The Whites of their Eyes (11 page)

“You are thirty-seven kids, and you need to sound like seven thousand people!” Zerah Jakub, of Old South’s education program, told that class of fifth graders. “Mr. Samuel Adams, where are you?” she called. Up to the front stepped a tall, dark-skinned boy with glasses, to renounce the Tea Act. A tiny, willful girl played a shoemaker named George Robert Twelves Hewes: “Gentlemen, we cannot let the king and Parliament treat us like this.” “Fie!” cried the little Loyalists. “King George treats us well . . . ,” one girl whispered, from behind long brown bangs. “Don’t we owe England our
respect and support?” asked a girl with glasses, playing Peter Oliver. “But we did not get to vote on it,” a kid with dimples pointed out. “Huzzah!” cried her side of the aisle. “What’s stopping the king from raising it to four pence? Four pounds? Ten pounds?” asked Benjamin Edes. One of the teachers played Copley; he said he was “caught in the middle.” After everyone had a turn, Jakub gave one of the kids a tricorn and a lantern and told him to go find the governor, because the people at Old South sent an emissary to Hutchinson, asking him to let the ships return to England without unloading the tea
. When word came that Hutchinson had refused, the tall kid with glasses who was playing Samuel Adams shouted, “This meeting can do nothing more to save our country!” Thirty-seven fifth graders nearly blew the roof off: “Huzzah!”

Adams’s shout may have been the signal for three groups of men, about fifty altogether, to head to the Green Dragon, the print shop of Edes’s
Boston Gazette
, and a carpenter’s house, where they disguised themselves as Mohawks,
smearing their faces with soot. Then they marched to Griffin’s Wharf, boarded the three ships, and dumped into the laughing sea three hundred chests of tea. More details about what happened that day and night are hard to come by. The night of the Boston Massacre, nearly one hundred people gave depositions; the Sons of Liberty were preparing a legal case, in order to charge Preston and his soldiers with murder. But the dumping the tea was, of course, a crime; the participants therefore pledged themselves to secrecy. Later—much later—people told stories about what happened and wrote memoirs. Some
people kept souvenirs. When Thomas Melvill got home that night, he found some tea in his shoes and saved it. The next morning, an empty tea chest washed up on shore. Someone took it home.
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The Salada
Beaver
sailed from Denmark in May of 1973, just as the Watergate hearings got under way. In July, a witness revealed that Nixon had made tapes of conversations in the Oval Office. Archibald Cox, who headed the investigation, subpoenaed the tapes; Nixon refused to hand them over. The
Beaver
reached Massachusetts in October.
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Nixon committed what the press called his “Saturday Night Massacre” on October 20, ordering first his attorney general, and next the deputy attorney general, to fire Cox. Both men refused, and resigned. Nixon then ordered his solicitor gen
eral, Robert Bork, to do the firing. Bork complied. “I’m not a crook,” Nixon told reporters on November 17. On December 10, the
Boston Globe
covered its front page with an illustrated editorial titled “The Boston Tea Party . . . and this Generation”:

