Over Christmas break I read historian Jill Lepore’s The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle Over American History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). Part historical analysis, part personal narrative, Lepore constructs her text by juxtaposing the lives of Revolutionary-era Americans and the larger-than-life events which surrounded them with the claims and actions of present-day “Tea Partiers,” that amorphous group of right-wingers who surged into media prominence following the election of President Obama.
Her argument, it seems to me, is two-fold. First, the book is a meditation on the contested nature of American history, and the uses through time of the American Revolution, in particular, to justify the present-day politics of a given group. Whether it is the Civil Rights activists of the 1950s and ’60s or the far-right constitutional originalists of today, arguing that your plan of action is somehow connected to the founding of the nation is a short-hand way of claiming political legitimacy. This part of her narrative is somewhat politically-neutral — that is, it is possible to recognize that people all across the political spectrum marshal historical precedent in aid of their present-day agenda.
Second, by juxtaposing the stories of Revolutionary-era Americans (principally Benjamin Franklin, his destitute sister, and their mentally-disabled kin) with stories about present-day Americans who identify with the Tea Party ideology, Lepore is making two value judgments. One: the Tea Party movement is telling a story about the American Revolution that is not just conservative spin on established fact, but in fact ahistorical quasi-religious magical thinking. “Every generation tells its own story about what the Revolution was about, of course, since no one is alive who remembers it anymore,” she writes in the Prologue.
But the Tea Party’s Revolution wasn’t just another generation’s story — it was more like a reenactment — and its complaint about taxation without representation followed the inauguration of a president who won the electoral college vote 365 to 173 and earned 53 percent of the popular vote … It wasn’t only that the Tea Party’s version of American history bore almost no resemblance to the Revolution I study and teach. This was true, but it wasn’t new. … What was curious about the Tea Party’s Revolution, though, was that it wasn’t just kooky history, it was antihistory (7-8).
In short, the Tea Partiers conflate the past with the present and believe, in a mystical fashion, that their struggle is literally the exact same struggle as that engaged in by the “founding fathers” over two centuries ago. The passage of historical time is irrelevant; spatial-temporal context no longer matters.
Obviously, to an historian, this sort of ahistorical thinking is problematic when applied to events that did, indeed, happen in a time and place bound by the passage of time.
The second value judgment Lepore makes is more implicit than explicit: she is calling into question the Tea Partiers’ assumption that the values they are fighting for are values Revolutionary-era Americans would either have understood or would have sympathized with. Lepore’s eighteenth-century figures are vulnerable, faltering human beings — a far cry from the iconographic imagery that depicts heroic white men in frock coats and a soft VistaVision filter. Phillis Wheatley, dragged from her childhood in Africa and brought half dead on a ship from African to America where she is sold to the Wheatley family, marries and dies in childbirth; Benjamin Franklin’s sister Jane Mecom who spent her life scrabbling to keep her family out of the poorhouse and outlived all but one of her twelve children; Franklin’s brother who went mad and was shipped off to the countryside where he was looked after by a farmwife who kept him chained in the barn like a wild animal.
Would these historical figures, Lepore seems to be asking, have really taken affront at the notion of universal health care? Laws designed to protect the rights of blacks and women from discrimination and violence?
History moves on, Lepore is arguing, and those who believe the greatest honor we can pay the “founding fathers” of our nation is by strict adherence to what (we think) they imagined for themselves is a woefully narrow vision of what we as a people can achieve. To deify the people who populate the past, to seal off the possibility that their vision could have been flawed, or limited, by their own particular time and place — just as ours is limited by our own less-than-infinite imaginations — to imagine that living up to their example is the best we can do is to, ironically, betray the very visionary thinking that led to the Revolution in the first place. That is, it was a beginning, not an end point. It was a break with the past, not an exercise in nostalgia or fixity.
Reading Lepore reminded me of another recent analysis of the far-right’s relationship with history: Sean Wilentz’s discussion of Glenn Beck and what he owes the conservatives of the Cold War era (published in the 18 October 2010 edition of the New Yorker). Wilentz was interviewed about the piece on Fresh Air by Terry Gross (audio and transcript available at NPR), with whom he discussed Beck’s deployment of history and antihistory rhetoric.
