The Whites of their Eyes (3 page)

Beginning with the rise of the New Left in the 1960s, women’s history, labor history, and the history of slavery and emancipation—the study, in one way or another, of ordinary
people, of groups, and, especially, of conflict—dominated the academic study of American history. (Every school subject is taught differently than it was in the 1950s, and American history is no exception.) In word-by-word amendments to the existing curriculum, the Texas School Board proposed rejecting this scholarship, replacing “ordinary people” with “patriots and good citizens”; dispensing with “capitalism” in favor of “free enterprise”; and calling the “slave trade” the “Atlantic triangular trade.” The amendments also included some striking adjustments to the teaching of twentieth-century
history: a defense of McCarthyism, for instance (in studying the House Committee on Un-American Activities, students were to be responsible for explaining “how the later release of the Venona Papers confirmed suspicions of communist infiltration in U.S. government”), and an emphasis on “the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s, including Phyllis Schlafly, the Contract with America, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority, and the National Rifle Association.” But what proved most controversial, as the press picked up the story, were changes to the teaching of the foundi
ng era of American history. Thomas Aquinas was added to a list of thinkers who inspired the American Revolution; Thomas Jefferson (who once wrote about a “wall of separation between Church & State”) was removed. The United States, called, in the old curriculum, a “democratic society,” was now to be referred to as a “constitutional republic.” Biblical law was to be studied as an intellectual influence on the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution. Kids in Texas, who used to study Locke, Hobbes, and Montesquieu as thinkers whose ideas informed the nation’s foundin
g, would now dispense with Hobbes, in favor of Moses.
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The week the Texas School Board was meeting in Austin, a chapter of the Tea Party was holding its regular monthly meeting in Boston. I decided to go. In the weeks that followed, I went to more Tea Party meetings and rallies. I also visited historic sites, places I’d been many times before, and interviewed museum curators, people I’d known, and worked with, for years. Meanwhile, I dug in the archives. And I drove up to Gloucester. Reading, watching, listening, and even scrambling over that ship, I came to believe, and this book argues, that the use of the Revolution by the far right had quit
e a lot to do with the
Beaver
, which sailed across the Atlantic, nearly sank on the way over, and dropped anchor in Boston Harbor just in time for Watergate, at a moment in American history when no one could agree on what story a country torn apart by war in Vietnam and civil rights strife at home ought to tell about its unruly beginnings.

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 erecti
on 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 quite 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.
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That political tradition is long-standing. But the more I looked at the Tea Party, at Beck and Hannity as history teachers, and at the Texas School Board reforms, the more it struck me that the statement at the core of the far right’s version of American history went just a bit further. It was more literal than an analogy. It wasn’t “our struggle is like theirs.” It was “we are there” or “they are here.” The unanswered question of the Bicentennial was, “What ails the American spirit?” Antihistory has no patience for ambiguity, self-doubt, and introspection. The Tea Party had an answer: “
We have forsaken the Founding Fathers.” Political affiliates are, by nature, motley. But what the Tea Party, Beck and Hannity, and the Texas School Board shared was a set of assumptions about the relationship between the past and the present that was both broadly anti-intellectual and, quite specifically, antihistorical, not least because it defies chronology, the logic of time.
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To say that we are there, or the Founding Fathers are here, or that we have forsaken them and they’re rolling over in their graves because of the latest, breaking political development—the election of the United States’
first African American president, for instance—is to subscribe to a set of assumptions about the relationship between the past and the
present stricter, even, than the strictest form of constitutional originalism, a set of assumptions that, conflating originalism, evangelicalism, and heritage tourism, amounts to a variety of fundamentalism.

