This is a bit after the fact, but for the sake of completeness in self-archiving, here’s my appearance on 30 January 2013 on WBUR’s “On Point with Tom Ashbrook.” The show was about what it’s like to be gay in America today, and I was one of those playing the role of native informant.
Over at the New Yorker website, I’ve posted some thoughts about the late Aaron Swartz.
“Havel’s Specter,” my essay on Václav Havel’s philosophy as manifested in his essays, his plays, and his political career, is published in the 9 April 2012 issue of The Nation.
If anyone wants to know what a Czech shopkeeper’s display window under Communism actually looked like, click on the gallery titled “Prague Shop Windows 1976–96″ on the photographer Iren Stehli’s website.
For this essay, I consulted Havel’s plays and essays in English, as well as, in some cases, in Czech as published in his collected works, the first seven volumes of which were published by Torst in 1999. For biographical details, I relied on Havel’s autobiographical books, Disturbing the Peace and To the Castle and Back; Eda Kriseová’s campaign biography of Havel (1991; translated in 1993 by me in an earlier life; don’t blame me for all the typos! its original publisher went out of business before the book went to press and it was never proofread); John Keane’s problematic, tonally off-kilter 1999 biography; and Carol Rocamora’s Acts of Courage, which focuses primarily on Havel’s career as a dramatist. I also consulted the New York Times obituary and the chronologies at the back of Jan Vladislav’s anthology Living in Truth and on the website of the Václav Havel Library. Also useful were Hugh Agnew’s The Czechs and the Lands of the Bohemian Crown and Aviezer Tucker’s The Philosophy and Politics of Czech Dissidence from Patočka to Havel. Paul Wilson commented on Havel’s word samopohyb in “Notes from the Underground,” a 2006 article in Columbia magazine. Details of Václav Klaus’s political philosophy are taken in part from his book Renaissance. Klaus claimed that the role of dissidents had been exaggerated in a 15 November 2003 column in Mladá fronta dnes and repeated the claim in a 16 November 2004 interview with Hospodářské noviny as well as in remarks delivered in English in London in 2009. Wilson’s observations about Klaus’s eulogy were published in the New York Review of Books.
Just two days ago, I received in the mail a copy of my friend Jonathan Bolton’s new book, Worlds of Dissent: Charter 77, the Plastic People of the Universe, and Czech Culture under Communism, which I’m eagerly reading and highly recommend! I strongly suspect it will be the definitive account in English of Havel’s ideas about dissidence and the intellectual milieu in which they arose.
Over at the New Yorker‘s Book Bench, I try to explain why I signed the Occupy Writers petition.
It is a sign of our times, conspicuous to the coarsest observer, that many intelligent and religious persons withdraw themselves from the common labors and competitions of the market and the caucus, and betake themselves to a certain solitary and critical way of living, from which no solid fruit has yet appeared to justify their separation. They hold themselves aloof: they feel the disproportion between their faculties and the work offered them, and they prefer to ramble in the country and perish of ennui, to the degradation of such charities and such ambitions as the city can propose to them. They are striking work, and crying out for somewhat worthy to do! . . .
Society, to be sure, does not like this very well; it saith, Whoso goes to walk alone, accuses the whole world; he declareth all to be unfit to be his companions; it is very uncivil, nay, insulting; Society will retaliate. Meantime, this retirement does not proceed from any whim on the part of these separators; but if any one will take pains to talk with them, he will find that this part is chosen both from temperament and from principle; with some unwillingness, too, and as a choice of the less of two evils; for these persons are not by nature melancholy, sour, and unsocial,—they are not stockish or brute,—but joyous; susceptible, affectionate; they have even more than others a great wish to be loved. . . .
These exacting children advertise us of our wants. There is no compliment, no smooth speech with them; they pay you only this one compliment, of insatiable expectation; they aspire, they severely exact, and if they only stand fast in this watchtower, and persist in demanding unto the end, and without end, then are they terrible friends, whereof poet and priest cannot choose but stand in awe; and what if they eat clouds, and drink wind, they have not been without service to the race of man.
From “The Transcendentalist, a Lecture Read at the Masonic Temple, Boston, January, 1842.”
To spend one’s days and nights in a New York City park is expensive. At a minimum, one gives up running hot water, protection from rain and cold, convenient access to a bathroom, and most forms of privacy. I’ve done no more than visit the Occupy Wall Street protests in Zuccotti Park, whose older name of Liberty Plaza the protesters have reclaimed, and I imagine that the ones who actually spend the night there know who each other are. Maybe the willingness to lose safety and comfort are proof, in one another’s eyes, of a level of commitment. Maybe the loss underwrites a trust in one another that makes possible the group’s persistent faith in the ideals of openness and democracy.