Mr. WILENTZ: Right. Well, Glenn Beck is trying to give you a version of American history that is supposedly hidden. Supposedly, all we historians -left, right and center – have been doing for the past 100 years is to keep true American history from you. And that true American history is what Glenn Beck is teaching.
What interests me as an historian, is how Glenn Beck’s version of American history, it isn’t new. It isn’t hidden. It’s been out there for 50 years. It’s pretty much what the John Birch Society – that they’ve been teaching for 50 years.
It’s a version of history that demonizes the Progressive era, particularly Woodrow Wilson, sees it as the beginnings of America’s going down the road to totalitarianism, which ends, in Beck’s version, with Barack Obama.
It’s a version of history that is beyond skewed. One history professor said that, you know, it’s not worth a pitcher of warm spit. But of course, that’s what Beck expects us to say. He lives in a kind of, you know, Alice in Wonderland world, where if people who actually know the history say what he’s teaching is junk, he says that’s because you’re trying to hide the truth.
You can read the full transcript online at NPR.
As an academically-trained historian who also has strong sympathies with the anti-elitist strain in American culture, I find the far right’s use of history deeply frustrating. On the one hand, I understand on an emotive and even political level the frustration and feeling of disenfranchisement expressed by many of the folks for whom Beck’s message about America’s past strikes a chord. Ersatz though their reading of the American past may be, their frustration with mainstream narratives that they feel have gotten the story “wrong” certainly bears a strong resemblance to the complaints many on the left have made over the past half-century or more.
The difference, I would argue, lies in the desired goals of these revisions. Those on the left (generally speaking) argue that history should be more inclusive, more self-reflexive, less a celebration of those in power and more an interrogation of how they got to have such power, and at whose expense? There is a strong small-D democratizing ethic in these historical inquiries, wherein no historical event or person is off-limits to be re-interpreted, personal actions and consequences large and small examined anew. Such a vision of historical analysis and deployment of historical narratives in relation to present-day problems opens the door to creativity, to imaginative interpretation, to asking new questions of old sources.
On the right, Glenn Beck and the Tea Partiers in Lepore’s account resist this democratizing impulse. Granted, they exercise their own democratic right to offer fresh interpretations of history, regardless of professional credentials. Yet the irony is that they turn around and use that right to challenge what they see as the mainstream (or “lamestream”) narratives on behalf of the powerful rather than the disenfranchised.
That is, they champion not those whom history has forgotten (the enslaved Africans, the poor, the ill, the working mothers with children, the spinster women, the poor, the poor, the poor) but instead they seek to rehabilitate those who have long had their pick of champions: the Founding Fathers. In the right-fundamentalist, inverse version of American history, the crisis is not that so few peoples’ historical stories have been told — but that since the mid-twentieth-century too many peoples’ stories have been told. And too many different versions of those stories, so that their favored version no longer holds (to the extent it ever did) center stage. Figures and events whom they hold as sacred are not being treated with due deference by academic historians, by politicians, by the public.
What’s the motivating factor? After reading Lepore’s book, I came away far from certain. In fact, I was most struck by the way in which the Tea Party activists with whom Lepore spoke were reluctant (or unable?) to articulate their own economic vulnerability under the current system — and resistant to imagining how (say) universal, tax-funded health care could benefit them and their families. As one man, George, explains to her,
My little girl, when she was three, she got real sick. Had to be in intensive care for ten days. Had to have a tracheotomy. I had shit for insurance. The hospital sent me a bill. Ten thousand dollars. I got a second job; I sent the hospital one hundred bucks a month. That was the right thing to do. This [the new health care legislation] is wrong. People want something, they have to work for it (100).
A personal narrative that I, or Lepore, or no doubt most of you would read as an object lesson in why this country needs to provide universal access to affordable health care, George deploys as an object lesson to precisely the opposite end: he got that second job, he paid the astronomical health care bills because it “was the right thing to do.” And because, he believes, the Founding Fathers would have approved.
What is it going to take to convince the Georges of the world that maybe another possible “right thing” would be to ensure that his little girl — and all other little girls just like her — were given access to medical care that didn’t involve their parents taking on second jobs? I sure as hell don’t know.
Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Sarah Palin… The “right” is rife with ignorance and revisionism. They are the Christian cherry-pickers, who select only those things that support their ideology. They are not all that far off from being Fred Phelps.
They want the world their way; they have the same “mystical bond” with history that Hitler championed as being the birthright of Germany. Oh yes, it’s the same thing, dressed up in different clothing, but fundamentally equivalent. Past as prologue — we must go backward to go forward. We must embrace the ways of the past, because they were “purer” and “truer.”
The Founding Fathers brought about a revolution to end tyranny, and forged a nation to protect their newly won freedom from that tyranny. There is no equivalent now, so The Tea Party has to invent a “tyranny” to fight, and that is progressivism, and it’s avatar is President Obama. He represents the kind of progress our Founders were hoping we would make, but instead, The Tea Party has turned him into King George III.
Interesting Anna.
My kids were asking me the other day to explain about the John Birch Society and I found I couldn’t do it justice. Any pointers to reading material?
@rodriguez Good question! The JBS is something that historians of 20th-century are, I think, just beginning to realize is much more central to understanding political conservatism than was previously assumed. When I have a moment today, I’ll try to dig up some suggestions.
My last job was as an historical interpreter at one of the lesser known Founding Father’s mansions. The bare facts of what Tea Partiers get wrong about Founding Fathers drives me absolutely up the wall, especially any ‘fact’ that turns all 50+ of them into one homogenous Christian group that acted in perfect harmony with no disputes or disagreements.
One of my former co-workers is a Tea Partier. She was telling me how the healthcare bill would allow the government to tell you which doctor to go to and this was one of the most rage inducing points for her. I responded, “You mean exactly like HMOs already do.” Turns out the healthcare provided by her husband’s job let’s you pick your own doctor and she just assumed ALL insurance was like that. It was pure ignorance. I think we just have to fight the ignorance.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Chloe Angyal, i RISE. i RISE said: Fundamentalist History: The Political Right and the Origins of …: What's the motivating factor? After reading … http://bit.ly/heJYWX [...]
@rodriguez,
after a bit of quick-and-dirty reference work at the library today, I have a couple of suggestions for “further reading.”
1) You could always go direct to the source and check out the John Birch Society’s website (click through to their “about” page). This would give you the official version of the Society’s history and mission.
2) The New Yorker provides a bit of context for the Sean Wilentz article I link to above in this blog post by Erin Overbey, including excerpts from previous New Yorker articles about the Birchers.
3) Although I have not read the book, I found several citations pointing toward Jonathan Schoenwald’s A Time for Choosing: The Rise of Modern American Conservatism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). Chapter 3 appears to be all about the John Birch Society’s beginnings.
The Library Journal review posted on Amazon.com reads:
“Conservatism emerging as a political force to be reckoned with very well may be the most enduring counterculture movement of the Sixties. Schoenwald (humanities, Stanford) offers a thoroughly researched investigation of the love/hate relationship between mainstream Republican conservatism and extremist, rabid anti-Communist factions like the John Birch Society and how they merged in 1964 to nominate the conservative Arizona senator Barry Goldwater as the Republican Presidential candidate. While Goldwater proved to be the wrong man at the wrong time, Schoenwald demonstrates that Ronald Reagan was the right man at the right time just two years later when he was “surprisingly” elected governor of California. The conservative movement surpassed liberalism as the politics of choice for voters when its leaders and grass-roots workers discovered the limits of ideology, the importance of organization, and the necessity of getting out the vote. Although not as entertaining as Rick Perlstein’s Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (LJ 2/15/01), Schoenwald’s is an excellent account of the spread of conservatism from 1957 to 1972. His study is especially strong in revealing the internal workings of the many splinter groups that the movement comprised during its formative years. Strongly recommended for larger public and academic collections.”
Hope this helps! Now you’ve spurred me to do more background research — so perhaps future posts will tackle the question more directly!
~Anna
many many thanks Anna
Great post, Anna. I’m going to go listen to that NPR clip now.
