The Whites of their Eyes (16 page)

Lincoln was a lawyer, Douglas a judge; they had studied the law; they disagreed about how to interpret the founding documents, but they also shared a set of ideas about standards of evidence and the art of rhetoric, which is why they were able to hold, over seven days, such a substantial and relentless debate. Falwell and LaHaye were evangelical ministers; what they shared was the art of extracting passages from scripture and using them to preach a gospel about good and bad, hea
ven and hell, damnation and salvation.

“My faith is the faith of my fathers,” Mitt Romney declared in an address on faith, in 2007, just before the presidential primary season, during which Romney sought the Republican nomination. Romney’s Founding Fathers weren’t the usual ones, though. Historians of religious liberty have typically referred to four foundational texts: Madison’s 1785 “Memorial Remonstrance against Religious Assessments” (“The Religion of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man”), a statute written by Jefferson (“our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions any mo
re than our opinions in physics or geometry”), Article VI of the Constitution (“no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States”), and the First Amendment (“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”). Romney, though, skipped over Jefferson and Madison in favor of Brigham Young, John and Samuel Adams, and the seventeenth-century Puritan dissenter, Roger Williams, in order to accuse modern-day secularists of being “at odds with the nation’s founders,” an
d of having taken the doctrine of separation of church and state “well beyond its original meaning” by seeking “to remove from the public domain any acknowledgement of God.”
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Precisely what the founders believed about God, Jesus, sin, the Bible, churches, and hell is probably impossible to discover. They changed their minds and gave different accounts to different people: Franklin said one thing to his sister, Jane, and another thing to David Hume; Washington prayed with his troops, but, while he lay slowly dying, he declined to call for a preacher. This can make them look like hypocrites, but that’s unfair, as are a great many attacks on these men. They approached religion more or less the same
way they approached everything else that interested them: Franklin invented his own, Washington proved diplomatic, Adams grumbled about it (he hated Christianity, he once said, but he couldn’t think of anything better, and he also regarded it as necessary), Jefferson could not stop tinkering with it, and Madison defended, as a natural right, the free exercise of it. That they wanted to preserve religious liberty by separating church and state does not mean they were irreligious. They wanted to protect religion from the state, as much as the other way around.

Nevertheless, if the founders had followed their forefathers, they would have written a Constitution establishing Christianity as the national religion. Nearly every British North American colony was settled with an established religion; Connecticut’s 1639 charter explained that the whole purpose of government was “to mayntayne and presearve the liberty and purity of the gospel of our Lord Jesus.” In the century and a half between the Connecticut charter and the 1787 meeting of the Constitutional Convention lies an entire revolution, not just a political revolution but also a religious re
volution. Following the faith of their fathers is exactly what the framers did not do. At a time when all but two states required religious tests for office, the Constitution prohibited them. At a time when all but three states still had an official religion, the Bill of Rights forbade the federal government from establishing one.
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Originalism in the courts is controversial, to say the least. Jurisprudence stands on precedent, on the stability of the laws, but originalism is hardly the only way to abide by the Constitution. Setting aside the question of whether it makes good law, it is, generally, lousy history. And it has long since reached well beyond the courts. Set loose in the culture, and
tangled together with fanaticism, originalism looks like history, but it’s not; it’s historical fundamentalism, which is to history what astrology is to astronomy, what alchemy is to chemistry, what creationism is to evolution.

In eighteenth-century America, I wouldn’t have been able to vote. I wouldn’t have been able to own property, either. I’d very likely have been unable to write, and, if I survived childhood, chances are that I’d have died in childbirth. And, no matter how long or short my life, I’d almost certainly have died without having once ventured a political opinion preserved in any historical record, except that none of these factors has any meaning or bearing whatsoever on whether an imaginary eighteenth-century me would have supported the Obama administration’s stimulus package or laws allowing the ca
rrying of concealed weapons or the war in Iraq, because I did not live in eighteenth-century America, and no amount of thinking that I could, not even wearing petticoats, a linsey-woolsey calico smock, and a homespun mobcap, can make it so. Citizens and their elected officials have all sorts of reasons to support or oppose all sorts of legislation and government action, including constitutionality, precedence, and the weight of history. But it’s possible to cherish the stability of the law and the durability of the Constitution, as amended over two and a half centuries of cha
nge and one civil war, and tested in the courts, without dragging the Founding Fathers from their graves. To point this out neither dishonors the past nor relieves anyone of the obligation to study it. To the contrary.