During my two visits, I wasn’t wearing my reporter’s cap, and I’m not much of a joiner. That left me the role of tourist. When I visited on Thursday, September 29, haphazard eavesdropping seemed to pick up repeatedly the earnest, necessary, and tedious conversations typical of groups of people trying to decide how to make decisions—conversations that tend to become especially byzantine in groups suspicious of hierarchies. But the openheartedness with which people were giving themselves to these tedious conversations was winning, and the protesters’ physical innovations to group interaction were ingenious and looked fun. Since electric amplification is forbidden in the park, the protesters have adopted what they call “the people’s mike”: at the end of every phrase, a speaker pauses while audience members who were able to hear him repeat the phrase for the benefit of audience members who couldn’t. Lest this practice render listeners too fawningly imitative, audience members all the while talk back to the speaker through a variety of silent, waggling gestures: jazz hands pointing upward signify approval, a pinched forefinger and thumb suggest that the speaker cut his message short, and so on. Watching this new semiotics, I found myself wondering, Why haven’t people been doing this all along? It’s as if it took the Facebook generation to make the most of human presence. People of every description were photographing, filming, and recording. Policemen stood around the periphery, gazing into the crowds, apparently looking for alcohol, which the protesters have forsworn, and tents, which city law forbids. The multiplicity of surveillance triggered a little paranoia in me, and I wondered what sort of databases my visage might be appearing in.
When I visited again today, Tuesday, October 4, the food table looked better stocked, but the sleeping area looked more bedraggled. The photographers, meanwhile, seemed more benign; I watched a young man interview a protester on video, and when she asked, at the end, who he worked for, he explained that the video was just for his Facebook page; he added that he was from Tennessee. Whereas, on my earlier visit, strangers had greeted me and asked what I might be able to contribute, today the people who struck up conversations with me seemed to have more-focused agendas. A woman dressed as Marie Antoinette tried to sign me up for wind-powered electricity. A camera crew for Al Jazeera asked me to pretend to be reading an issue of the protesters’ newspaper, the Occupy Wall Street Journal, for the sake of some B-roll that they were shooting. I actually did want to read it, and the outreach table had given away all its copies, so I pretended. The camera guys were willing to let me keep the prop.
Is this the revolution? I haven’t gone to a march yet, and haven’t yet attended the protesters’ twice-daily town meeting, which they call General Assembly, so I’m hardly in a position to say. Some critics have pointed out that the finance companies once associated with Wall Street are now for the most part headquartered in midtown, but the criticism seems to miss the point: Wall Street, as a location, is a symbol. The location of Occupy Wall Street, on the other hand, is peculiarly literal. The protest is happening in a particular place; online, one may observe it happening, but one can’t virtually participate; it isn’t clear whether the improvised infrastructure could be transferred to another location, let alone seeded to many locations.
Other critics have objected that the protesters don’t seem to know what they want—an objection harder to dismiss. Indeed, the Adbusters poster that launched the movement asked the koan-like question, “What Is Our One Demand?” Similarly, the “Declaration of the Occupation,” which the New York General Assembly adopted unanimously on September 29, lists grievances but proposes no remedies—or rather, no specific remedies; it does exhort people to “create a process to address the problems we face, and generate solutions accessible to everyone.” But details matter in politics; it’s only through negotiation of details that compromises can be reached. Moods—even good moods—pass, and New York City is going to get colder before it gets warmer. Before winter comes, I hope the protesters find a way to disperse their movement without dissipating it.
It seems likely to me that almost everything prescribed by politicians as a remedy for America’s economic doldrums is wrong. I’m not an economist, so my opinion should probably be taken with a grain of salt. But since reading the news has begun to take on an Alice in Wonderland quality for me, I wanted to try to set down in words how my understanding diverges from theirs.
Just so you know where this is headed: I suspect that the flow of money in America has broken down because wealth is too highly concentrated, and that for at least a generation or so, the government ought to tax the rich heavily and spend on the poor and middle class just as heavily.
Why do all politicians and most pundits recommend the opposite? Flawed metaphors, I think. Most people make a natural comparison between a nation’s budget and a family’s. If a family is sliding into debt, the only remedies are to earn more and spend less. But a nation’s economy is not at all like a family’s. For one thing, within most families, communism prevails: the rule governing money is, From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs. For better or worse, this doesn’t happen to be the rule governing money in America at large. Also, within most families, money is not exchanged for labor. In a pedagogical, largely symbolic way, Jimmy may be given $2 a week in exchange for taking out the garbage. But the person who cooks and cleans does not clock his hours; the children do not buy their dinners. The exchange of labor and goods within a family is for the most part unmeasured and invisible, and it makes more sense to understand a family as a group of people functioning a single economic agent. If the sort of thing that brings a family from debt to prosperity also helps a nation, it’s logical coincidence. Family and nation are so unlike each other that there’s no reason to expect it to.
