The Whites of their Eyes Read online

  THE WHITES

  OF THEIR EYES

  The Public Square Book Series

  PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

  Ruth O’Brien, Series Editor

  THE WHITES

  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,

  41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

  In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press,

  6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW

  press.princeton.edu

  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

  CONTENTS

  Foreword by Ruth O’Brien

  Prologue Party Like It’s 1773

  1 Ye Olde Media

  2 The Book of Ages

  3 How to Commit Revolution

  4 The Past upon Its Throne

  5 Your Superexcellent Age

  Epilogue Revering America

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  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.” “That 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 can 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

  PROLOGUE

  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 were 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 anachronistic 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 2
007, 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 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.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,” Tuerck 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.”

  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, quietly supported the Vietnam War.)7 Kris Mineau, an evangelical minister who heads the Massachusetts Family Institute, invoked the sage of Monticello: “I want to give you all a little history lesson. Thomas Jefferson, our third president, from that Oval Office, he wrote, ‘It is only in the love of one’s own family that heartfelt happiness is known.’ ” (Given the Hemingses, Jefferson’s children by Sally Hemings, one of his slaves, this was a particularly striking choice.)8 Wearing colonial garb from head to toe was a Pentecostal minister named Paul Jehle, executive director of the Plymouth Rock Foundation, an organization founded in 1970, on the occasion of the 350th anniversary of the Mayflower’s voyage, “to preserve, rehearse and propagate the rich Christian heritage of the United States of America, beginning with the Pilgrims.” Jehle preached that “God gives rights; governments don’t” and urged people to form something like Bible study groups: “Our little organization, Plymouth Rock Foundation, we publish materials, where you can study the Constitution line by line, from its original intent, and what was meant by the founders. You can study in small groups. You can study all kinds of things, because we need to reeducate ourselves, because the present education system won’t.”

  Elsewhere, activists stapled Lipton tea bags to their hats, like so many fishing lures. “Party Like It’s 1773” read one sign.9 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 white 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 of America 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.”10 (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.”)11 In Washington, someone threw a box of tea bags over the fence that surrounds the White House. All over the country, people turned up wearing tricorns and periwigs, cuffed shirts and kersey waistcoats, knee breeches and buckled shoes, dressing as the founders, quoting the founders, waving copies of the Constitution, arguing that the time for revolution had come again.12

  At the time, I happened to be teaching an undergraduate seminar on the American Revolution at Harvard, reading monographs and articles in scholarly journals; visiting archives; transcribing letters and diaries; touring graveyards and museums; and grading papers on the Stamp Act, the Boston Massacre, the Intolerable Acts, the Battle of Lexington and Concord, the Siege of Boston, and the Battle of Bunker Hill. Meanwhile, at home, my nine-year-old was busy memorizing Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1860 poem, “Paul Revere’s Ride,” an assignment given, every year, by a masterful teacher in a public school in Cambridge, arguably the most liberal city in the most liberal state in the nation. In my house, we couldn’t sit down for dinner without one or another of the under-tens clearing his throat and reciting

  Listen, my children, and you shall hear

  Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,

  On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;

  Hardly a man is now alive

  Who remembers that famous day and year.13

  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 1968.14 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. Th
at was true, but it wasn’t new. People who study the Revolution have almost always found the speeches people make about it to be something other than “true history.” In 1841, George Ticknor Curtis, a Boston lawyer and constitutional historian, wrote The True Uses of American Revolutionary History. He was hopping mad about the tea partiers of his day. “The age for declamation about the American Revolution has passed away,” he insisted. He was sick of people invoking the Revolution to advance a cause. He didn’t want to be misunderstood, though. “Do I propose to forget the past? Would I cut loose from the great sheet-anchor of our destiny, and send the political and social system to drift over the wide waters of a boundless future, or on the turbulent waves of the present, careless of the great dead, their principles, their deeds, their renown, their splendid illustration of the great truths of man’s political and social state?”15 No. He just wished people would study the Revolution instead of using it to make political arguments. Curtis called this kind of thing declamation. The word “blather” also comes to mind. What was curious about the Tea Party’s Revolution, though, was that it wasn’t just kooky history; it was anti history. In May of 2009, a month after the Tea Party’s first Tax Day protests, Hannity began lecturing about the Sons of Liberty. “In 1765, Parliament passed the Stamp Act,” he said on his show one day. He told of the protests under the Liberty Tree, in Boston. Then he unveiled a new Fox News graphic: a liberty tree.

  In the spirit of our Founding Fathers, with our liberties once again threatened, we introduce our own Liberty Tree. Now as you can see, our tree is built upon the roots of life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, and freedom. They support the trunk of the tree, which is made of we the people. And the trunk supports the branches and the fruits of our liberty represented by the apples. It is those apples, the fruits of our liberty, that this administration is now picking clean.