by Jill Lepore
“This is America in the ’70s,” Rifkin’s favorite tagline went: “The 1770s and the 1970s.”36 Jeremy Rifkin wrote the Tea Party’s playbook.
Austin Hess briefly thought about printing out a copy of the 2,400-page health care bill and dumping it into the harbor, but when he learned that would get him arrested, he decided against it. “We weren’t ready for that,” he told me. A lot of other junk has been dumped in Boston Harbor over the years, though. In 1988, the Just Say No days, a troop of Boy Scouts dumped a cask labeled “CRACK.” Four years later, Teamsters meeting on Labor Day poured out cans of beer in the water and then tossed in the empty cases, though that sounds more like plain old littering. In 1997, a bunch of doctors and nurses, wearing scrubs, boarded the Beaver and threw overboard some HMOs’ annual reports, thereby “launching a campaign against market-driven health care,” according to the Boston Globe. House majority leader Dick Armey came to Boston in 1998 to unload a copy of the U.S. tax code. In 2007, state senators from Massachusetts, Texas, Georgia, and Virginia went to the wharf and dumped boxes bearing the labels of unfunded federal mandates, like No Child Left Behind, except they didn’t actually dump them; that would be breaking the law. They pretended to dump them.37
“The Destruction of the Tea is so bold, so daring, so firm, intrepid and inflexible,” John Adams wrote, “that I cant but consider it as an Epocha in history.” A week after the dumping of the tea, he wrote to Mercy Otis Warren: “I wish to see a late glorious event celebrated by a certain poetical pen which has no equal that I know of in this country.” (At the time, Adams and Warren were close friends.) He suggested the conceit. Warren, inspired, wrote the poem, called “The Squabble of the Sea Nymphs,” after Pope’s “Rape of the Lock,” about a band of Indians who
Pour’d a profusion of delicious teas,
Which, wafted by a soft favonian breeze,
Supply’d the wat’ry deities.
Adams arranged for it to be published in Edes’s Gazette.38 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 1774.39 No one gave any speeches on the sixteenth of December. And no one called it a “tea party,” either.40 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.41 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.
In 1831, Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote a poem called “The Last Leaf,” about Thomas Melvill, who was known around Boston as “the last of the cocked hats”:
I know it is a sin
For me to sit and grin
At him here;
But the old three-cornered hat,
And the breeches, and all that,
Are so queer!42
Melvill, the best-known surviving participant in the destruction of the tea, died in 1832. He was Herman Melville’s grandfather. In Herman Melville’s 1855 novel, Israel Potter, a hero of the Battle of Bunker Hill spends fifty years’ exile in England, only to return to a Boston he can no longer understand (the book works much like Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle”). In London, Potter meets the king, though he refuses to bow to him. “Immediately Israel touched his hat—but did not remove it.” At the end of his exile, Potter, a man out of time, lands in Boston on the Fourth of July. He gets off the boat, walks up the wharf, and is nearly killed by the spirit of ’75: “hustled by the riotous crowd near Faneuil Hall, the old man narrowly escaped being run over by a patriotic triumphal car in the procession, flying a broidered banner, inscribed with gilt letters:
‘BUNKER HILL.
1775.
GLORY TO THE HEROES THAT FOUGHT!’ ”
He heads up to Copp’s Hill, the burying ground behind the Old North Church, where he sits down, wearily, amid the gravestones. He wanders to places he once knew and finds that he doesn’t know them anymore. He becomes a curiosity, a relic. Melville ends Israel Potter this way: “He dictated a little book, the record of his fortune. But long ago it faded out of print—himself out of being—his name out of memory.”43
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. Hewes, a poor shoemaker, has much in common with Israel Potter. He was, after Melvill’s death, one of the last surviving participants of the destruction of the tea. In 1835, Hewes, now in his nineties, was brought to Boston for a Fourth of July parade. Calling the dumping of the tea a “tea party” made it sound like a political party: in the 1770s, parties were anathema (“If I could not go to heaven but with a party,” Jefferson wrote, “I would not go there at all”), but in the 1830s, parties ran politics—and fought over who carried the mantle of the passing Revolutionary generation. By parading Hewes through the streets of the city, Boston’s Whigs, who, after all, had named their party after the patriots, claimed the so-called Tea Party as their own.44
Meanwhile, what the Revolution meant to Hewes—that a poor man was as good a man as any other—was lost. In 1762, when Hewes was a twenty-year-old apprentice, he repaired a shoe for John Hancock, the richest man in Boston. On New Year’s Day, in one of the era’s many elaborate rituals of deference to rank and wealth, Hewes went to Hancock’s house, the grandest mansion in the city, met the great man, took off his hat, bowed, and was given a coin. In 1778, Hewes, still as poor as dirt, enlisted to serve on board the Hancock, a twenty-gun ship, to fight the British. But when a ship’s officer demanded that Hewes doff his hat to him, Hewes would not. He refused, he said, to doff his hat for any man.45
“We don’t have a problem with the sites on the Freedom Trail,” Shawn Ford told me, after we sat down in his office, “but they have a problem with us.” Historic Tours of America began operating the Boston Tea Party Ship in 1988 and bought it six years later. The attraction had not often been celebrated for its educational value. (“It became about making money,” Curran told me. “Interpretive decisions were based on that.”) Ford talked about the company’s commitment to the visitor’s experience. “Running a for-profit attraction is a lot more difficult than a nonprofit. How we pay for this is the guest that comes through the front door.”