The nation-family metaphor is nonetheless powerful. Even though most economists believe that reduced government spending will worsen the current recession, almost all politicians have caved into the “common-sense” idea that a nation in economic trouble ought to reduce its debt, leaving Paul Krugman to cry in the wilderness. The metaphor also drives, I suspect, another popular economic idea with almost no empirical support, namely, the notion that instead of taxing the wealthy, the government should reward them, in hopes that the wealth they accumulate will trickle down to others in the nation. The wealthy have proven that they know how to make a profit, this line of reasoning goes; get out of their way and let them make the economy grow.
The notion appeals, I suspect, because it, too, would make sense if a nation were like a family. In fact it’s excellent economic advice for a family. If Mother is a whizbang software engineer and Father’s just a freelance writer, it doesn’t make economic sense to tax them with household chores equally. Father should change more diapers and wash more dishes, freeing up Mother to devote more energy on coding the latest breakthrough app. (Whether this sort of inequity is good for the marriage bed, as well as for the pocketbook, is a different question. But it’s well understood that marriages are economically more than the sum of their parts only when spouses differentiate in their skills and tasks, rather than splitting all responsibilities identically.) If the richest people in a nation were analogous to the primary breadwinners in a family, and if income taxes were analogous to housekeeping chores, then it would make sense for the nation as a whole to indulge the rich in their profit-making and to believe in the existence of the trickle-down fairy. But neither analogy holds. Mother the software engineer, remember, deposits her paycheck every week in the family’s communal bank account; this bank account feeds her freeloading children, not to mention the dog; Mother may even let Father the freelance writer buy a new laptop that his personal earnings don’t yet justify. By contrast, when a corporate executive is given a break on his capital earnings tax, he is thereby exempted from, say, providing food for fellow Americans who can’t earn enough to feed themselves or investing in the future earning potential of a worker who’s not yet up to speed. Yes, he’s now able to make money faster, but the reason that other family members make sacrifices for Mother the software engineer is that they know she’s going to share her wealth—that her wealth is also theirs. The wealth of the little-taxed corporate executive is only his.
Proponents of trickle-downism will argue that the little-taxed corporate executive will in fact share his wealth by spending it, and that his purchase of goods and services will drive economic growth more efficaciously than mere giveaways would. But it turns out that the executive doesn’t spend more, or not enough more for his increased spending to be helpful to the economy—for the simple reason that he doesn’t need to. In the hands of rich people, money moves slowly. That’s what it means to be rich: you have more money than the cost of all the things you need or want. A poor person, by contrast, needs more than he can afford. The poor therefore spend money faster. If you want to boost a nation’s economic growth, it’s better to give to the poor, not the rich. A dollar given to a poor man multiplies faster, Keynes observed, than a dollar given to a rich man.
Economic inequity has been extremely high in the past decade, much as it was in the 1920s and 1930s. The popular understanding of the Great Depression is that it ended because World War II finally obliged American politicians to forget their prudence, and borrow and spend enormous sums. Supposedly this great deficit expenditure stimulated the American economy, like an adrenaline shot. Maybe. But what if the metaphor of stimulation is wrong too? What if it wasn’t the deficit spending of World War II that stimulated the American economy, but the war’s redistribution of wealth? The war obliged America to employ a literal army of people as soldiers and factory workers, and after the war, America felt obliged to continue to reward the working classes with expanded social services, including free higher education for veterans. The period from World War II to the 1970s turned out to be the greatest era of prosperity America has ever known. Is it a coincidence that it followed a massive, government-run redistribution of wealth, which happened to take the form of a war? When TARP and a fiscal stimulus bill were passed a couple of years ago, I remember thinking to myself, well, if the mainstream economists are right, and the problem with America can be remedied by an injection of deficit spending, then my gloom will be disproved. But if my suspicion is right that the underlying problem is economic inequity, then no stimulating injection, however large, will succeed. The economy will be lackluster until something happens that shifts wealth from the rich to the poor. Such a shift is unlikely in today’s political climate, of course. Political power naturally follows wealth, so the rich, owning as they do a disproportionate share of the nation’s wealth, now also control a disproportionate share of its political decisions. In a catch-22, the inequity undermining the economy makes impossible the political action needed to remedy it.
Why haven’t our current wars had the same effect that World War II did? I don’t know. Maybe we’re not paying our soldiers enough; maybe the military’s heavy investment in technology and equipment has muted war’s impact as a redistributor of wealth. (And maybe, of course, I’m wrong. I don’t have the statistical chops to back up this analysis.)
The mention of military technology brings me to my last idea. This is the challenge of the robot utopia. You remember the robot utopia. You imagined it when you were in fifth grade, and your juvenile mind first seized with rapture upon the idea of intelligent machines that would perform dull, repetitive tasks yet demand nothing for themselves. In the future, you foresaw, robots would do more and more, and humans less and less. There would be no need for humans to endanger themselves in coal mines or bore themselves on assembly lines. A few people would always be needed to repair and build the robots, and this drudgery of robot supervision would have to be rewarded somehow, but someday robots would surely make wealth so abundant that most people wouldn’t need to work and would be free merely to enjoy and cultivate themselves—by, say, hunting in the morning, fishing in the afternoon, and doing literary criticism after dinner.
