. ∞
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To my sons
I do not mean to say, that the scenes of the revolution
are now
or
ever will be
entirely forgotten;
But that, like everything else, they must fade
upon the memory of the world, and grow
more and more dim by the lapse of time.
—Abraham Lincoln, 1838
FOREWORD
Ruth O’Brien
Recalling the soldiers at Bunker Hill who, facing the British, were told to get close enough to see “the whites of their eyes,” Jill Lepore’s magnificent book takes a very close look at both the founding of the United States and its legacy—the unending battle over American history. In artful and vivid prose, Lepore takes readers the distance between past and present, and then back again, sometimes all in the space of a page, to explain, for instance, how the Revolution could spawn both the conservative Tea Party, in the twenty-first century, and its ideological opposite—the
liberal Tax Equity for Americans (TEA) Party, in the 1970s and, finally, to offer a thoughtful meditation on history itself. The study of history, she argues, is always “controversial, contentious, and contested,” but the Tea Party’s Revolution was antihistorical, tangling together originalism, evangelicalism, and fundamentalism. Lepore, deftly navigating between history, culture, and politics, also offers a caution about her own profession. In the 1970s, she argues, academic historians belittled the Bicentennial as “schlock” but “didn’t offer an answer, a story, to a country that needed one.” “T
hat left plenty of room,” she suggests, “for a lot of other people to get into the history business.” And they did.
Beginning in 2009, one month after the election of Barack Obama, the Tea Party charged the new administration with
imposing “taxation without representation,” as if health care legislation, passed by Congress in 2010, were like the Stamp Act, imposed by Parliament in 1765. Lepore shows us, though, that this kind of maneuver was not new. “Americans have drawn Revolutionary analogies before,” she writes. “They have drawn them for a very long time.” To reveal how historians think about the past, Lepore carries readers on a journey, her journey, as she scrambles onto a replica Revolutionary ship, sits in dimly lit Revolutionary taverns, and attends Revolutionary reenactments. By musing on how the past ca
n better inform the present and on how historians might play a civic role, this book enters the public arena—and the Public Square.
THE WHITES
OF THEIR EYES
Party Like It’s 1773
One morning last March,
I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized
fence on the Boston Common.
—Robert Lowell, “For the Union Dead,” 1960
Lashed to a dock in the oldest working shipyard in America, the Boston Tea Party Ship, or what was left of her, sat in a dozen feet of brackish water in Gloucester Harbor. I went to see her one raw winter’s morning in March. Her bones creaked when the wind blew, but no halyards clanged: she had no masts, no rigging, and hardly any decking. She was not open to the public. To clamber aboard, I had to climb down an iron ladder, cross two floating docks, crawl under a stretch of ropes, and walk a plank, barefoot. Topsides, it felt like being inside a greenhouse, if a greenhouse we
re a houseboat and haunted: plastic sheeting stapled to a tented frame of two-by-fours sheltered the ship from gale, sleet, rain, snow, and every other act of God to afflict the rocky coast of Cape Ann, the site of twenty-seven shipwrecks before John Hancock convinced the Massachusetts legislature to raise money to build a pair of lighthouses, whose whale-oil lights were first lit on December 21, 1771, Forefathers Day, a holiday commemorating the arrival of the
Mayflower
’s first landing party in Plymouth, a century and a half before.
1
Americans love an anniversary.
Beaver
was the name carved, ornately, in her stern. She was a replica. No one knows what became of the original
Beaver
, one of three ships whose cargo of East India Company tea was dumped into Boston Harbor on December 16, 1773, which pleased Hancock, who had been making a great deal of money by smuggling Dutch tea into the colonies. That
Beaver
was long gone; like many another old boat, she sank or burned or was junked for parts, a derelict on a distant shore. In 1972, three Boston businessmen got the idea of sailing a ship across the Atlantic for the tea party’s bicentennial. They bought a Baltic schooner, built in Denmark in 1908, and had her rerigged as an English brig, powered by an a
nachronistic engine that was, unfortunately, put in backwards and caught fire on the way over. Still, she made it to Boston in time for the hoopla. After that, the bicentennial
Beaver
was anchored at the Congress Street Bridge, next to what became the Boston Children’s Museum. For years, it was a popular attraction. In 2001, though, the site was struck by lightning and closed for repairs. A renovation was planned. But that was stalled by the Big Dig, the excavation of three and a half miles of tunnel designed to rescue the city from the blight of Interstate 93, an elevated expressway that,
since the 1950s, had made it almost impossible to see the ocean, and this in a city whose earliest maps were inked with names like Flounder Lane, Sea Street, and Dock Square. (Boston is, and always has been, a fishy place.) In 2007, welders working on the Congress Street Bridge accidentally started another fire, although by then, the
Beaver
had already been towed, by tugboat, twenty-eight miles to Gloucester, where she’d been ever since, bereft, abandoned, and all but forgotten.
2
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 coun
try 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.
3
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.
4
Almost overnight, Tea Parties sprang up across the country. The Chicago Tea Party adopted the motto “Revolution Is Brewing.”
5
On April 15, Tax Day, the day Americans file their income tax returns, Tea Party protests were held in hundreds of cities and towns. Everywhere, people told stories about the Revolution. On Boston Common, a gently sloping patch of grass set aside for pastureland in 1634, four years after Puritans founded their city on a hill, state senator Robert Hedlund, a Republican from Plymouth County, addressed a few hundred people gathered around a tree. “The history books in
our public schools,” he said, had failed to teach that what happened in 1773 “was about a collection of interested citizens afraid of seeing their economic success determined by the whim of an interventionist governmental body.”
6
Michael Johns of the Heritage Foundation, believing that the United States was founded as a Christian nation, wanted to send this message to the White House:
Mr. Obama, every historical document signed in Philadelphia, every founding document in this nation, has cited our creator. That is the basis on which we distinguish ourselves in the world. And it is the foundation of our liberty and our God-given freedom.
David Tuerck, an economist from Suffolk University, wore a George Washington tie: “In case there are any people here with Obama’s picture in their living room, they can see what a real patriot looks like.” The problem wasn’t just in DC, Tuerck said. “Right here in Massachusetts, we have a Supreme Judicial Court that thinks it can redefine marriage without a thought to the will of the people.” (In 2004, same-sex marriage became legal in Massachusetts when the state’s highest court ruled that its restriction was unconstitutional.) “It’s time for us to rally around a new cause,” Tuer
ck said, “which is to return America to the principles for which our forefathers fought and died. It’s time for a new American Revolution. And I can think of no better place to start that revolution than right here.”