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 inspired; 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 f
ounding documents, as sacred texts, and to the Founding Fathers, as prophets, are therefore incontrovertible.
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The past haunts us all. Just how is a subject of this book. But time moves forward, not backward. Chronology is like gravity. Nothing falls up. We cannot go back to the eighteenth century, and the Founding Fathers are not, in fact, here with us today. They weren’t even called the Founding Fathers until Warren G. Harding coined that phrase in his keynote 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 m
ay 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, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it.”)
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The Founding Fathers haven’t been rolling over in their graves for very long, either. Not one was roused from his eternal slumber with any regularity until about the time that Harding called the founders our fathers (and, more particularly, his) and said they were divinely inspired (which had the curious effect of granting to his presidency something akin to the divine right of kings). Dead presidents and deceased delegates to the Constitutional Conve
ntion only first got restless in 1868, in a play called
The Spirit of Seventy-Six
, published in Boston and set in a fictitious, suffragette future, where women voting and holding office were said to be “enough to make George Washington turn in his grave!”
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If that sounds old-fashioned, that’s because it is; we don’t say that people turn in their graves anymore. We say they “roll over.” That expression came into use in 1883, the year after Ralph Waldo Emerson died.
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Maybe it was Emerson who was rolling over in his grave. In American history, all roads lead to the Revolution: if Emerson had rolled over in his grave (miffed about the “rant heard round the world”), that would have to have happened in Concord’s Sleepy Hollow, a cemetery over whose dedication Emerson presided in 1855, calling it a “garden for the living,” and where he
was buried in 1882; Sleepy Hollow borrows its name from a story written by Washington Irving, who, born in 1783, the year the Treaty of Paris was signed, was named after George Washington; “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” published in 1820, is set in 1790 in a town haunted by the ghost of a Hessian soldier who had his head blown off, by cannonball, during some “nameless battle during the Revolutionary War”:

Certain of the most authentic historians of those parts, who have been careful in collecting and collating the floating facts concerning this spectre, allege that the body of the trooper having been buried in the churchyard, the ghost rides forth to the scene of battle in nightly quest of his head, and that the rushing speed with which he sometimes passes along the Hollow, like a midnight blast, is owing to his being belated, and in a hurry to get back to the churchyard before daybreak.
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I’d have worried about Emerson, wriggling, rotted, and miserable in his worm-ridden coffin in Sleepy Hollow, except that, of course, people don’t roll over in their graves any more than headless horsemen ride forth through the night. Emerson rests, undisturbed. But the battle over the Revolution rages on.

This book is an account of that battle, over the centuries. It is also, along the way, a history of the Revolution—an archival investigation into the relationship between the people and their rulers, between liberty and slavery, between learning and ignorance, and between irreverence and deference. Each of this book’s five chapters is set in one place—Boston—but each travels through time: each begins with the rise of the Tea Party, in 2009 and 2010; moves backward to iconic moments in the coming of the American Revolution, in the 1760s and 1770s; and then skips forward to the Bi
centennial of those events, in the 1960s and 1970s. Just as faith has its demands and its solaces, there are, I believe, demands and solaces in the study of history.
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My point in telling three stories at once is not to ignore the passage of time but rather to dwell on it, to see what’s remembered and what’s forgotten, what’s kept and what’s lost.

Standing on the
Beaver
watching sea-weedy waves slap the ship’s hull, I thought about how sailors on ocean-faring vessels once measured depth. They would drop a rope weighted with lead into the water and let it plummet till it reached bottom. I like to sink lines, too, to get to the bottom of things. This book is an argument against historical fundamentalism. It makes that argument by measuring the distance between the past and the present. It measures that distance by taking soundings in the ocean of time. Here, now, we float on a surface of yesterdays. Below swirls the blue-gree
n of childhood. Deeper still is the obscurity of long ago. But the eighteenth century, oh, the eighteenth century lies fathoms down.