Your fifth-grade self was wrong, of course. Robots aren’t altruistic beings; they’re capital investments; and though robots may not ask to be paid, their owners demand a return on their investment. We now live in the robot utopia, which isn’t one. Thanks in large part to computerized mechanization, manufacturing productivity in the past century has increased many times over. Standards of living are higher than they ever were, but we no longer need as many humans to work as we once did. Perhaps not coincidentally, human wages, in America at least, have stagnated since the 1970s. If humans made no more money in the past four decades, where did the wealth created by the higher productivity go? Toward robot wages, as it were. The owners of the robots took the money—that is, the capitalists. Any fifth-grader can see where this leads. At some point society has to choose. Either society accepts the robots’ gift as a general one, and redistributes the wealth that the robots inadvertently concentrate, or society allows the robots to become the exclusive tools of an ever-shrinking elite, increasingly resented, in confused fashion, by the people whom the robots have displaced.
The robots are here. By now they automate even much of our social lives. You might compare the political challenge they represent to what’s known as the “resource curse”—the infamous difficulty that oil-rich nations have in preserving democracy while sharing the oil’s proceeds. Do we want to be Norway or Saudi Arabia? The choice seems to be between democratic socialism and tyranny. I know my understanding will strike many as implausible, if not unspeakable: I’m saying that the country is suffering economically because it doesn’t know what to do with all its surplus wealth.
I’ll be answering questions about “Tea and Antipathy,” my New Yorker article about the role that smuggling merchants may have played in fomenting the American Revolution, during a “live chat” on the New Yorker website today (Wednesday, Dec. 15) at 3pm.
If you’re looking for questions to ask me, check out “‘The Revolution May Have Been Astroturfed’?”, a post by J. L. Bell at his blog Boston 1775, in which he fills in some details of the Tea Party story that I didn’t have room for in my New Yorker piece and raises some good questions about the hypothesis I entertain.
Update, Dec. 16: Thanks to all who participated in the live chat, which has now been precipitated into a transcript on the New Yorker website. Meanwhile, over at Boston 1775, J. L. Bell today adds a further supplement to my historiographic blog post by reviewing the scholarship of Oliver Morton Dickerson, who focused on the self-dealing of the British customs service in the American colonies.
"Tea and Antipathy," my review-essay about the dark side of the American Revolution, is published in the December 20 & 27, 2010, issue of The New Yorker. As in the past, I'd like to offer a bibliographic supplement here on my blog. N.B.: This post is more likely to be comprehensible if you first read the article whose sources it describes.
My essay approaches the books under review at a bit of an angle. In As If an Enemy's Country: The British Occupation of Boston and the Origins of Revolution, Richard Archer tells the story of the British occupation of Boston between 1768 and 1770 in a fluently written, chronologically straightforward, somewhat old-fashioned style. He touches on such questions as the revolutionaries' motives and ideological consistency, but he aims mostly at a presentation of the evidence. In American Insurgents, American Patriots: The Revolution of the People, by contrast, T. H. Breen has a thesis to prove. In a style somewhat more rarefied than Archer's, Breen argues that in 1774 and 1775, during the early stages of popular mobilization, America's revolutionaries were more uncouth than we're comfortable remembering today. In his interest in character, Breen is following in the footsteps of historians like Gordon Wood and Joyce Appleby. Archer is aware of the historiographic trend that Breen is participating in, but Archer's is the sort of book that aims to keep to one side of such trends.
In my article, I was adding concerns of my own to Archer's presentation of the facts, and reading Breen's interpretation somewhat against the grain. Breen wants to lift the stigma attached in the modern mind to the insurgent character (though he does retain a few reservations) and is confident that "American insurgents provide no comfort to those in our own time who claim that a single cause or narrow agenda justifies armed violence against neighbors or the state." It isn't clear to me, however, that it's possible to draw that distinction. Insurgents who are confused, misinformed, and paranoid may well believe that they're acting for the sake of a common good—mistakenly—and people with such beliefs today may have more in common with the early revolutionaries than Breen allows. Another distinction between us: Breen believes that consumer culture helped to shape American character in a positive way—see his Marketplace of Revolution (Oxford, 2004)—and I found myself worrying that the corruptions of profit-seeking may have deformed America's political process at the nation's inception.
