The Tea Party’s Battle for American History

Review of Jill Lepore, The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle over American History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), i-x, 207 pages, ISBN 978-0-691-15027-7, Hardcover, $19.95.

Jill Lepore, the David Woods Kamper ‘41 Professor of American History at Harvard University, has earned my admiration for leaving the safety of her Ivy League campus and the intellectual protection of her position as a staff writer for the New Yorker to attend Tea Party meetings. This has led to a book about the fantasies of Tea Party members regarding the “good old days” of Colonial America, what actually happened at the Boston Tea Party and during the American Revolution as discerned by academic specialists working in dusty archives, and her own experiences jostling shoulders with the Tea Party membership. What the professor found makes for a fascinating book, which goes back and forth between fantasies of American history loudly proclaimed at the well-publicized Tea Party protests and the messy realities of our colonial and revolutionary past—including the 1773 Tea Party and wonderful materials on Ben Franklin and his struggling sister Jane Mecom.

At Tea Party rallies, Lepore was immediately branded and often denounced as a liberal the second she identified herself as a professor. On one occasion, a woman—who was there “to see Sarah [Palin]. She’s so adorable”—responded to Lepore’s taking out her notebook by frowning and demanding, “Are you a liberal?” Lepore’s answer, “I’m a hist—” was drowned out by the grabbing of the professor’s jacket and demands for $50. Lepore’s puzzled, “$50?” drew the Tea Partier’s response: “If you’re a liberal. Because you people, you want to give money to anyone who asked you” (pp. 128-129). Dealing with the fantasies of Tea Partiers, which could occasionally turn aggressive, was a far cry from inspiring bright Harvard undergraduate and doctoral students. Her experiences led me to be uncharacteristically quiet on my own trips to Tea Party meetings.

This volume does a good job of covering the “who, what, where,

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when, why, and how” of her subject. The people she met and interviewed at Tea Party rallies were mostly fairly recent transplants to the state known as “Taxachusetts.” Some of them were educated in non-historical fields, such as an MIT technical researcher. The professor treated and describes her interviewees in a respectful manner, mostly letting their words speak for themselves, though juxtaposing some of the realities of colonial history with their images of it. This regard, however, does not extend to the big names in the Tea Party movements and those devoted to proving the constitutional theory of “originality”—the concept of interpreting only the precise meaning of what the founders meant in the Declaration, the Constitution, and the Federalist Papers.

What Tea Partiers had to say reflected great frustration with the gridlock of the American political system, the high taxes, fear of Obama’s “change you can believe in,” and the growing fear that America is in decline. Their ideas about our founders and founding had very little to do with the actual lives of our colonial ancestors, which the historian knows so much about and brings to light especially through the person of Jane Mecom. This populist movement’s lack of historical verisimilitude is not very troubling to those participating. It was always my sense, from watching accounts of Tea Party rallies on the news and at greater length on C-SPAN, that for participants the experience was very much like going to a rock concert or a major sporting event. Since I’ve never been to a rock concert, my equivalent experiences were anti-war and civil rights marches and rallies. In all such cases, there was the good (what the rally stood for), the bad (those who stood in the way of achieving the goal of goodness), and very little concern for the facts.

I remember, as I rapidly made up posters in preparation for our environmental awareness week at Temple University prior to the first Earth Day, being asked by an older colleague, “How do you or anyone know that a quarter of the world’s oceans are covered with debris? Have studies been done?” “But,” I proclaimed, “I read it in the New York Times!” “How did the reporter know this to be a fact, as opposed to a wild speculation?” “I don’t know.” I paused. This was one of my first great lessons in groupthink, which helped to prepare me to understand how perfectly intelligent—and not so intelligent—human beings can get together in the name of a cause and often show no more critical sense than at a rock concert or a championship athletic event where the great pleasure comes not from thoughtful analysis but rather from the joy of group identification with the “good” cause or joyous event. The Tea Party rallies I have actually attended have been much more subdued affairs with only approximately 50 in attendance.

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The Tea Party rallies in and around Boston evoke all sorts of memories of the actual events that Jill Lepore reports on as she visits the replica of the actual ship and takes her children on weekend excursions to the local historical sites.

Why the Tea Parties in 2009-2010? Why the actual Boston Tea Party and American Revolution in the 1770s? Why did the Tea Party start less than a month after Barack Obama had entered the White House? Hadn’t Tea Partiers ever heard of the presidential honeymoon, which the press and I used to write about? Why was there such determination to stop this unusually intelligent and intellectual president from achieving his goals so soon after 53% of the population had voted him into office with 365 electoral votes out of 538? Professor Lepore raises these questions but does not begin to adequately answer them in her fine volume. However, she does give us some excellent information on what brought about the Boston Tea Party, which escalated into the American Revolution.

However, I only wish here and elsewhere the professor would have gone a step or two further to provide direct psychohistorical explanations. Although she was a student of John Demos, who has brilliantly used psychohistory in several of his books on Colonial America, the psychohistorical approach does not appear to have rubbed off on this fine early American historian. She writes about the “anti-history” of the movement she is studying, recognizing the confusion of the present with the past, but ignores the path-breaking work of Vamik Volkan on “chosen traumas,” “chosen glories,” and “time collapse,” which would have given her more insight into what she observed. In Lepore’s shoes, I would ask why the colonies, which paid such low taxes compared to the English colonialists, were so rebellious. What psychic forces kept them from enjoying British protection at bargain tax rates instead of becoming involved in a life-threatening civil war, which ended with them paying much higher taxes? Whenever I’ve had the opportunity to teach about the American Revolution, I’ve always likened it to the need of many young adults to establish autonomy in a rebellious manner.

Why the Tea Party Movement developed is a complicated issue. The Internet, with Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social networking sites, makes it possible to get lots of people together in relatively short periods of time, especially when they know there will be television cameras. The profound ambivalence of Americans about chance in our system of checks and balances found expression in this well-funded, well-publicized movement. Partly it is a case of growing anxiety about change in America, especially among the graying population. Recipients of social secu-

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rity worry about adding medical benefits to others just as they worry about the declining economic basis of our country. When members of Congress held public hearings in their home districts in the summer of 2009 they encountered sharp reactions from their constituents, so many of whom were on Social Security and Medicare, as well as Tea Party members—recipients of big government railing vociferously against government programs. The underlying fear is that by extending medical services and government programs to others in a period of a declining economy, their own benefits will be diminished. I was utterly amazed at the degree to which the rhetoric of protesting against big government was coming from people who were direct beneficiaries of government largesse.

This concern is enlarged by the fear that having an African American president, and many committee chairs who are African American, will result in increased benefits for these groups, cutting the slice of the governmental pie to the general Caucasian population. I have often been struck, in watching both Tea Party and conservative Republican public events, by the extent to which they have had black and/or Hispanic speakers on the podium with them for groups that are so overwhelmingly white. The minorities’ seeming inclusion in the rhetoric of struggling against big government and supporting non-existent laissez faire economics is politically correct and much safer than acknowledging whites’ fears that this country and the world are on the verge of losing its Anglo-Saxon domination.

Despite its failure to delve explicitly into the psychohistorical roots of the Tea Party movement, it’s a pleasure to recommend Lepore’s charming book.

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