@NefariousNewt: I’m always wary of Nazi comparisons, but I think you have a point – the glorification of the nation on the Right (and its use to blind people to issues of class, etc.) does have similarities to some aspects of the Nazi ‘Volksgemeinschaft’.
hey any chance of having this site offer Facebook as one of its “share” options? i am a Harpyness junkie and want to get others addicted, but stuff like that not being offered slows that down…
(I also notice when i google Buzz a Harpy post, even if it shows up as proper link, it doesn’t show photo as option.)
update: I figured out a bit of the tech issues…for some reason it offers FB sharing at the bottom of a Harpy post (Bookmark and share) but not at the top (Share). strange
@veganmarcy Since I’m new to the blog and am not so familiar about the back-end workings yet, I’ll check with the group and see if we can make the FB thing clearer! Thanks for the feedback.
The TP has nothing to do with ideology and everything to do with power. Wealthy white Christian men have always had it in this country, and they would rather bring down the country than share it. They sounded less threatening in the past, but that’s because the threat was less real. It’s going to get worse, not better, and we should not underestimate their dangerousness.
You claim that Lepore’s criticisms of the Tea Party’s take on American history is due to the idea of “taxation without representation” being inapplicable to the modern day, and that the very human figures of the Revolution would have wanted ObamaCare.
First: Lepore needs to brush up on both her history and her knowledge of economics. A lot of the Tea Party’s complaints stem from the reality that Obama and Pelosi’s policies will result in taxation without representation. In the time of the American Revolution, it was the colonists who were not represented in England; now, it is future generations who are being taxed (which is how we will have to pay for all of this) so that our generation can get goodies. We were upset with the spending in the Bush years, then infuriated when Obama took that fiscal irresponsibility and put it on steroids.
There are huge social justice issues with saddling the next generation with an additional $5 trillion in debt (which is the Pelosi Congress’s addition to our national debt). People who are not even born yet will pay off the stimulus and the social entitlement programmes, never having gotten a chance to vote against them.
Second, and more importantly, Lepore is not just ahistorical with her juxtaposition of Franklin and universal health care; she is anti-scholarly, running contrary to the notions of a social compact, and doing something that his frowned upon in textual interpretation. She is using the private lives of Founders to play psychic into their idea of policies, rather than examining the most clear evidence of their intent to promulgate policies: the documents that have legal force.
The Founders explicitly prohibited the federal government from promulgating universal health care. Moreover, even if some of them may have personally disagreed with this result (a highly dubious proposition*), their personal views don’t matter. What matters is the agreement between all of them, that states signed on to and that has been passed down through the ages, which we are bound by but are able to amend: the Constitution.
The test is never “would someone maybe sort of have liked this idea if we brought it up to them in 1790?”. It is, “What is the natural meaning of the agreement? What is the contract? Let’s not examine what individuals may have wanted (which, of course, involves playing psychic), but the sum of the trade-offs to which they agreed.
Finally, Franklin’s family’s sorry history, if you are to use it at all, actually trashes the idea that universal health care is a human right that is part of the Constitution. If a perfectly healthy set of people, whose lives are positively idyllic, do not have such language in the Constitution alongside coining money and creating a copyright office, it could be chalked up to human error. But when a person whose life has been marred by tragedy does not ask for the alleged “solutions” to such a tragedy, it is rational to conclude that those “solutions” are not things that the person would have agreed to.
“The Founders explicitly prohibited the federal government from promulgating universal health care.”
Roxeanne, you’re going to need to back up your assertions here with actual evidence.
And although I’m not ascribing this idea to you, an enormous proportion of this “what the Founders wanted” BS coming out of the Tea Party is based completely on “using the private lives of Founders to play psychic into their idea of policies.” See also : a Christian Nation, We are One.
@Roxanne: What PHDork said.
Also, I note that this is your first comment on this site. Please read our FAQs about commenting.
You may have noticed that some of the more gratuitiously assholish bits of your comment were redacted. Disagreeing is fine. Personal swipes at the person who wrote the post are not.
Keep it civil and we’ll do the same. If you can’t, your next comment will be deleted completely.
@Roxeanne,
In addition to what others have already said in response to your comment, I specifically wanted to address your charge that Lepore’s argument is an “anti-scholarly” one because she looks at the lived lives of the historical figures she writes about (in addition to their words), not merely the legal documents that some of them helped to craft.