The third new book mentioned in my article, Defiance of the Patriots, by Benjamin Carp, did not reach me until after I had researched and written most of my essay, and unsurprisingly my essay is somewhat oblique to it as well. The classic and still definitive account of the Boston Tea Party is Benjamin Woods Labaree's The Boston Tea Party (Oxford, 1968). Carp has revisited the events described by Labaree, updating details and uncovering new sources. He is a methodical researcher, who has clearly done his time in the archives; he has found the earliest instance in print of the term "Boston Tea Party" yet known (in 1826, a newspaper quoted a Tea Party participant then living in Ohio as having used the phrase), and his list of participants is no doubt the most accurate yet compiled. Like Archer's, Carp's book is an account rather than an argument; like Breen, however, Carp writes in the contemporary historiographic mode, preferring contextual explanation and characterological description. One chapter places the events of 1773 in the context of the international trade in tea; another, in that of colonists' relations with native Americans; a third, in that of African American slavery. He's not much interested in double-guessing colonists' motives. Indeed, I sometimes felt that Carp was a bit partial to the radicals.
Setting aside for a moment my differences of temperament and perspective from them, however, I should say that I'm indebted to Archer, Breen, and Carp for their many insights and discoveries, as well as for giving me the occasion to discover that I have opinions of my own about the topic. (If you would like to see how Breen himself relates his research to the contemporary Tea Party movement, please see his March 2010 op-ed for the Washington Post.)
The American Revolution is a puzzle unlike other historical puzzles, not least because very few, if any, of those who participated planned for it to happen. Once you start to question professed motives—that is, once you doubt the good faith of some actors and the accuracy of others' understanding of the situation they were in—the puzzle becomes even trickier. A person could spend a lifetime trying to solve it, and so it's with more than the usual trepidation that I offer my online bibliography this time around, conscious that I'll be revealing the limits of my research even more starkly than I usually do, and that the responsible thing for me to do is direct readers to, say, the twelve-page descriptive bibliography at the back of Robert Middlekauff's The Glorious Cause and to the lavish guides to further research that David Hackett Fischer includes at the end of books like Paul Revere's Ride and Washington's Crossing. Now that I've directed you to them and my conscience is clear, here's to the limits within which journalists are obliged to work, and here we go . . .
The best account of Joyce, Junior, the mysterious figure who claimed to lead Boston's "Committee for Tarring and Feathering" between 1774 and 1777, is Albert Matthews, "Joyce, Jun.," Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts 8 (1903): 88-104. In a subsequent article, Matthews explained that the pseudonym was probably a reference to Cornet George Joyce, thought by some to have been the executioner of Charles I, though he probably wasn't; see Albert Matthews, "Joyce Jr. Once More," Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts 11 (1906-1907): 280-295. Among the literary critics who have linked Hawthorne's demonic figure to Joyce, Junior, are Roy Harvey Pearce, in "Hawthorne and the Sense of the Past, or, the Immortality of Major Molineux," ELH 21 (1954): 327-349, and Peter Shaw, in "Fathers, Sons, and the Ambiguities of Revolution in 'My Kinsman, Major Molineux,'" New England Quarterly 49 (1976): 559-76. As for the general history of tarring and feathering in America, the best account I found is Benjamin H. Irvin's "Tar, Feathers, and the Enemies of American Liberties, 1768-1776," New England Quarterly 76 (2003): 197-238, though an older article, R. S. Longley's "Mob Activities in Revolutionary Massachusetts," New England Quarterly 6 (1933): 98-130 was also useful. A disgusted Loyalist once described a lady "so complaisant as to throw her Pillows out of the Window, as the Mob passed," in order to furnish them with feathers. That disgusted Loyalist was Peter Oliver, chief justice of the Superior Court in Massachusetts, whose bitter, intemperate, and pretty funny history of the American Revolution was published in the twentieth century as Peter Oliver's Origin & Progress of the American Revolution: A Tory View, Douglass Adair & John A. Schutz, eds. (The Huntington Library, 1961) and is a sourcebook for patriot human rights violations. The tale of customs agent John Malcom, perhaps the only American to have been tarred and feathered more than once, is best told by his great-great-great-nephew Frank W. C. Hersey, in "Tar and Feathers: The Adventures of Captain John Malcom," Transactions of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts 34 (1941): 429-73 (not digitized, to my knowledge).
A wonderful introduction to the historian and Massachusetts governor Thomas Hutchinson is Bernard Bailyn's The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson (Harvard University Press, 1974); it reads like a tragic novel. In a 2004 lecture, Bailyn recalled how, when the book was first published, some critics "said that this biography of a law-and-order conservative who struggled against popular mobs and protestors could only be a disguised defense of Richard Nixon" ("Thomas Hutchinson in Context," Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 114 [2006]: 281-300). Many of Hutchinson's writings are available online. His account of his debriefing by George III begins on page 157 of The Diary and Letters of His Excellency Thomas Hutchinson, Esq., Peter Orlando Hutchinson, ed. (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1883). On page 67 of the same book Hutchinson explains that he suspects John Rowe and other merchant-smugglers of having masterminded the destruction of his house. Hutchinson narrates the destruction itself in the third volume of his history of Massachusetts, The History of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, from 1749 to 1774 (London: John Murray, 1828), beginning on page 122. When I mention that Hutchinson enjoyed debating political philosophy, I was thinking of his 1773 exchange with the Massachusetts legislature (including John Adams and James Bowdoin) over the nature of the British Parliament's legal authority over the colonies, which Bailyn suggests he indulged in for his own intellectual satisfaction and to his political detriment. The exchange is printed on pages 336 to 396 of Speeches of the Governors of Massachusetts, from 1765 to 1775; and the Answers of the House of Representatives, to the Same (Boston: Russell and Gardner, 1818) and also exists in a modern edition, Briefs of the American Revolution, edited by John Philip Reid (1981).
