BackStory; Teed Off: The Tea Party, Then and Now

This is the podcast of backstory with us, the American History Guys. I'm Peter Onof, 18th Century Guy. I'm Ed Ayers, not Decentral Guy, and I'm Brian Valla, 20th Century Guy. Glad you're back. It's been one year since the Tea Party movement gained widespread notice for its opposition to President Obama. In the thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, they're gathered on street corners, state capitals, or in front of their times, town squares all across our country today. The anti-party organization says they want to remind the government that they work for the people. They return to the birthplace of the concept Boston. Obama took office. The other big message, if they think they're not being heard, they insist they're just not being heard. That was news coverage of the Tea Party protests around the country last month. Posts that marked the one year anniversary of the first Tea Party rallies back in April on on.

Over the course of that year, not only have the Tea Partyers become a force to be reckoned with in American politics, we've also learned a lot more about who exactly they are. A recent CBS New York Times poll found that they are mostly white men above the age of 45 who identify as Republicans and are both better educated and wealthier than most Americans. They also tend to share a particular fondness for the founding generation. I'll tell you what, if you read our founding fathers, people like Benjamin Franklin and Jefferson, what we're doing in this country now is making them roll over in their graves. All right, Rick, we're going to check back in. That was CNBC commentator Rick Santelli in the so-called rant heard round the world, in which he angrily denounced the federal bailout of homeowners facing foreclosure and essentially accused the government of promoting bad behavior. The rant has been credited with triggering those first Tea Party rallies last year, and while that may or may not be the case, what's certain is that between all the three cornered hats and don't shred on me flags, my century, the 18th century, is enjoying something of

a moment right now. Now as historians watching this all from the wings, we couldn't resist the opportunity to weigh in with our own thoughts on the Tea Party phenomenon. And so that's what we're going to do in today's special podcast edition of Backstory. Peter, I want to know, and I guess this would put you on the spot, why the Tea Party? I mean, Ed and I know people have been protesting the government forever. Why the Tea Party? Why is that the moment they chose? Well, I think it's a wonderful expression for something that's both nonthreateningly domestic, a Tea Party after all. And in our collective memory, though, it's the first big splash as it were of the American revolution. But I think the way to go on this one, Brian, is to talk to somebody who really knows what happened. Oh, Peter, I want to talk to you. Well, too bad for you, Brian, because I called up my friend, former student Ben Carp. Ben has just written a wonderful book on the Boston Tea Party coming out shortly.

But before I go ahead and play the tape, let me just remind listeners a little bit about some of the basics. First of all, Boston Tea Party, December 16, 1773. Samuel Adams was at the helm, and they storm on to three British ships in Boston Harbor that were carrying the tea that the East India Company had sent over, and all those crates went into the water. Of course, some of them didn't make it into the water because it was low tide. They were protesting the Tea Act of 1773, a law that benefited, you guessed it, the East India Company. A few of the conspirators were dressed up famously as Mohawk Indians that evening, and I began my conversation with Ben by asking him, what was up with those costumes? I mean, that's what makes it so much fun. I mean, a, it's, you know, destroying a bunch of stuff, which I think appeals to the young child and all of us who like to knock down buildings of block or whatever when we were kids.

And then also, yeah, I mean, the mystique of, you know, oaths of secrecy and Indian disguises definitely adds to the romance of the event. Yeah. So this is the first big fraternity prank in American history in a way, sure. But on the other hand, and the part that we don't always talk about is that there's this undercurrent of violence. What we forget about the Tea Party is that there were weeks leading up to the Boston Tea Party in which the people of Boston were intimidating the East India Company's agents, threatening them, and storming their homes and places of business, and making it unsafe for them to sleep in Boston, you know, and then they commit this act of property destruction. The amount of money would be equivalent to almost $2 million today. Now, this was really a grand event in American history and it was to make a point. What exactly was it? Well, they were angry about three things. The first thing they were angry about is that Parliament was propping up the East India Company, which they had decided was too big to fail. Haha. Nice phrase that. The East India Company was the monopoly company, you know, it was in charge of all British trade east of South Africa.

Right. It's 17.5 million pounds of tea in their warehouses, unsolved, and so Parliament is trying to come up with a way to relieve them of this particular problem. And so they passed the Tea Act in 1773, which is going to allow them to unload their excess tea on the American market. It's going to reduce certain taxes. It's going to cut out American middlemen. And so that's the first thing that angers the Americans is that it's a propping up this monopoly company that the expense of American merchants, both legitimate merchants and also smugglers, you know, who are doing their own things. Right. And what you're saying, man, is that the East India Company is going to be able to undersell smugglers. In other words, Americans were going to get cheap tea. Yes. Right. They were going to get cheaper tea. It's not just going to undersell the smugglers. It's going to undersell legitimate merchants because, you know, if you're going to go to London and buy the tea yourself and then try to sell it to Americans, you're not going to be able to do as well as the East India Company's own hand-picked agents. Well, that makes us feel better about the revolutionaries, because it wasn't that they always were looking for the best price. So the Walmart syndrome hadn't kicked in quite yet.