First, I want to clarify that Lepore herself never claims to know what the “founding fathers” would have thought about our present-day concerns. Her only assertion concerning their political philosophy is that, based on her understanding of their political writings, they saw the social contract and the laws that govern our collective lives as in need of flexibility. Indeed, they themselves were acting in ways that were new, in some cases unprecedented. And utterly human. They were not omniscient gods who could predict every possible future contingency. Thus, Lepore argues that to take their words literally is a mis-handing of historical texts.
This is her opinion as an historian; not the only valid opinion but certainly not an anti-scholarly approach.
The second point I want to make regarding her juxtaposition of the lives of 18th-century Americans with those of present-day citizens is this: that the “founding fathers” whom most Americans learn about in school are hardly the only historical people who matter when we think about America’s past. And their experiences and opinions, however compelling, should not be the only ones that count when we make arguments based on what we believe our predecessors would or would not want. If we’re going to start claiming to know what Benjamin Franklin or Samuel Adams would have made of health care reform, we also need to consider what Franklin’s mentally ill brother or poverty-stricken sister would have made of it too. What poet Phillis Wheatley or enslaved persons would have wanted. Because all of those folks are part of our heritage.
Finally, as an historian I want to point out that while Lepore’s work (in this case) is a blend of memoir, opinion, and historical fact, she is a well-respected member of her chosen field and she takes care to contextualize and cite her historical sources. Her interpretation is, obviously, her own. But if you are going to charge her with needing to “brush up on her history,” I think you had better have a great deal of evidence to back up that assertion.
@Roxeanne de Luca – “First: Lepore needs to brush up on both her history and her knowledge of economics. A lot of the Tea Party’s complaints stem from the reality that Obama and Pelosi’s policies will result in taxation without representation…now, it is future generations who are being taxed (which is how we will have to pay for all of this) so that our generation can get goodies.”
This is a pretty absurd false equivalence for at least two reasons: 1) If this objection were to be upheld, there could be no possible time difference between when a bill is passed in Congress, when the policy is implemented, and when taxes associated with the policy are implemented. After all, people are taxed when they start working, not when they turn 18, and new people turn 18 every day. You seem to be saying that even in the event that the taxes that may be needed to pay for some of Obama’s policies are implemented tomorrow, then it will *still* be taxation without representation because of all the new voters who turned 18 in between when Obama was elected (or when the health care vote happened) and tomorrow. This is obviously untenable. Taxation without representation was a concept that meant that things were happening to people *right then* that didn’t have representation *right then*. Future generations will in fact be represented in government in exactly the same way we are now. 2) On that note, you’re predicating your objection on something that may happen in the future. We have no idea what the US’s fiscal state is going to be even 5 years down the line, let alone 25 or 50. Other countries may have financial collapses, we may have another financial collapse, we may see unprecedented economic growth, who knows? Maybe the government will need to impose more taxes in the future but maybe there will be a ton of growth and it won’t be necessary. Alternately, maybe there will be another collapse and taxing more wouldn’t even help. We cannot know this right now. Cross that bridge when you come to it.
Moreover, I think you really glossed over this part of Anna’s post: “she is calling into question the Tea Partiers’ assumption that the values they are fighting for are values Revolutionary-era Americans would have understood” (emphasis added). Keep in mind the state of the medical system during the Revolutionary War era. Remember that more people died in the Civil War of disease than of tissue trauma — the germ theory of disease wasn’t even widely accepted until at least a century after the Revolutionary War. Now considering that, I personally don’t believe that people who lived in that era would even be able to conceptualize a hospital that wasn’t a horrific, nightmarish place where people were more likely to die than to leave healthy. The entire argument over universal health care is predicated on the very idea that we have a pervasive medical system that tends to help people more than it hurts them (physically, at least). If you don’t come from a society in which that’s true, why would you even consider the idea of government helping people to get health care?
[...] politics, etc., as “scary books.” This came to my mind while I was reading Anna’s review of Jill Lepore’s The White’s of Their Eyes over at The Pursuit of [...]
baraqiel:
Second, easier point first: the Framers explicitly prohibited Congress from addressing health care. Sorry, analysis STOPS THERE. The question is NOT (period, end of story, take your ball and go home) whether they would have wanted something, based on Anna and Lepore’s seance with Ben Franklin’s ghost; it is whether or not that is allowed by the document as written.