The destruction of Hutchinson's townhouse was further described by Francis Bernard, then the governor of the colony, in a letter to the earl of Halifax, quoted by Caleb H. Snow in A History of Boston (Boston: Able Bowen, 1825). Edmund S. and Helen M. Morgan give an excellent modern account of this event and the 1760s generally in their classic work The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution (University of North Carolina Press, 1953). Hawthorne rendered the scene in his children's history Grandfather's Chair:
The volumes of Hutchinson's library, so precious to a studious man, were torn out of their covers, and the leaves sent flying out of the windows. Manuscripts containing secrets of our country's history, which are now lost forever, were scattered to the wind.
In the same book, Hawthorne also reprinted a letter from Hutchinson describing the riot. You can read the young merchant Henry Bass's admission that his group the Loyal Nine preferred to keep their names hidden behind that of Ebenezer McIntosh in his letter to Samuel P. Savage, 19 December 1765, Savage Papers, Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 44 (1910-1911): 688-689.
The thorny question of economics, smuggling, and corruption is not a new one. Some suspected a link even at the time. "The Plan of the People of Property," General Thomas Gage wrote to the British government in 1765, "has been to raise the lower Class to prevent the Execution of the Law." Writing under the name "Massachusettensis," Daniel Leonard wrote in 1775 that "A smuggler and a whig are cousin Germans, the offspring of two sisters, avarice and ambition. The smuggler received his protection from the Whig, and he in his turn received support from the smuggler." It was the Progressive historians of the early twentieth century who first gave a scholarly formulation to the idea that merchants, eager to protect their smuggling profits and to dodge tax burdens, manipulated popular discontent in the colonies and then lost control of the fire they had set. My starting place was Arthur Meier Schlesinger Sr.'s The Colonial Merchants and the American Revolution, first published in 1918 and revised in 1939. (C. M. Andrews is said to have come up with the same thesis, independent of Schlesinger, and he published his version as "The Boston Merchants and the Non-Importation Movement," Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, vol. 19.) Late in life Schlesinger offered a précis of his argument in "Political Mobs and the American Revolution, 1765-1776," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 99 (1955): 244-50.
Schlesinger's thesis has been regretted by a number of historians as reductive, which is, I suspect, in some quarters a more scholarly-sounding way of calling it unflattering to the American revolutionaries, but his painstaking and lucid book has not been discredited or for that matter surpassed, though in places it has been corrected. (David Ammerman, for example, showed in In the Common Cause: American Response to the Coercive Acts of 1774 [University Press of Virginia, 1974], his classic study of how the colonies' boycotts and protests birthed their self-governance, that Schlesinger was wrong to believe the Pennsylvanian Joseph Galloway's claim that the conservative faction at the First Continental Congress had at any point more than a snowball's chance in hell of dissuading that Congress from declaring a boycott of Great Britain.) Instead of contradicting Schlesinger's thesis, a later generation of historians—including J. G. A. Pocock, Caroline Robbins, Bernard Bailyn, Gordon Wood, and the Morgans, a group who came to be called neo-Whigs—shifted the investigation of revolutionary motive from economics to a more philosophical plane and attempted to understand the mentality of the revolutionaries on their own terms. The neo-Whig historians identified a political ideology with a paranoid streak that they called the eighteenth-century Commonwealthman tradition. In Britain, the tradition was popular among those who were shut out of power during George III's rule and who hearkened back to the English revolutions of 1640 and 1688. Though confined to the radical fringe in Britain, the ideology had a powerful resonance in the American colonies. Why? Bailyn has suggested that it resonated because royally appointed governors had powers in America that kings had lost in Britain a century before. Wood has ingeniously suggested that paranoia was the natural result of combining the Enlightenment insistence that everything can be understood with a new complexity of sociopolitical governance:
At this very moment when the world was outrunning man's capacity to explain it in personal terms, in terms of the passions and schemes of individuals, the most enlightened of the age were priding themselves on their ability to do just that.
Wood surmises that instead of resigning themselves to bafflement over the causes of complex social events, the paranoid thinkers of the late eighteenth century preferred to believe that they had failed to understand because the crucial evidence had been withheld (see Gordon Wood, "Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth Century," William and Mary Quarterly 39 [1982]: 402-41).