Right. Sometimes they're just looking for the most robust business environment. Right. The second reason is this notion of taxation without representation, because it's not as if the T-Act of 1773 was imposing any new taxes, but he still had this tax on it that had been posed during the Townsend duties of 1767. And so this still offends the Americans, and the sub-issue was that the money from these taxes were going to pay the salaries of civil officials in Massachusetts, such as Governor Thomas Hutchinson and various judges. And since it was Hutchinson's sons and his friends and other distant relatives who were going to be the hand-picked T-Agence for the East India Company, this all looked like a kind of corrupt bargain. Yeah. And so that's the third thing that the Bostonians are really angry about. So Ben, let's talk a little bit about how the Tea Party became a central episode in Americans self-understanding in the mythology of American history. Everybody knows about the Tea Party, and it's something that, well, we all take patriotic pride in.

Well, yeah. I think because the Tea Party does help to catalyze the American Revolution, or it looks like the first chapter in what would then lead to the outbreak of violence in 1775, that it is part of America's myth of origins. And so I think that is why the Tea Party is so often celebrated. But what's interesting is that the term Boston Tea Party itself doesn't appear until the mid-1820s. Yeah. And they didn't even know who any of the participants were. The members of the Boston Tea Party swore each other to secrecy. And most of them seemed to have kept that secret until they died. Now, hold it, Ben, that's a very interesting thing you're saying. You'd think that these would be, in effect, the first core of veterans of the Revolution, and they would be proud to be known as the perpetrators of this legitimate reaction to British oppression. Why is it, then, that they don't come out sooner? Well, in the very beginning, they might have been worried that they'd be prosecuted for treason, or at very least for burglary and property destruction. Right.

But they also have to fear lawsuits from the East India Company even after the Revolution is over. So, Ben, if the Tea Party, as we call it today, first got its name in the 1820s, what was it known as before then? They just called it simply the destruction of the Tea in Boston Harbor. And everybody would have known what that meant. Yeah, it turned out that that was a bit of a mouthful. So, yeah, right. The Boston Tea Party. This is a short version and a lot more fun. Yeah, yeah. So, first, it was just part of the general understanding that everybody knew there was a Tea Party, but they didn't call it that. But then, by the 1820s, you say it became known and popularized as the Boston Tea Party. What explains, aside from the legal liability questions that you raised, what explains the belated arrival of this new idea of what had happened? Well, I think there was this notion that it was all very well to destroy property in the name of liberty if you were living under a tyrannical government where you weren't represented. But once the revolution was over and everyone had the right to elect members of national Congress and state legislatures and everything, there was a feeling among a lot of the new

American leaders and the new nation that, okay, we don't tolerate things like P-parties anymore. If you're going to have a government, you can't just have civil unrest happening all the time. There was this real reluctance to embrace the Tea Party, and instead, the people who were telling the histories of the revolutionary era tried to focus on less disruptive sorts of events. I mean, what's interesting to me about what you're saying is in the 1820s, and particularly the 1830s, is a rising tide of mob violence in American cities and a concern about lawlessness. So how do you sell the idea of the Tea Party at the very time when lots of the better sort are worried about urban mobs? Yeah, I mean, I think there are some conservative folks, people like Nathaniel Hawthorne, who really just tried to kind of sanitize the event or keep it buried in mystery, or play down the violent elements of the story. I think there was a lot of reluctance. But on the other hand, some of these people who are becoming riled up in crowd actions

during the 1820s and 1830s actually revive the Boston Tea Party as their inspiration. People who want to expand the meanings of liberty in various ways say, hey, we like the idea of breaking down the law and service of a higher purpose. Yeah. So what are some of the instances, Ben, over the 19th century, we know all too much about the 21st century, of the ways in which the Tea Party could be used by insurgent Americans? Sure. In some cases, it's used for the purposes of civil rights, women, suffragists, site the Boston Tea Party because they feel that they, too, are tax without representation. In the 1830s, it's anti-abolitionists, you know, with their various killings, etc., and some people defend the people who are killing abolitionist printers or destroying their printing presses by saying, you know, that this is something that we need to do in order to protect the sanctity of the American nation. But then, interestingly, in the 1850s, there's a switch, and it's the abolitionists who say, no, we need to rescue fugitive slaves, etc., and they're going to cite the Boston Tea Party as their way of saying, no, the higher law or the higher form of liberty that we serve

is freeing the slave. Yeah. So, Ben, the theme that's running through all of these events that you're talking about is the invocation of higher law and the notion that there are circumstances in which the people can resort legitimately to violence. Yeah. I think it goes back to these concept of natural rights, right? You know, superseding whatever the laws of man might be. But on the other hand, I'm not sure that Americans are totally comfortable with that notion, because if everyone had the right to do that, then we would just, you know, we would revert to a state of nature. We'd all just be violently protesting everything we didn't like. Ben, wouldn't you say that the deeper problem from the historian's point of view is that patriotism in the 1770s before the Declaration of Independence is anti-government patriotism. In other words, it's a mobilization against legitimate authority. Of course, all good patriots, as we understand it, support the government and salute the flag and are willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for American liberty and independence.

