Jill Lepore: Who Owns the American Revolution?

Here at The Way of Improvement Leads Home we have made an effort to call our readers' attention to authors who bring history to bear, in a responsible way, on the current Tea Party Movement. So far no one has done it better than Harvard history professor Jill Lepore. In her recent article in The New Yorker, "Tea and Sympathy," Lepore brilliantly offers us a piece of history journalism (is that a genre?) that weaves the current Tea Party movement in Boston with both the Boston Tea Party of 1774 and the bicentennial celebration (1974) of the event. Here is a very brief taste that does not do justice to the entire article:

Beginning even before it was over, the American Revolution has been put to wildly varying political ends. Federalists claimed its legacy; so did anti-Federalists. Jacksonian Democrats said they were the true sons of the Revolution. No, Whigs said, we are. The Union claimed the Revolution; so did the Confederacy.

Today’s Tea Party has roots in a battle over the Revolution that dates to the Bicentennial, when no one could agree on what story a country torn apart by the war in Vietnam and by civil-rights strife at home ought to tell about its unruly beginnings. Congress established an American Revolution Bicentennial Commission in 1966. “My view is that the Bicentennial should be a vehicle for social change,” Richard Barrett, who was a director of the commission under Lyndon Johnson, said. After Richard Nixon took office, in 1969, Barrett left. The new Administration, he said, “is not prepared to deal with the kinds of problems I’d like to see dealt with.”

On May 4, 1970, the Ohio National Guard fired into a crowd of Kent State students protesting the U.S. invasion of Cambodia, killing four. This caused a lot of people to think about the Boston Massacre; almost exactly two hundred years earlier, British soldiers had fired into a crowd, killing five. In those years, Bostonians had opposed the military, insisting that a standing army was inconsistent with a free government. To a generation dodging the draft, that argument looked pretty interesting. The week after the shooting, a Kent State student said to the Times, “They told King George or whoever that guy was, ‘Look, leave us alone.’ And he said no. And they said, ‘Come on, leave us alone or there’s going to be trouble.’ And he still said no. So they said, ‘All right, mother,’ and they picked up a gun and started killing a bunch of British and tossing tea in the Boston harbor. And that’s what’s happening here.”