“What would the founders do?” is, from the point of view of historical analysis, an ill-considered and unanswerable question, and pointless, too. Jurists and legislators need to investigate what the framers meant, and some Christians
make moral decisions by wondering what Jesus would do, but no NASA scientist decides what to do about the Hubble by asking what Isaac Newton would make of it. People who ask what the founders would do quite commonly declare that they know, they know, they just know what the founders would do and, mostly, it comes to this: if only they could see us now, they would be rolling over in their graves. They might even rise from the dead and walk among us. We have failed to obey their sacred texts, holy writ. They suffered for us, and we have forsaken them. Come the Day of Judgment, they will damn us.

That’s not history. It’s not civil religion, the faith in democracy that binds Americans together. It’s not originalism or even constitutionalism. That’s fundamentalism.

CHRONICLING A GATHERING ON THE COMMON—THE
CURIOUS HISTORY OF THE PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE—
COMMON SENSE
—INDEPENDENCE—THE EVACUATION OF
BOSTON—AN ATTEMPT TO STEAL THE BICENTENNIAL—SOME
VEXING REMARKS MADE BY THE FORMER GOVERNOR OF
ALASKA—AN AGE OF PAINE—THE FATES OF OUR SEVERAL
CHARACTERS—AND A SURPRISING PROPHECY

Boston Common was lined with vendors the day the Tea Party Express drove into town, on April 14, 2010. You could buy: “Fox News Fan” T-shirts; “Tea Party Tea”; “Don’t Tread on Me” flags; “Straight Pride” signs; a pin that read

a tote bag picturing a revolver and the caption “An Armed Society Is a Polite Society”; and, at a special day-of-the-rally discount, a copy of “The Constitution Made Easy.” Christen Varley’s Coalition for Marriage staffed a table. George and John Egan and Patrick Humphries were passing out Boston Tea Party information at two different tents. Scott Brown
hadn’t come; the Senate was in session. Charlie Baker, a Massachusetts Republican gubernatorial candidate who had breakfasted with the Boston Tea Party over the weekend, hadn’t turned up, either. This was Sarah Palin’s party.

Clustering around the bandstand, Cape Ann Tea Partiers jostled with Plymouth Rock Tea Partiers, every fourth hand carrying an American flag. A man in a hard hat, trying to make his way closer to stage, parted the waters by crying out, “The liberals are coming! The liberals are coming!” The Tea Party Express put on a musical show: “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” “The Star-Spangled Banner,” “America the Beautiful,” “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” In between numbers, the crowd broke out into chanting, “USA! USA! USA!” Someone on the stage cried out, “I heard there ain’t no pa
rty like a Boston Tea Party!”

Next came a call to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.

“I pledge allegiance to the flag—”

The original pledge was written by Francis Bellamy, the former pastor of Boston’s Bethany Baptist Church. Bellamy, a socialist, was the vice president of the Society of Christian Socialists; his sermons and lectures included “Jesus the Socialist” and “Socialism and the Bible.” He was also the cousin of Edward Bellamy, whose 1888 novel,
Looking Backward, 2000–1887
, imagined a man born in Boston in 1857 falling asleep in 1887 and waking up in the year 2000, to find a socialist utopia, a city with no more poor, with a public square—a Boston Common—on every corner, “open squares filled with trees
, among which statues glistened and fountains flashed.”

“—and to the Republic, for which it stands—”

Francis Bellamy wrote the Pledge of Allegiance for children, to recite at school; it wasn’t meant for grown-ups. It was published in a Boston children’s magazine, the
Youth’s
Companion
, in 1892, on the occasion of the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of America.

“—one nation—”

It became the national pledge in 1942.

“—under God—”

“Under God” was added in the 1950s.