The Framers absolutely expected that things would develop which they did not foresee. Hence Article V: the Amendment process. If you want universal health care, then convene a Constitutional Convention amongst the states or get Congress to start the Amendment process. Argue before the people, the states, that we should radically redefine the role of government. But do not pass it by “deem and pass” and by paper-thin majorities in the House and Senate, then declare your opponents to be idiots who do not understand history.
Further, as someone who studied the history of medicine rather extensively, I’m here to tell you that you are 100%, unequivocally WRONG about your perceptions of medicine. Yes, modern medicine is better than 18th-century medicine (thank you, capitalism, for making that happen – and let’s all hope that the socialists don’t get their way, because I want to leave the next generation with better, more advanced medical care than we have). Nevertheless, baraqiel, the ancients and the colonists were not left without their medical remedies – some of which were very effective and are either in use today or are the basis of our modern remedies.
Doctors, as in professional physicians who studied the art and received payment for their services, have been around in many cultures since the ancient times. (Remember the Hippocratic Oath?) While anaesthesia was not introduced in the Western world until 1846 (IIRC), the Founders had antiseptics, painkillers (such as opium, which was very common in ancient Greece), rudimentary pharmaceuticals, and the like. To your modern eyes, it looks like nothing, but I don’t think that you can legitimately claim that it was so obscure that the Founders could not have conceived of having medical care. In fact, any study of the history of medicine indicates that you, Lepore, and Anna are horrifically wrong.
Now, for your first part:
ROFLMAO. Seriously? You are equating the time lag between when one can vote and the policies that will affect them with the $13 trillion in debt that will HAVE to be paid back? The unfunded liabilities for the next fifty years, net present value $100 trillion? That we cannot look at Europe – failing, ailing, aging, in need of intervention – and see our own path? That with a national debt that is about equal to our GDP, that slight fluctuations in the health of our economy will not matter?
We’re not talking about taxing Americans at an extra few percent here. We are talking about massive economic changes if we are to pay this off.
What kills me is that young people, like you and Anna, support the policies that will end your financial health. You will spend your entire lives paying into Social Security and Medicare, but will not see any of it back. (“Taxing the rich” will not help; there are simply not enough rich to pay for it. You could tax the rich at 100%, assume that they will still produce, work, and invest, and not make this country economically sound.)
Sorry, baraqiel, there are social justice issues here. To equate the life-altering changes that we will have to make, and the life-altering debt that we are putting on our children’s shoulders, with slight variations in the law which affect children is the height of folly.
But rejoice – the Tea Party is doing its best, and fighting the good fight, to save you, Anna, Lepore, and every other liberal who thinks that feelings or clever arguments will change economic reality – to save you from yourselves.
Roxeanne, I fail to understand 1) why you’re personally attacking baraqiel as if she is some dim-witted, nose-picking child: not cool, and not allowed; 2) how you claim to be interested in social justice, but prefer to protect only the ultra-rich and the unborn from taxation, as if taxes themselves were some sort of evil; 3) your support the Tea Party (…”rejoice”?). I don’t think we need you to “save” us from ourselves, sister.
ETA: You’ve merely restated your assertion that the Founders forbid universal health care, not provided any evidence to back it up. Repetition isn’t proof.
@Roxanne,
I second what PhDork observes: you have not responded to any of your critics points here, just restated your convictions … in a fairly insulting way. It is not necessary to insult the intelligence and/or scholastic ability of every person who disagrees with you. Obviously, rigorous historians can have different interpretations of the evidence. Lepore’s contention is that the Tea Party activists are not simply interpreting the historical record in a way she disagrees with; she is arguing that parts of the historical record are being actively ignored. This is poor history, not just a difference of interpretation.
Obviously, you and I have a very different understanding of what it means to be socially responsible, seek social justice and care for future generations. As PhDork observes, your vision of social justice seems to ignore the poor and the vulnerable in favor of the economically secure and self-sufficient. This is not my vision for what our collective responsibility as citizens should be. On that point, it appears we will simply have to disagree.
[...] to last week’s post on the far right and American history, Sarah Posner posted recently at Religion Dispatches Magazine about the post-Prop-8, post-DADT [...]