History Through Whose Eyes?

The Tea Party and its uses of American history
The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle over American History, by Jill Lepore.
Princeton University Press, 2010. $19.95, 224 pp.
In April 2009, Bill O’Reilly asked Sarah Palin on national television, “Why do you think America is a Christian nation?” For Palin, the answer was obvious: If we “go back to what our founders and founding documents meant,” we find that “they’re quite clear that we would create law based on the God of the Bible and the Ten Commandments.”
Harvard historian Jill Lepore, in her new book The Whites of Their Eyes, seeks to overturn this sort of interpretation of the founding, exploring the uses and abuses of history within the Tea Party movement. Drawing on her conversations with local Boston Tea Partiers and on the writings of the founding generation, she brokers a conversation that spans over two hundred years. While Lepore is far from sympathetic to most of the Tea Party’s aims, she does not engage in cheap ridicule of what Tea Partiers believe about the founding era. Rather, she attacks the dogmatism of how they see and use history. Ultimately, she offers a thoughtful reflection on history itself and the ways in which we bring meaning to it.
When History Becomes Religion
Lepore begins her book by noting that disputes over the meaning of the founding go back to the founding generation itself. In recounting an acrimonious correspondence between historian Mercy Otis Warren and John Adams, Lepore shows that even the founding generation could not settle on a single narrative about the Revolution. Each participant and group had its own story to tell, even as the events were unfolding.
Similarly, as America prepared to celebrate its two hundredth birthday in the 1970s, various factions championed their own histories of the founding. The version put forth by the Nixon and Ford administrations was very different from the one told by antiwar protesters and civil rights activists.
In the year before the Bicentennial, Lepore recounts, angry protesters converged on the same street corner where the Boston Massacre occurred in 1770, to rally against forced busing policies that were designed to integrate Boston’s public schools. The protesters held a funeral for liberty and buried it in a coffin, just as the Sons of Liberty had done to decry British censorship of newspapers—and just as Tea Partiers would later do, in protest against high taxes.
The contentions over the Bicentennial demonstrate what those who use history to justify their beliefs often forget: that history is not a static monolith received directly from the past, but a complicated story that must be actively interpreted and reinterpreted in the present. The founding story takes on different meanings depending on who tells it.
What drives Lepore, then, is opposition not to a particular view of American history, but to a particular view of what history itself is. She accuses the Tea Party of a “historical fundamentalism” that cherishes America’s founding as “ageless and sacred and to be worshipped” and that calls for “the founding documents” to “be read in the same spirit with which religious fundamentalists read… the Ten Commandments.” Lepore finds no better spokesperson for this historical fundamentalism than the enormously popular and controversial TV personality Glenn Beck. For Beck, reading the Founding Fathers is, as he once told his audience, “like reading the Bible.” This analogy pervades the book: for Tea Partiers, history is religion and the past is hallowed.
When History Fails
Lepore’s frustration is not reserved for the Tea Party’s historical fundamentalism alone. Her book is also a thoughtful evaluation of her profession, the study of American history. She laments a growing indifference to argumentation based on hard historical evidence, and a tendency to focus on historical figures rather than forces—a way of doing history that makes the past seem more accessible and similar to the present than it really is. Most distressingly, she argues, most historians are too caught up in academic debates to remember that history should serve a civic and not merely an academic function. All of these trends, she proposes, came to a head in 1976, as “historians… didn’t offer an answer, a story, to a country that needed one.”
In particular, Lepore takes modern American historians to task for failing to openly and thoughtfully address two interrelated issues: slavery and race. According to her, American history contains a tragic paradox: The American Revolution and all that it has come to represent could not have been secured without slavery. As early as 1770, Lepore argues, the Founding Fathers “could choose to end slavery, or they could choose to battle Parliament.” The Revolution required a united effort among the states, and any attempt to confront the entrenched system of slavery would have almost certainly fractured that unity.
For Lepore, both the Tea Partiers and modern historians have glossed over this thorny problem and, in doing so, have advanced narratives incapable of bringing the nation together. In fact, she attributes much of the Tea Party’s success in using history to the failure of academic historians to give America the foundational story it deserves.
Moving Forward, Looking Back
Nearly 35 years after the Bicentennial, America is again disillusioned and divided. As the Bicentennial approached, America was reeling from Vietnam, disgusted by Watergate, shocked by the violence at Kent State, and struggling to move forward on the civil rights legislation of the 1960s. Today, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq churn on, politicians in Washington are profoundly unpopular, and, even as racial mistrust persists, religious differences draw new fault lines of division and anger. In this context, a more conscientious reflection on our history is crucial. Simplistic interpretations of the past distort judgments of the contemporary challenges facing the country. They encourage the illusion that present problems can be remedied by invoking the words of a few remarkable individuals, or by enshrining a set of respected but little-defined ideals.
Historical fundamentalism cannot and will not provide answers to questions that need to be addressed. Turning to the founders to try to navigate racial issues and come to terms with the legacy of slavery is futile, for the founders failed to resolve those issues. This observation can be extended beyond slavery and race to almost any challenge facing America. Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson bitterly disagreed about the proper course of American foreign policy; James Madison and Patrick Henry clashed over the role of religion in the public sphere; the list of unsettled debates goes on.
Interpreting the past can be as complex as understanding the present. What is needed, then, is balance: an approach both reflective and forward-looking that never loses touch with its own context. We should look to the past, but becoming unthinkingly absorbed in it makes us forget that the here-and-now is unique, that it has not been set in stone, and that we are the ones who have the opportunity to shape it.
Taylor Helgren ’11 is a Staff Writer.