“—indivisible—”

In the 1970s, white antibusing activists in Boston recited an antipledge: “We will not pledge allegiance to the order of the United States District Court, nor the dictatorship for which it stands; one order, under Garrity, with liberty and justice for none.”

“—with liberty and justice—”

At a meeting in Boston in 1976, a group calling itself the Bicentennial Ethnic Racial Forum drafted a new pledge, swearing allegiance to “one nation of many people, cultures, languages, and colors.” That went nowhere. The next year, Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis vetoed a law requiring teachers to lead schoolchildren in daily recitations of the pledge. His veto became a partisan weapon during the presidential campaign of 1988, the campaign in which “liberal” became a smear. “What is it about the pledge that upsets him so much?” then vice president George Bush asked at a rally, in
a particularly effective attack on his “card-carrying member of the ACLU” opponent.
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“—for all.”

“Isn’t this sweet?” said a woman standing next to me, smiling. She didn’t wait for an answer. “I’m here to see Sarah. She’s so adorable.”

I took out my notebook. She frowned.

“Are you a liberal?” she asked, her voice rising.

“I’m a hist—”

“—because give me fifty bucks.” She grabbed my jacket and yanked, hard. “Give me fifty bucks!”

“Fifty bucks?”

“If you’re a liberal. Because you people, you want to give money to anyone who asks you.”

In the winter of 1776, John Adams read
Common Sense
, an anonymous, radical, and brilliant forty-six-page pamphlet that would convince the American people of what more than a decade of taxes and nearly a year of war had not: that this battle wasn’t just Boston’s fight, and what’s more, it wasn’t even only America’s fight. “The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind,” was
Common Sense
’s astonishing and inspiring claim about the fate of thirteen infant colonies on the edge of the world. “The sun never shone on a cause of greater worth. ’Tis not the affair of
a city, a county, a province, or a kingdom; but of a continent—of at least one-eighth part of the habitable globe. ’Tis not the concern of a day, a year, or an age; posterity are virtually involved in the contest, and will be more or less affected even to the end of time, by the proceedings now.”
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Everyone wondered: who could have written such stirring stuff? “People Speak of it in rapturous praise,” a friend wrote Adams. “Some make Dr. Franklin the Author,” hinted another. “I think I see strong marks of your pen in it,” speculated a third. More miffed than flattered, Adams admitted to his wife, Abigail, “I
could not have written any Thing in so manly and striking a style.” Who, then? Adams found out: “His Name is Paine.”
³

“I offer nothing more than simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense,” Paine wrote, but this was coyness itself:
Common Sense
stood every argument against American independence on its head. “There is something absurd in supposing
a continent to be perpetually governed by an island,” he insisted. He wanted Americans to grow up. As to the colonies’ dependence on England, “We may as well assert that because a child has thrived upon milk, that it is never to have meat.”
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“He is a keen Writer,” Adams allowed, but he had written only “a tolerable summary of the argument which I had been repeating again and again in Congress for nine months.”
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George Washington, meanwhile, remained at his headquarters in Cambridge. (He lived in a house that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow would one day occupy.) Phillis Wheatley wrote to Washington that October, sending him a poem she had written about him, and signing off, “Wishing your Excellency all possible success in the great cause you are so generously engaged in.” (Washington wrote back, graciously thanking her for the poem and inviting her to visit: “If you should ever come to Cambridge, or near headquarters, I shall be happy to see a person so favored by the Muses.”)
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The British and the
Americans had been in a stalemate for months, but in November of 1775, Washington sent Knox, who had left bookselling behind in Boston, to bring back artillery captured from the British at Ticonderoga. When Knox turned up with sixty tons of artillery, in February of 1776, the Continentals fortified Dorchester Heights and, on March 2, began bombing the city. Two months after
Common Sense
was published, the Continental army blasted the British out of Boston and ended the siege. On March 17, the British evacuated. Eleven thousand people, more than nine thousand of them soldiers, sailed out of Bo
ston Harbor. (The seventeenth of March, Evacuation Day, is a somewhat woe-begotten public holiday in Boston; most people think schools and offices are closed, that day, because it happens, also, to be St. Patrick’s Day.)