The Whites Of Their Eyes

Jill Lepore, The Whites Of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle over American History; 2010, Princeton Univ. Press, 165 pp. 

Each of this book’s five chapters is set in Boston—and 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. (Pg 18).   The author maintains that the point of narrating three stories at once is to see what’s remembered and what’s forgotten, what’s kept and what’s lost.  This book is an argument against historical fundamentalism.  I found the book moderately interesting but not one of those “must reads.”

Americans have always used the past to support political ends. The Union laid claim to the Revolution--so did the Confederacy.  Civil rights leaders said they were the true sons of liberty--so did Southern segregationists. This book tells the story of the centuries-long struggle over the meaning of the nation's founding, including the battle waged by the Tea Party, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and evangelical Christians to "take back America."

The Whites of Their Eyes attempts to document  that the far right has embraced a narrative about America's founding that is not only a fable but is also, finally, a variety of fundamentalism--anti-intellectual, antihistorical, and dangerously antipluralist.

My Notes:

Pg. 36:  Academic historians have criticized biographers for locating the explanation for events in character rather than, say, in larger historical forces, like ideas or politics or culture or economic and social conditions, an approach that has the effect of falsely collapsing the distance between now and then. 

Pg. 38:  A 2010 New York Times CBS News poll reported that 63 percent of self-described Tea Party supporters gain most of their television news from Fox, compared with 23 percent of all adult Americans.

“It will affect Printers more than anybody,” Benjamin Franklin warned Parliament about the (1765) Stamp Act, a piece of legislation that turned out to be Britain’s first and arguably its worst mistake.  Printers, more than anybody, better than anybody, could fight back.  In 1766 it was repealed.  But in 1767, Parliament levied the Townsend Duties, taxes on tea, paper, and other goods. 

Pg. 77:  In May of 1773, Parliament passed the Tea Act to bail out the East India Company, which, with a surplus of tea and stiff competition from smugglers, was facing bankruptcy.  By eliminating duties on tea in England and lowering the import tax to just three pence, the Tea act actually reduced the price of tea in the colonies, but it offended colonists, gravely, by its forceful assertion of Parliament’s right to tax the colonies, and by its protection of a politically connected corporate monopoly.  It wasn’t the price; it was the principle. 

In the summer of 1773, ships loaded with tea were sent to four cities: Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston.  In November and December 1773, three tea ships, the Beaver, the Eleanor, and the Dartmouth, sailed into Boston Harbor.  The three ships were boarded and three hundred chests of tea were thrown into the sea.  This incident did not get the title of “Tea Party,” at least in print, until 1834. 

Pg. 91:  In 1774, in response to the dumping of the tea, Parliament passed what colonists called the Intolerable Acts:  Four of the acts were issued in direct response to the Boston Tea Party of December 1773; the British Parliament hoped these punitive measures would, by making an example of Massachusetts, reverse the trend of colonial resistance to parliamentary authority that had begun with the 1765 Stamp Act.

Pg. 103:  On June 17, 1775, shots were fired in what came to be called the Battle of Bunker Hill.  Lost in that battle were 140 Americans and 226 British.  (“Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes!” is the order allegedly given by Israel Putnam to the colonial militiamen.  But there’s not much evidence Putnam ever said that.  That story comes from the imaginative pen of Parson Weems, and didn’t enter textbooks until the Civil War.)

Pg. 107:  The population of the United States, less than four million in 1790, would increase tenfold by 1870.  And the founders had not at all anticipated political parties.  The framers had expected only a tiny minority of Americans to vote.  And these voting men (all property owners) wouldn’t elect the president directly; they would vote only for electors of the Electoral College, an institution established to further restrain the popular will. 

Pg. 123:  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.  But herein lies another revolution in the century and half between the pilgrims and the 1787 meeting of the Constitutional Convention.  This was not just a political revolution but also a religious revolution.  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. 

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, the author of this book wouldn’t have been able to vote.  He wouldn’t have been able to own property, either.  He’d very likely have been unable to write, and, if he survived childhood, chances are that he’d have died in childbirth.  It is very unlikely he would express a political opinion, ever.  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.  That’s not history; it’s not originalism or even constitutionalism: it is fundamentalism.

Pg. 127:  The original pledge of allegiance was written by Francis Bellamy, a socialist.  It was written in 1892 for children to recite at school; it wasn’t meant for grown-ups.  It became the national pledge in 1942; “Under God” was added in the 1950’s during the McCarthy scare.  When 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. 

Pg. 137:  In the far right, where originalism has slipped into fundamentalism, where historical scholarship is taken for a conspiracy and the founding of the United States has become a religion, it’s not the past that’s a foreign country.  It’s the present.

Pg. 141:  In 1777, Vermont became the first state to outlaw slavery.  That same year, John Adams defeated a bill put forward, in the Massachusetts legislature, to do the same.  Slavery ended in Massachusetts in the 1789s. 

Pg. 143: In The Age of Reason, Paine was uncompromising in his condemnation of the world’s religions.  Paine believed in God; he just didn’t believe in scriptures; these he considered hearsay, lies, fables, and frauds that served to wreak havoc with humanity while hiding the beauty of God’s creation, the evidence for which was everywhere obvious in “the universe we behold.”

Pg. 144:  Many believed that Adams after his election to the Presidency betrayed everything the Revolution had been fought for.  In 1798, Adams signed the Sedition Act making defaming his administration a federal crime.  Twenty-five people were arrested, fifteen indicted, and ten convicted, including Benjamin Franklin’s grandson, who died of yellow fever before he could be brought to court.  This act expired on March 4, 1801, the day before Jefferson was inaugurated.

Jefferson defeated Adams in the election of 1800.  Without the three-fifths clause, Adams would have won, which is why one Boston newspaper writer observed that Jefferson had ridden “into the temple of Liberty on the shoulders of slaves.”

Pg. 146:  Until Longfellow’s poem in 1860, no-one seems to have heard of Paul Revere’s ride.

Pg. 150:  In 1797 John Adams signed the Treaty of Tripoli, freeing the American captives in North Africa.  Its Article 11, an assurance that the United States would never engage in a holy war, declared, in no uncertain terms, that “the Government of the United States of Americas is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”