The Whites of their Eyes

by Matt Braun

  He concluded, “It took more than two hundred years, but it now looks like we are headed back to where we started.”16

  In antihistory, time is an illusion. Either we’re there, two hundred years ago, or they’re here, among us. When Congress began debating an overhaul of the health care system, this, apparently, was very distressing to the Founding Fathers. “The founders are here today,” said John Ridpath of the Ayn Rand Institute, at a Boston Tea Party rally on the Common on the Fourth of July. “They’re all around us.”17

  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 the 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.”18

  That fall, a little-known Massachusetts Republican state senator named Scott Brown launched a campaign for the U.S. Senate seat vacated by the death of Ted Kennedy, who had held it since 1962. Kennedy had been a staunch advocate of health care reform. Brown pledged to defeat passage of the health care bill. In a special election held on January 19, 2010, Brown defeated the Democrat, Massachusetts attorney general Martha Coakley, by a seven-point margin, a victory for which the Tea Party took credit. Fox News called Brown’s triumph the “Massachusetts Massacre,” a reference, I guess, to the Boston Massacre, although what the 2010 election and the 1770 shooting share begins and ends with the word “massacre.”

  On February 18, 2010, a fifty-three-year-old software engineer named Joseph Andrew Stark set fire to his house and then flew a one-engine plane into an office building in Austin, Texas, where some two hundred IRS employees work, killing himself and an IRS manager, a man with six children. In a suicide note that Stark posted on the Internet the morning he died, he wrote,

  Sadly, starting at early ages we in this country have been brainwashed to believe that, in return for our dedication and service, our government stands for justice for all. We are further brainwashed to believe that there is freedom in this place, and that we should be ready to lay our lives down for the noble principles represented by its founding fathers. Remember? One of these was “no taxation without representation.” I have spent the total years of my adulthood unlearning that crap from only a few years of my childhood.

  Stark, who had been feuding with the IRS for years, had no connection to any political organization. He was not a Tea Partier. He was alone and adrift, but he also seems to have been caught up in something, something bitter and terrible, about the Founding Fathers and about innocence lost.19

  On March 5, 2010, the 240th anniversary of the Boston Massacre, Glenn Beck issued a special Fox News report on “Indoctrination in America”: “Tonight, America, I want you to sit down and talk to your kids and hold your kids close to you,” he began. “Get the kids out of this indoctrination or our republic will be lost.” He was talking about environmentalism and about a lot of other things, too: “Our kids are being brainwashed with the concept of—I’ve shown it to you before, earth worship. Earth worship. I pledge allegiance to the earth. Social justice. What is social justice? God is being eliminated from the equation entirely.” He found occasion to reach back to the Revolution: “Let me give you the words of George Washington, ‘It is impossible to rightly govern a nation without God and the Bible.’ ” Like Hannity, Beck had begun giving history lessons. He outfitted his studio with chalk and a blackboard and even old-fashioned oak school chairs and desks, as if from a one-room schoolhouse. What our children are learning, Beck warned, darkly, is nothing short of learn-to-hate-America lunacy.20

  That was a Friday. The next morning, I rode a rumbling Red Line subway car from Cambridge, over the Charles, a river named after a king, to watch the annual reenactment of the Boston Massacre, in front of the Old State House, built in 1713, the oldest public building in the United States.21 A scrum of rambunctious kids jostled for position on a narrow and cramped walkway along the brick building’s southern face. A burly British Army reenactor playing Captain Thomas Preston recruited ten grenadiers, outfitting them with gold-rimmed tricornered hats, brass-buttoned red coats, and wooden muskets. He lined them up and, feigning sternness, commanded his pint-sized soldiers to shout, “God save the king!”

  They giggled.

  Preston glared at them. He growled. “Would you rather be French?”

  “My mom speaks French!” said Isaac Doherty, a six-year-old from Quincy.

  “I know karate!” another kid piped up.

  Then they all started clobbering each other with their muskets.

  Preston sighed.

  A National Park Service ranger handed out Styrofoam balls to the rest of the kids in the crowd who, gleefully playing an angry mob, hurled the fake snowballs at the soldiers.

  “Bloody redcoats!”

  “Go back to England!

  “Stinking lobsterbacks!”

  Every year, this gets a little out of hand. Madeline Raynor, age ten, got pelted in the eye. It looked like it smarted. She took it in stride. “I learned it’s really hard to be a Redcoat,” she told a reporter from the Boston Globe.22 I decided I wasn’t worried about anyone getting indoctrinated.

  The next week, in Austin, the Texas School Board convened to discuss amendments to the state’s social studies curriculum. A review of the curriculum, from kindergarten through high school, had been under way for some time. It made national news because of its national implications. The state of Texas is one of the largest buyers of textbooks in the country; its standards wield considerable influence, nationwide, on publishers’ content, since publishers do not generally provide different editions for different states.23 Conservative board members, who, during an earlier revision of the state’s science curriculum, had fought for the teaching of creationism, stated their belief that liberals had contaminated the teaching of American history. “I reject the notion by the left of a constitutional separation of church and state,” said one board member, a real estate agent, who added, “I have $1,000 for the charity of your choice if you can find it in the Constitution.”24

  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 founding 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 founding, would now dispense with Hobbes, in favor of Moses.25

  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 quite 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 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 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.26

  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.27 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 founding documents, as sacred texts, and to the Founding Fathers, as prophets, are therefore incontrovertible.28

  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 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, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it.”)29 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 Convention 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!”30

  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.31 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.32

  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 Bicentennial 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.33 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-green of childhood. Deeper still is the obscurity of long ago. But the eighteenth century, oh, the eighteenth century lies fathoms down.