So it's the very context within which the Tea Party takes place that I think creates this fundamental ambiguity. Can you be a good patriot in America by protesting against the government, even threatening to shut it down? It's a very tricky issue. I mean, what you have to argue is that you're seeking to reclaim the American government from the corrupting influences that are starting to bring it down, which is very similar to how the Americans felt about the British Empire in the 1770s. So in a way, Ben, the kind of mentality that emerges out of the resistance movement and the revolution is in some ways recognizably still with us today. Oh, absolutely. Ben, it's been wonderful talking to you. Tell us the name of your book and when we can expect to see it. The title of the book right now, I don't know if it's 100% confirmed, but it's the Boston Tea Party, the American Tempest that inspired a revolution, and it's due out in September, October of 2010.

What ever the situation, what ever the race or creed, demons, no segregation, no class is going to happen. Well, guys, I was hoping that I would learn from this interview that the current Tea Party has no connection to the original Tea Party, but I have to admit, I mean, the three things really jumped out at me from that terrific interview, Peter. One, corrupt bargain, two, size matters. These people really worry about the bigness of the East India Company, not to mention the British Empire, and third representation. So I just want to make my case, I want you to listen to some tape.

This is from an interview that one of our producers, Katherine Moore, brought back from Richmond, Virginia. She interviewed a number of members of the Richmond Tea Party, and the first one is Colleen Owens. I think the reason we all joined it, at least for myself, is that I feel like Washington has this invisible bubble around it, and none of the rest of us can penetrate this bubble and get them to even acknowledge or listen to any of our ideas or thoughts or worries that we have. In my opinion, our government is not listening to us, just like in 1773. We're having the door slammed in our faces in a lot of instances, and that makes us a little bit mad. It's Colleen Owens and Phil Scott, both members of the Richmond Tea Party. Well, Brian, I'd say that's a real throwback, and it resonates with me, because the fear of a distant metropolis, that has been a central and obsessive theme in American history,

and it's as if we had London, the old metropolis, which represents everything corrupt and despotic, and ever since we won our independence, the metropolis has been emerging within the United States. That idea of a bubble, where people don't hear us, where we're not really represented, that really is a throwback to the kind of talk you would hear in the run-up to the American Revolution. A question could be, is there really a bubble around Washington, because these same people would argue other times of the problem with Washington as it has its nose and every mass of the world lives? The language is powerful, but it can be used by people at every point of the political spectrum of the United States. This is the same language that people would have used and say the anti-war movements in the 1960s. The behemoth of the military-industrial complex is running roughshod over this and dragging our young men into the jungles to fight for a war.

I mean, there's no doubt that this is authentically American ideology, but it is so adaptable to not really have much ideological content. Well, I think you've really hit it. It resonates on the right and on the left, and I think what people on the left rarely recognize is that they're responding to that same libertarian theme, and that is that anti-power, anti-bigness, as if we're the little guys. There's also this idea that it's the little David's against the big Goliath and kind of heroic, challenging talk back to authority. Well, on that theme of size matters, here's another clip from Colleen Owens of the Richmond Tea Party. I don't think our government was representing me when they build out Goldman Sachs or build out all the banks or purchase general motors or any of these other things. They weren't representing me or anybody else but those big corporations. It was corporate welfare, but guess who gets to pay for it?

Everybody's sitting around this table. We're not confident about what kind of leadership, what kind of decision-making is going on, and it's not in our best interest, but rather in the interest of whether it's corporations, particularly special interests when they can go in and have a meeting and turn the whole healthcare bill around. Basically the East India tea company was the first special interest group that was favored unfairly by the government. That was Colleen Owens, Phil Rapp, and Susan Laskolette of the Richmond Tea Party. Now, that's really interesting, Brian, because you'll notice that if you weren't told beforehand that this was a conservative movement, you would think that this is a blistering critique of capitalism. Unlike the populism of the past, the Tea Party people seem to be speaking for a generalized discontent, not for any particular economic group who's been disadvantaged.