The neo-Whig angle of vision discovered new riches in American revolutionary history by bringing to life the ideas in its pamphlets, letters, and diaries. The neo-Whig interpretive paradigm became the dominant one in American revolutionary history, and questions of pecuniary interest during the Revolution were set aside not as wrong but as intellectually vulgar. Among historians on the left, who might have been relied upon in other circumstances to doubt and carp, the old Progressive suspicion was not treated any more hospitably, because if Schlesinger and Andrews were right, then the working-class people who had thrown brickbats on behalf of freedom had to be demoted from heroes to pawns. In Crowd Action in Revolutionary Massachusetts, 1765-1780 (Academic Press, 1977), for example, Dirk Hoerder defends the political integrity of lower-class rioters. "Their actions were spontaneous," Hoerder writes, though he admits that "leaders could accentuate issues." Hoerder sees a continuity between the American rioters who launched the Revolution and those who, in the century that led up to it, punished profiteers and adulterers in their communities and menaced religious outsiders who encroached. Hoerder believes that eighteenth-century rioters acted to preserve communal equity, resisting free-market liberalism in favor of a public good that was, alas, to become harder to identify in the next century's proliferation of conflicting private interests. Hoerder's book is a treasury of detail, sometimes overwhelmingly so. His sympathy for the commoner sometimes clouds his judgment—as evidence of Thomas Hutchinson's "arrogance," for example, he confusingly adduces Hutchinson's regret over the unhealthy conditions in a Boston jail—but he is an honest and indefatigable researcher who presents evidence supporting the Progressive thesis as well as that contradicting it. For example, noting that crowd actions against soldiers were conducted in a different manner and spirit during the British occupation of Boston than those against tea importers, Hoerder is willing to wonder if Whig merchants paid for the latter attacks: "The different patterns of action at a time when customary forms of crowd activity were maintained against soldiers suggest that the participants were different, too."
Marc Egnal and Joseph A. Ernst proposed a synthesis of the Progressive thesis and the neo-Whig perspective in their article "An Economic Interpretation of the American Revolution," William and Mary Quarterly 29 (1972): 4-32. The evidence for the Progressive thesis was revisited, and the thesis reconsidered on its own terms, in 1986, when John W. Tyler published Smugglers & Patriots: Boston Merchants and the Advent of the American Revolution (Northeastern U P, 1986). Tyler ended up confirming Schlesinger's work. In fact, Tyler's only significant revision to Schlesinger's storyline was to suggest that in 1774, when radicalism and violence began to frighten moderate merchants, the merchants did not unanimously turn Loyalist but instead split more or less evenly into patriot and loyalist sympathizers. Tyler tells the story of the corrupt customs official Benjamin Barons, whose humiliation, when caught in 1760 trying to suborn an informer, was suspected by Hutchinson to be the ultimate cause of the destruction of Hutchinson's townhouse in 1765. (Barons's tale is told in even greater detail by Maurice Smith in The Writs of Assistance Case [University of California, 1978].) But Tyler's ace card, as a scholar, was his ability to prove from insurance records that certain merchants were indeed smugglers, including such patriots as John Rowe, Solomon Davis, William Molineux, Edward Payne, and William Cooper. In an appendix, Tyler printed a list of Boston merchants, identifying their specialties and naming the known smugglers.
I was convinced by Tyler's book, but I was concerned to note a number of discrepancies in his data. Some of these seem due to sloppiness, though it's hard to know whether the problem was in compiling the data or presenting them. On page 11, for example, Tyler claims to have figured out the specialties of 392 out of 439 Boston merchants; but in Table 4, on page 246, the specialties of only 342 merchants are tallied; and in the appendix, on page 257, there is an analysis of 425 merchants. So how many merchants did Tyler study? On page 30, John Erving is identified as a major smuggler of Dutch goods, but he's not marked as a smuggler in the appendix, where he does appear. These are minor issues, but since Tyler is the only scholar to have dug so deep into the evidence for the Progressive thesis in nearly a century, they suggest to me that the source documents could bear further scrutiny. (Tyler, for his part, does correct an error by Labaree, or rather a misplaced emphasis. Labaree thought that American resistance to the Tea Act of 1773 was driven more by the principle of taxation without representation than by fears of a British monopoly. In fact, Tyler writes, the antimonopoly rhetoric was vital as "the articulation of a genuine fear of the merchants themselves . . . and a propaganda device to divert the consumers' attention from the reduced prices the Tea Act would bring"—an aspect of resistance rhetoric first noticed by Schlesinger.)