Are we again today not made indignant by the abuse of power, violations of oaths of office, indifference to the public good, undermining of the people’s confidence? Mishandling
of problems, shortages, we all try to understand; none of us is perfect and great leaders are not always in abundant supply. But are we to tolerate longer publicly elected officeholders who do not belong exclusively to the entire public? It is not just the 18th century that tried men’s souls. Our generation, too, has to act on democratic—and constitutional—principles in the face of arrogant use of power.
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Meanwhile, the city braced for Boston’s “Tea Party Weekend,” intended to be the kickoff of the Bicentennial, not just for Boston but for the whole country. It included a brunch, tea parties, a ball, and a great deal of gimcrackery: “Tea Party plates, tea boxes, Boston 200 brooch and teaspoon, Tea Party posters, silver and pewter Tea Party medallions, and Tea Party stamp cachets.”
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On the morning of December 16, twenty-five hundred people gathered at Faneuil Hall for a meeting held by the Peoples Bicentennial Commission, where Thomas Boylston Adams, a descendant of John Adams and preside
nt of the Massachusetts Historical Society, grieved for the state of the nation: “This should not be a day of commemoration but a day of mourning and prayer. We are faced today with the corruption, rot, arrogance and venality that our forefathers protested.” Then everyone in the hall marched to the waterfront.
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By noon, as falling snow turned to rain, forty thousand people gathered on Boston’s bridges and wharves to watch the action on board the
Beaver
. “Dump Nixon, not tea” read one sign in the crowd. The National Organization for Women was there, picketing: “Taxation without Equa
l Rights Is Tyranny.” Another banner read “Gay American Revolution.” Rock music blared from loudspeakers. The ceremonies began at two o’clock when about thirty men wearing tricorns and knee breeches boarded the
Beaver
. They were from the Charlestown Militia, a reenactment group founded by an Irish American longshoreman named Jim O’Neil in 1967.
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They dumped crates of tea into the harbor. Minutes later, six protesters from the Peoples Bicentennial Commission boarded the ship and unfurled a flag reading “
IMPEACH NIXON
.” (This, too, had been preap-proved. “The bicentennial belongs to everyone,” the people at Boston 200 had always insisted.)
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Then, as the Associated Press reported,

A member of the group, wearing a huge mask resembling President Nixon’s face, circled the brig in a rowboat and waved his hands high in Nixon’s familiar “V” style. That group also tarred and feathered a dummy of Nixon and hanged him in effigy. Members o
f the Disabled American Veterans, dressed as Indians, then boarded. . . . Genuine Indians, however, members of the Boston Indian Council, complained about the fakes.
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What happened in Boston that day made front-page news across the country; it was reported in over two thousand newspapers and magazines.
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The coverage wasn’t the kind Kevin White wanted. “The first anguished attempt to make something—anything” out of the Bicentennial, according to an editorial in the
Washington Post
, was “distinguished by commercial and ideological hucksterism.” The whole thing, including the protests, was “strained, self-conscious, artificially contrived” and “concocted.”
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Watergate made everything look bogus.

On March 21, 2010, the day of the House vote on the Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act, Boston Tea Partiers held a vigil at the Green Dragon “to watch enemy troop
movements on C-SPAN,” as Hess put it. “Seventeen seventy-three was all about taxation without representation,” he had told me. This was only different because it was worse. “Can you imagine if the British said not only do you have to pay a tax on the tea, but you have to buy the tea and you have to buy tea for your neighbor?”

In the 1970s, Jeremy Rifkin’s Peoples Bicentennial Commission started a tax-agitating Tea Party, too. The Peoples Bicentennial Commission published
America’s Birthday: A Planning and Activity Guide for Citizens’ Participation During the Bicentennial Years
. It called on ordinary Americans to form TEA Parties (the acronym stood for Tax Equity for Americans), because the country needed “a new party, a movement that will treat tax reform as one aspect of a fight for genuine equality of property and power and against taxation without representation.” It urged TEA Party organizers to use the slogan
“Don’t Tread on Me.” The book included step-by-step instructions:

You might also consider staging your own events in places with captive audiences. How about a “King George Exhibit” of tax avoiders in some public park, with pictures and charts of the loopholes they use? How about forums on Tax Day, or on the anniversary of the Boston Tea Party—in front of IRS or H.&R. Block?
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“This is America in the ’70s,” Rifkin’s favorite tagline went: “The 1770s and the 1970s.”
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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 a
nd 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.
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“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 suggest
ed 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
.
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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.
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No one gave any speeches on the sixteenth of December. And no one called it a “tea party,” either.
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The dumping of the tea wasn’t such a big deal. In 1823, the fiftieth anniversary of what had alway
s 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.
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The Revolutionary generation was dying. The next year, when news reached Boston that John Adams and Thomas Jefferson had died on the fiftieth anni
versary 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!
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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:

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.”
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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 t
he 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.
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