When the site was damaged by fire, Historic Tours of America determined that the entire attraction was due for a renovation and hired Leon Poindexter, a master shipwright, to gut the Beaver and rebuild it. The plan was to reopen the Congress Bridge site with replicas of all three ships docked on a barge, the foundation for a museum. Poindexter, one of the few remaining people in the world who knew how to build an eighteenth-century ocean-faring vessel, had worked on many ships, including those in the film Master and Commander. He put a great deal of painstaking work into the renovation of the Beaver. In 2005, he also began taking apart an old fishing boat and turning it into the Eleanor, which was docked alongside the Beaver, in Gloucester. Poindexter hadn’t started on the third ship, the Dartmouth, when Historic Tours of America ran out of money; then, in 2007, came the second fire at the Congress Street site and, in 2008, the credit crunch dried up any chance of a new loan.
The plan was now back o
n track, Ford said. He brought out a handsome architect’s model, placed it on his desk, and walked me through the “three-stage experience” of what would be called the Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum. Stage 1: “You enter the meeting house. It will look as if they’re in Old South. We call this a ‘faux reenactment.’ There will be actors in period costume.” That is, the entrance to this for-profit attraction would be a re-creation of the Old South Meeting House, an original eighteenth-century building still standing, not a half mile away, open to the public, and operated as a nonprofit, as a sanctuary for free speech. Stage 2: “You march down the ramp and get on the Beaver or the Eleanor. Then go below decks to see what ship life was like.” The plan was for the Dartmouth to be built on site, its construction an exhibit in itself. Stage 3: “The museum is still being designed. There will be a theater.” There would be a film: “the tea party as seen through the eyes of a tea crate.”
Historic Tours of America catered mostly to older Americans, “aging Baby Boomers,” its company profile said. It sold celebration. For that generation, the struggle for civil rights, the tragedy of Vietnam, and the betrayals of Watergate made patriotism a sorrow. Heritage tourism provided a balm.
On Sunday, March 21, 2010, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the health care bill, in a vote that fell along partisan lines. All but 34 Democrats voted for it, and all 178 Republicans voted against it. On Monday, eleven state attorneys general announced a plan to challenge the law as a violation of state sovereignty. Across the country, there followed scattered threats of violence against legislators who had voted in favor of the bill and against the president who signed it into law on Tuesday, by which time there had already been talk of nullification.
The next night, I met Austin Hess and Kat Malone at the Warren Tavern in Charlestown. The tavern, built in 1784, was named after Dr. Joseph Warren, who died in the Battle of Bunker Hill, and was just a cobbled street away from Monument Square, where a granite obelisk commemorated the patriots who died alongside him. We sat near the bar, beneath a dark ceiling of massive oak timbers. Tin lanterns hung from the wall. Hess took off his tricornered hat and set it down on the table between us. Malone was quiet. Hess was frustrated. “I have recently started a committee to elect the corpse of Calvin Coolidge,” he said, “because anyone’s better than Obama.” He was dismayed by the vote, but he was also, as always, courteous and equable. “It’s the law of the land now, so, it’s up to us to blunt its impact and overturn it if we can.” The vote, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s maneuvering around a potential filibuster made possible by Brown’s election to the Senate, had deepened Hess’s conviction about the aptness of his analogy. “One of the things people like to say about us is that they like to think that we don’t know what we’re talking about, that we don’t know what the tea party was about. But to the people who say we have taxation with representation, I would just say that they should look to the bill that just passed. We sent Scott Brown to Washington to kill this bill, but the people in Washington did everything they could to thwart the will of the people, and especially the people of Massachusetts. How is my voice being represented?”
