This week in the magazine, Caleb Crain writes about the original Tea Party and the American Revolution. Today Crain answered readers’ questions in a live chat. A transcript of their discussion follows.
CALEB CRAIN: Hi! Welcome, thanks for coming.
QUESTION FROM GEORGEBM: Breen’s use of the word insurgent is, as you mention, a loaded and calculatedly challenging choice. Does it work?
CALEB CRAIN: I think it does. These people were trying to create a social order to one side of, and eventually in opposition to, the existing rule of law, and some of what they did wasn’t so pretty—tarring and feathering, ostracism, death threats, smearing feces on shop fronts. The amount of actually lethal violence by the insurgence wasn’t, however, at the level that we associate with that words nowadays.
QUESTION FROM ALENE WRIGHT: Well-researched piece! Thanks for a non-astroturfed history lesson. :)
CALEB CRAIN: Thanks!
QUESTION FROM TOMAS: Who is your favorite writer from the Revolutionary period, in terms of prose?
CALEB CRAIN: Well, Ben Franklin is pretty brilliant. There’s a line of his I often misquote, about how wonderful it is to be a reasonable creature, because it means you can find a reason for whatever it is you wish to do. Jefferson writes maybe the most beautiful prose—he’s the sort of writer who when he uses the word “focus” makes you aware that he knows it means “fire” in Latin.
QUESTION FROM PHOEBE: What is it about tar and feathering that has allowed it to be seen as an almost charming, harmless link to the past. It sounds gruesome!
CALEB CRAIN: It’s so theatrical—maybe that’s what gives it its charm? I think the danger to the victim varied enormously, depending on the temperature of the crowd and the temperature of the weather. There may also be some filtering through the nineteenth century, when the pranks that men played on one another were often still quite violent by our standards.
QUESTION FROM BW: You write that the original revolution may have been Astroturfed by smugglers looking to hang on to profits. If that’s happening again with this phony grass roots movement, who similarly stands to gain?
CALEB CRAIN: I didn’t actually investigate the contemporary Tea Party’s funding. In fact, when I first drafted this piece, there wasn’t much reporting as to corporate funders behind it, and I was hesitant to make that analogy. Later, Jane Mayer wrote a piece for The New Yorker about the Koch Brothers, and it seemed fair to draw that comparison, and I revised accordingly. But I haven’t looked into the details personally, except by way of reading other reporters’ work.
QUESTION FROM BRANDON: How does your work compare with Gordon Wood’s “Radicalism of the American Revolution?” Is it more of a physical extension of his thesis or does it defy it in any way?
CALEB CRAIN: That’s a good question. I wrote a little historiographical supplement on my blog, Steamboats Are Ruining Everything, where I tried to frame my article in terms of the research I drew on, and I mention there the neo-Whig historians, of which Wood is one of the most prominent. While I was researching this piece, I was reading history by an older generation of historians, and what struck me was how there’s something about the neo-Whig turn that seems to have the effect, perhaps unintentional, of sidelining the kind of double-guessing about motives that Progressive historians were really into. Wood in “Radicalism” is interested in the Revolution’s effect on American character, and you can’t really analyze character without taking people at their word. But Wood himself actually has a great article speculating on the genesis of the paranoid style of the period.
QUESTION FROM GUEST: I love the Hawthorne story you open the piece with, and am such a fan of Hawthorne, the way he cast such terrifying shadows back on the revolutionary period, and on other times in New England’s history.
CALEB CRAIN: I don’t think any fiction writer (except maybe Melville) took American history more personally. A sign of Hawthorne’s devious interest: he names the tarred and feathered character after one of the leaders of the tarrers and featherers—Molineux.
QUESTION FROM GUEST: Which of the “unconstitutional” Parliamentary acts (i.e. Stamp Act, Sugar Act, Intolerable Acts) do you believe most contributed to raising the ire of the colonists?
CALEB CRAIN: Hard to generalize, of course. Some of the historians I read suggested that even though the Stamp Act got the most press at the time, the real motivator was the contemporaneous Sugar Act, which confined American trade to the British imperial system much more closely than it had been.
QUESTION FROM BETH FRANKLIN: These events in Boston are hard to get a good sense of in terms of scale. What did the Boston Massacre feel like, I wonder, in terms of scope; what did the Tea Party look like? As a kid I imagined massive crowds, but now I think I’ve been watching too many PBS reenactments, where it is just ten guys standing around.
CALEB CRAIN: Well, it’s hard to know, actually. As near as I can tell, nearly everything that happened in the Boston Massacre is contested, factually. With the Tea Party, the trouble is that for a generation or so, no participants wanted their names mentioned, and then in the 1830s, suddenly everyone wanted their names mentioned in association with it, whether they had been there or no. My sense is that the Massacre took place in a quite crowded square, full of unruly, upset people, and that the Tea Party was organized and rolled out quietly, with perhaps a fair number of people watching approvingly from a short distance away. Jill Lepore’s new book on the Tea Party, which I didn’t read until after I filed my article, is a great read, by the way, and has a lovely summary of the evidence.
QUESTION FROM FRED: Are steamboats really ruining everything?
CALEB CRAIN: Haven’t you noticed?
QUESTION FROM DONNELLY: I think we imagine pirates and smugglers and Johnny Depp and his cohort… it can be hard to imagine our American political heroes in such a light.