Alfred F. Young has supplemented Labaree's definitive account of the Boston Tea Party with The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution (Beacon Press, 1999), which tells the story of how Americans remembered it, or rather, how they declined to for nearly sixty years. Like Hoerder, Young is a person of the left; he considers the Tea Party a radical mass action that helped to change the character of its participants, such as the shoemaker George Robert Twelves Hewes, from deferential to self-respecting. Young's primary texts are two early biographies of Hewes, James Hawkes's A Retrospect of the Boston Tea-Party (S. Bliss, 1834) and Benjamin Bussey Thatcher's Traits of the Tea Party (Harper, 1835), both of which are available online, as is Francis S. Drake's 1884 compilation of primary source documents about the symbolic protest, Tea Leaves. Over at the blog Boston 1775, John L. Bell has looked into the quest to figure out who exactly took part in the Boston Tea Party and has hosted a guest blog-post by Charles Bahne investigating how much the destroyed tea was worth. On the website of the Massachusetts Historical Society , you can read entries in the diary of merchant and documented smuggler John Rowe, who played a highly ambiguous role in the years leading up to the revolution, including Rowe's cautious account of the Tea Party.
How much were the British taxing tea in 1773? The question turns out to be surprisingly difficult to answer. More than a few historians claim that because Parliament in 1767 granted a tax refund of 12 pence a pound on tea imported to Britain if reshipped to America—the same year that the Townshend Acts imposed a new tax of 3 pence a pound—the price of East India Company tea in America actually fell by 9 pence a pound. It turns out that this is a gross simplification, but even at the time many people mistook this gross simplification for the truth, and it got into many history books. The correct, somewhat dizzyingly complex answer is given by Max Farrand in "The Taxation of Tea, 1767–1773," American Historical Review 3 (1898):266–69. The explanation is only three and a half pages long; I have discovered that if you read it out loud three times while taking notes, you eventually understand.
A major source for Breen and for many of the other historians listed here was American Archives, nine mammoth volumes of documentary material from the years 1774 through 1776, compiled and published by the editor Peter Force between 1837 and 1853. All the volumes have been digitized by Northern Illinois University and are searchable, making it easy for a casual reader to dive into the textual sources. (Relatively easy, that is; the search engine is buggy and there's no way to look up a citation if all you have is a volume and page number.) Here is Sam Adams calling the Coercive Acts worse than any tyranny of the Byzantine Empire. Here is the New York City lawyer Gouverneur Morris's satirical comments about Americans as sheep who are about to turn into serpents. Here's a selectman censured for selling a copy of the Continental Association for a pint of flip. Here's a letter that Virginia schoolteacher David Wardrobe wrote to a friend in Scotland about a hanging in effigy, here's his censure as an "enemy to America" for having written it, and here's his attempt at recantation. You may also read original documentation of the drover Jesse Dunbar being carted inside his ox's belly and of a Connecticut doctor named Beebe being tarred and feathered.
A few more scattered sources: The Englishwoman who saw her friends detained on the street in Wilmington, North Carolina, was named Janet Schaw, and her account of their harassment begins on page 191 of the Journal of a Lady of Quality, Being the Narrative of a Journey from Scotland to the West Indies, North Carolina, and Portugal, in the years 1774 to 1776, Evangeline Walker Andrews and Charles McLean Andrews, eds. (Yale, 1921). The author of the pamphlet The Crisis is identified as William Moore by John Sainsbury in Disaffected Patriots: London Supporters of Revolutionary America, 1769-1782 (McGill-Queen's University Press, 1987), confirming a guess made by Paul Leicester Ford in his bibliographic study "The Crisis," The Bibliographer 1 (1902): 139-152. In an article published last year, the scholar Neil York also fingers Moore as the likeliest culprit but notes that in the pages of The Crisis itself "it was emphasized that it was a group effort" (Neil York, "George III, Tyrant: The Crisis as Critic of Empire, History 94 (2009): 434–60).
The image at the top of this post, "A New Method of Macarony Making, as practised at Boston in North America," a loose interpretation of John Malcom's fate, was published by Carington Bowles in London in 1774, and is reproduced from page 74 of R. T. H. Halsey's The Boston port bill as pictured by a contemporary London cartoonist (Grolier, 1904). You can see a higher-quality digitization of a smaller version of the same print at the British Museum website, which also owns a hand-colored version. (The British Museum also has a depiction of tarring and feathering by James Gillray, which doesn't actually have anything to do with America at all, but it's by James Gillray, so it's great and who cares.) The Gilder-Lehrman Institute has a colored engraving of the same event by Philip Dawe, with the Boston Tea Party in the background (via). The Massachusetts Historical Society's Coming of the American Revolution site offers a curated tour of a number of original documents from the years leading up to revolution. Please mouse over or click on the other images in this post to find their sources.
"It Happened One Decade," my review-essay focusing on Morris Dickstein's Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression
In August 2013, Penguin will publish my novel Necessary Errors as a paperback original and an e-book. It's available for advance order now at Indiebound, Barnes & Noble, Apple Itunes, Amazon, Books-a-Million, and Powells. You can also add it to your bookshelf at Goodreads and Library Thing.