In 1774, in response to the dumping of the tea, Parliament passed what colonists called the Intolerable Acts: the Boston Port Act closed the port; the Massachusetts Government Act greatly constrained the activities of town meetings. Hutchinson was removed as governor; General Thomas Gage, commander of the British forces in America, was appointed in his place. (The legislature had actually voted to impeach Hutchinson earlier, following the publication of the Hutchinson letters leaked by Franklin.) A secret society of men, including Revere, Hancock, Warren, and the Adamses, met at the Green Dragon “for the purpose of watching the British soldiers,” as Revere wrote.46 Hutchinson sailed for England in May; Copley followed him shortly afterward. “Mr. Copley may be looked upon as the Greatest Painter we have ever yet had in America,” an admirer wrote, just months before Copley set sail. (Copley never returned. He died in 1815 and is buried in London.)47
The port was closed on the first of June; the only ships to arrive in Boston were those carrying still more British soldiers. In August, John and Samuel Adams set off, by carriage, for Philadelphia, for the first meeting of the Continental Congress. “The distinction between Virginians, Pennsylvanians, New Yorkers, and New Englanders, are no more,” Patrick Henry declared in Philadelphia. “I am not a Virginian, but an American.”48
Not long after, a man named Thomas Pain washed up in Philadelphia. Pain was born in Thetford, England, in 1737 (he added the e later, and was called “Tom” only by his enemies), the son of a Quaker journeyman who sewed the bones of whales into stays for ladies’ corsets. He left the local grammar school at the age of twelve to serve as his father’s apprentice. At twenty, he went to sea, on a privateer. In 1759 he opened his own stay-making shop and married a servant girl, but the next year both she and their child died in childbirth. For a decade, Pain struggled to make a life for himself. He taught school, collected taxes, and, in 1771, married a grocer’s daughter. Three years later, he was fired from his job with the excise office; his unhappy and childless second marriage fell apart; and everything he owned was sold at auction to pay off his debts. At the age of thirty-seven, Thomas Pain was ruined. He therefore did what every ruined Englishman did, if he possibly could: he sailed to America. Sickened with typhus during the journey, Pain arrived in Philadelphia in 1774 so weak he had to be carried off the ship. What saved his life was a letter found in his pocket: “The bearer Mr Thomas Pain is very well recommended to me as an ingenious worthy young man.”49 It was signed by Benjamin Franklin. It was better than a bag of gold.
In Massachusetts, the people stockpiled weapons in the countryside. In September, after Gage seized ammunition stored in Charlestown and Cambridge, the legislature established a Committee of Safety; in October, it created special units of “minutemen,” who could be ready to fight at a moment’s notice. “The people trembled for their liberties, the merchant for his interest, the tories for their places, the whigs for their country,” wrote Mercy Otis Warren.50 Josiah Quincy Jr. cried: “I speak it with grief, I speak it with anguish. Britons are our oppressors: I speak it with shame, I speak it with indignation: we are slaves.”51 “For shame,” preached a Massachusetts minister, “let us either cease to enslave our fellow-men, or else let us cease to complain of those that would enslave us.”52 Twelve days after Gage took office, he received a letter from “a Grate Number of Blackes,” who demanded their liberty, presumably on the theory, why not try the British? “We have in commen With all other men a naturel right to our freedoms without Being depriv’d of them by our fellow men as we are a freeborn Pepel.”53 Abigail Adams wrote to John in Philadelphia about “a conspiracy of the negroes” in September 1774; they had prepared “a petition to the Governor, telling him they would fight for him provided he would arm them and engage to liberate them if he conquered” the local rebels. (“I wish most sincerely there was not a slave in the province,” she added. “It always appeared a most iniquitous scheme to me—to fight ourselves for what we are daily robbing and plundering from those who have as good a right to freedom as we have.”)54
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 the drivers of negroes?”55 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.”56
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 ma
y 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 but would leave us if they believed they could make their escape,” Washington’s cousin wrote from Mount Vernon, adding bitterly, “Liberty is sweet.”57
“I really feel like this is a modern-day Intolerable Act,” Austin Hess said, about the new health care law, when we met at the Warren Tavern. Every time Hess talked about the Intolerable Acts, I got to thinking about the limits of tolerance, tolerance of racial equality, of religious diversity, of same-sex marriage, of a global economy, of democracy, of pluralism, of change. Hess labored in a world of uneasy alliances. I asked him if he was troubled by Christen Varley’s work with the Coalition for Marriage and the Family. “We do not discuss social issues and foreign policy issues,” he said. He was frustrated that journalists kept getting the Tea Party wrong. Hess’s girlfriend was black. He was tired of people calling the movement racist. “I will simply say this,” he e-mailed me. “I know what is in my heart.”58
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.59 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.