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
LATE—AND A VISIT TO THE GREEN DRAGON TAVERN

“Everybody, anywhere I go, always asks me, ‘Where did you get that hat?’ ” Austin Hess told me, when we first met, beside a statue of Samuel Adams in front of Faneuil Hall. Hess, a twenty-six-year-old engineer and member of the steering committee of the Boston Tea Party, was wearing a tricornered hat: not your ordinary felt-and-cardboard fake but the genuine article, wide-brimmed and raffish. In April of 2009, two months after Rick Santelli, outraged by the Obama administration’s stimulus package, called for a new tea party, Hess showed up at a Tax Day rally on the Boston Common. H
e was carrying a sign that read “I Can Stimulate Myself.” He was much photographed; he appeared on television, a local Fox affiliate. He was wearing his hat. He got it at Pli-moth Plantation. It was made of “distressed faux leather.” You could order it on-line. It was called the Scallywag.
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The importance of the American Revolution to the twenty-first-century Tea Party movement might seem to have been slight—as if the name were mere happenstance, the knee
breeches knickknacks, the rhetoric of revolution unthinking—but that was not entirely the case, especially in Boston, where the local chapter of the Tea Party bore a particular burden: it happened here. “Everybody in the movement is interested in the Revolution,” Hess told me. He took his debt to the founders seriously: “We believe that we are carrying on their tradition, and if they were around today, they would be in the streets with us, leading us, and they’d be even angrier than we are. I imagine we’d have to politely ask them to leave their muskets at home.”
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“Who shall write the history of the American revolution?” John Adams once asked Thomas Jefferson. “Who can write it? Who will ever be able to write it?” “Nobody,” was Jefferson’s reply. “The life and soul of history must forever remain unknown.”
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The records were murky, the course of events astonishing, the consequences immeasurable. Nobody could write the history of the Revolution, but everyone would have to try; it was too important not to. There was also this dilemma: a nation born in revolution will always eye its history warily, and with anxiety. It’s good that it happen
ed once; twice could be trouble. The Revolution’s first historian, Peter Oliver, was a Loyalist from Boston. Consumed by bitterness, regret, and rancor, he wrote the “Origin & Progress of the American Rebellion” in 1781, from exile in England. He didn’t think the Revolution should have happened even once.
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The first patriot historian of the Revolution, David Ramsay, a physician who had been a delegate to the Continental Congress from South Carolina and whose two-volume history was published in 1789, stated the problem as well as anyone. “The right of the people to resist their rulers, when invading their libe
rties, forms the corner stone of the American republic,” Ramsay wrote in
The History of the American
Revolution
, but “this principle, though just in itself, is not favourable to the tranquility of present establishments.”
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Ramsay appreciated the acuteness of the difficulty: celebrating the birth of the nation, and carrying on in its spirit, risked promoting still more revolution, unrest, impermanence, and instability, when what the new nation needed was calm. “A little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing,” Jefferson wrote from Paris in 1786, on hearing word of Shays’s Rebellion, an armed uprising by farmers from Massachusetts struggling to stay out of debtors’ prison. “The Tree of L
iberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants,” Jefferson wrote then.
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(This menacing line sometimes appeared on Tea Party paraphernalia, but it was far more popular in the 1990s, among members of that decade’s militia movement. On April 19, 1995, the 220th anniversary of the Battle of Lexington and Concord, Timothy McVeigh, who liked to wear a Tree of Liberty T-shirt, blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, including 19 very young children.)
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But aside from Jefferson, whose enthusiasm for revolution did
not survive Robespierre, most everyone else came down in favor of order. “In monarchies the crime of treason or rebellion may admit of being pardoned, or lightly punished,” Samuel Adams wrote, during the Shays crisis, “but the man who dares to rebel against the laws of a republic ought to suffer death.”
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James Madison believed America’s was a revolution to end all revolutions. And the Constitution, of course, sought “to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves a
nd our Posterity.” Domestic tranquility was what was called for. The Constitution helped contain the unruliness of
the Revolution. So did early accounts of the nation’s founding, which tended to emphasize that a revolution had to know when to stop. For the sake of the nation, revolution needed to be a thing of the past.