The Whites of their Eyes (2 page)

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 un
til about 1969, when Richard Nixon used it to refer to Americans who, he believed, quietly supported the Vietnam War.)
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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.)
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Wearing colonial garb from head to toe wa
s a Pentecostal minister named Paul Jehle, executive director of the Plymouth Rock Foundation, an organiz
ation 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.
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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.”
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(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.”)
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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 t
ime for revolution had come again.
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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.
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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 si
nce Nixon was elected in 1968.
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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. That 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?”
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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 graph
ic: 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.

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