I guess they're speaking as they imagine it for all Americans who are hard working. It's definitely not anti-capitalist, but I do think it's anti-bureaucratic, which makes it anti-corporate, big business, and makes it anti-government, big bureaucracy. I want to go back, actually, both of you guys touched on this point, that these folks think that they are speaking for the majority, and that majority is not being represented in Washington, DC. I want to suggest that it's almost exactly at the point when people, like whatever form of populism you want to talk about, are no longer the majority, or quickly becoming a minority that you get these impulses of populism. I think the greatest example is the very end of your century yet, and you've written about this very eloquently. That's the farmers who were the populist moment of the late 19th century, but it happened

at exactly the moment that the country was rapidly urbanizing, that they were not really the majority of the country, as they conceived of themselves to be. What you're referring to, the populist movement, the people's party in the 1890s, the largest pollute revolt in American history begins in Texas and spreads both to the south and to the west, and culminates in the nomination of William Jinning's Brian for the American presidency in 1896 running on the campaign of he's been crucified on a cross of gold by the rich plutocrats of Wall Street and all that, and he went down in strong defeat, but the point is that that revolt mobilized people across the entire nation, and they used language much like the Tea Party people of today. There's a strong suspicion of any kind of concentrated power, a strong suspicion of anybody who seems to have unearned gains, and to just underscore another parallel at economic

hard times. Well, you'd had the largest economic depression in American history in 1893, and people are looking around, who is to blame for this? Well, surely it's not the farmers who are so hard working. It must be people who do the equivalent of these collateralized debt obligations of recent years who are coming in with these elaborate bond schemes and trust and all these law yearly created fictions that allow real people who are growing real wheat or real cotton to be ripped off. It's very similar to today, in the sense of where does virtue really lie, where does value really lie, where do the people really lie? We're the real Americans, and that was true, I think, of your folks who dressed up like Indians, Peter, and Ed, your folks who were the salt of the earth farmers, and it was true of Nixon's forgotten man, who turned into the silent majority.

These were the real Americans hard working, not whining, not protesting under normal circumstances, but they couldn't help themselves. You know, they got it ignored, they got it pressed into it, and they had to defy traditional partisan politics, step outside of it, and make a little noise. It's very interesting point, Brian, because this is not in the 19th century when they fell apart, the populace back then did, when they had to get big themselves, and they were exactly right. That's exactly right. And so what's going to happen now when somebody is going to try to come in and consolidate the Tea Party? Well, and they have. Tea Party Incorporated, right? They have. You have the Republican Party. These people come out of the Republican Party for the most part, and it's the Republican Party that's terribly concerned about them, because they threaten to divide the Republican Party. So you have folks working very hard to try to do the very organizing you're talking about. And then you also have huge media conglomerates today that simply were not in existence in

your century or certainly Peter's century. So you have media outlets like Fox News that in many ways are aiding and abetting this movement. And it is not. I'm not saying they're the ones behind it, but I do think they are contributing to lending it a kind of national prominence that might not exist otherwise. Well, what's interesting about this from my perspective as a 19th century historian is that in that political revolt, they had to make their own newspapers because all the powers that be made fun of them and were completely contemptuous of the populace. And so you found in just a few years the creation of an entire alternative communication structure in the populace movement. Here, how do you do it when you already have the largest television network foaming you? How long can that continue? Right.

And that's the real question is the extent to which populist anger in its most recent form is going to be co-opted. You must buy powerful interests. I don't want to sound like a tea party guy and raising the question of a corporate conspiracy, but the very people who are protesting against corporations are perhaps being pawns in a corporate game. I have to tell you guys, when I lecture to my students about the leftist student movement and the counterculture in the 60s, I mark the end of the revolution by the day I walked into Sears and RoboCompany and found hand-tooled little leather wallets and keychains. There, in the heart of the corporate behemoth Sears and RoboCompany, that corporate co-optation, at least in the 20th and 21st centuries, are a real threat to any authentically populist movements. Well, it makes me want to quote Frank Zappa who said, is that a real poncho or like a Sears poncho? It's great. That is fabulous.

Every time the drama is the same in America, the rebels find that it's hard to stay on the outside in America that the Democrats want to come take William James Bryan and they sucked up the energy and populism. Consumer capitalism came and sucked up the counterculture and killed that. Now we'll see what happens with the tea party. First thing we're not in the future business, huh, guys? This has been a special podcast-only edition of Backstory. We'd love to hear your thoughts. Visit us online and leave us a comment. We've posted links to further readings about the Tea Party in historical context. You can also listen to any of our past shows and find a link to our Facebook page. That's all at backstoryradio.org. Don't be a stranger. Backstories produced by Tony Field with help from Catherine Moore, Eric Vercurkey, and Lydia Wilson. Gaby Alter, Rudder theme. Our executive producer is Andrew Wyndham. Backstories produced by VFH Radio at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.