CALEB CRAIN: There were some great traditional-style pirates in American waters, but they were for the most part a little earlier in the century. These smugglers were the most reputable merchants in Boston, so they probably didn’t wear eyepatches or carry parrots. That said, John W. Tyler in “Smugglers & Patriots” relates that merchants sometimes gave to the captains carrying their contraband goods quite piratical-sounding instructions, including which specific cove to lay low in while in the Caribbean and so forth.
QUESTION FROM TIM: What do contemporary right wing anti-tax activists get most wrong about the Revolution?
CALEB CRAIN: I’m not that close a student of the contemporary activists, but if I had to generalize, I’d say that what they miss is perhaps that the anti-tax radicals of the late 18th century mostly shared an image of the political body as an organic community, with responsibilities to whatever government they decided on. Part of the trouble with understanding the 1760s mindset is that we’re all more libertarian today than they were then. They’re all in each other’s business, all the time, and they didn’t mind a state of affairs that to a modern eye looks sort of burdensomely interdependent (if not corrupt).
QUESTION FROM STEVE: Being from Hawthorne NJ, I welcome the words concerning our famous literary namesake.
QUESTION FROM HISTORYREADER: So many figures from the Revolution have gotten the big-book treatment…who do you think as been overlooked and has a story today’s audience would respond to?
CALEB CRAIN: I feel like there needs to be more Henry Clay coverage (the politician not the steamboat), though come to think of it, I think there was a book on him last year.
QUESTION FROM JEROME WILSON: Your piece lays out the economic factors behind the Revolution very convincingly—but were there founders who cared less or nothing about money in the start of war and creation of a new country?
CALEB CRAIN: I found it interesting that a lot of the movers and shakers in this early phase of the Revolution don’t turn out to play such great roles, even just a few years later. There’s kind of a cast change, between acts 1 and 2. In act 2, Sam Adams ends up playing a much smaller role than his cousin John; John Hancock continues in public life, but he’s not as key a player; James Otis goes mad; etc. And the great Virginia gentry (Washington, Jefferson) didn’t really take charge until a little later, too. There’s no way you could charge Washington or Jefferson with venality. Franklin loved to make money, but by 1760s, he, too, was in the giving-back phase of his life, and the worst of his motivations was probably the pleasure he took in meddling and telling secrets. But the events that led to the situation that the people we know of as the Founders took control of—those events seem to have been triggered by the actions of merchant-smugglers working in their self-interest.
QUESTION FROM STEVE: I need to check to chronology but was the burning of the Gaspe in Narragannset an element of the turmoil?
CALEB CRAIN: It was. The Gaspee was a customs ship that ran aground near Providence in June 1772. Angry over the customs service and British tax policy, John Brown and a number of other citizens seized and burned the ship. No trial was possible, because no one would testify, though everyone knew who did it. I’m afraid I can’t keep in my head what Parliament knew and when Parliament knew it, but the episode can’t have contributed to Parliament’s further patience and clemency.
QUESTION FROM BRANDON: What are your thoughts about the infallibility of the Founding Fathers that seems to be espoused in popular culture on a regular basis? Is it a misunderstanding of the history or an intentional contortion for political purposes?
CALEB CRAIN: Well, some of the Founding Fathers are awfully charismatic, and a little hero-worship is probably inevitable in any country’s national myth. I think it’s probably just a matter of distinguishing history from myth. There ought to always be room for serious history, which begins with a suspicion of anything that sounds like myth.
QUESTION FROM A READER: Just curious: About how long did you spend researching and writing this piece, from beginning to end? It seems like a story that required sifting through and getting a handle on a large amount of material.
CALEB CRAIN: I don’t really know, unfortunately. I feel like this article took me much longer than articles of a similar length that I’ve written for The New Yorker—something to do with the nature of the puzzle. I think I spent about two and a half months solid of reading and drafting before I filed my first version. Then there was probably about a month’s worth of editing, revising, and fact-checking, spread out over a longer interval of time.
QUESTION FROM QUEENS1: Everything that ever man has ever done was in some sense motivated by economics.
CALEB CRAIN: And no one but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.
(Or something like that. You would think I would be able to Google the correct phrasing on gratuitous Samuel Johnson quotes.)
QUESTION FROM GUEST: Who else do you think deserves to have his face on our money?
CALEB CRAIN: F. Scott Fitzgerald?
QUESTION FROM GUEST: How likely do you think it is that the instigators of today’s modern Tea Party will lose control of the mob the way the instigators of the original tea party did? It doesn’t appear that we have leaders of the caliber of the later Founders in sight now as we enter our second Guilded Age, so is it possible that we could see some serious and unchecked consequences from the right in the future?
CALEB CRAIN: As I said before, I’m not an expert on contemporary politics, but it is interesting to look back at the 1760s/1770s and see how unforeseen the Revolution was, to the merchants who seem just to have thought they were creating a little static to protect their smuggling interests.
QUESTION FROM PAUL: Was George III really a tyrant?
CALEB CRAIN: He did take a much more hands-on approach to government than his predecessor, which left adrift a certain group in England who were used to being able to steer the monarch, and he does seem to have taken the colonists’ defiance as a personal challenge to his authority. But the picture of him painted in propaganda like “The Crisis” is sort of an 18th-century Dr. Evil.
Thanks to all for taking part here! Much appreciated. Sorry I couldn’t answer all the questions, but I typed as fast as I could.