The Founders: Can Times Past Meet Times Present?

Jill Lepore is a staff writer for the New Yorker and a Harvard professor of American history. Her combination of scholarship and lively wit is on view in The Whites of Their Eyes. It is an odd title, however, as it derives from Israel Putnam’s alleged command to his troops in the Battle of Bunker Hill. It has nothing to do with the tea-dumping action of 1773. It is even odder that her keenest historical look is not at the tea-party action of 1773 but rather at the current political tea party, “which had very little to do with anything that happened in the 1770s.” For her the actual tea party “wasn’t such a big deal” after all, and was not even called the tea party in print until 1834. In her book the Battle of Bunker Hill and the Boston Massacre are much more influential, going by her measure of how soon and how often the events were commemorated. To give up the tea-party movement of 1773, however, to the current right-wing polemicists would be a strategic and historical error.

She is not only writing her own historian’s version of the colonial struggle for independence but also is writing a history of the modern use of the tea-party image on behalf of “originalism, evangelicalism, and heritage tourism,” all of which amount to “a variety of fundamentalism.” Structurally this complexity requires her to shuttle back and forth between the eighteenth century and modern times, especially since the bicentennial, when it was clear there was no consensus on how to celebrate it.

Lepore sees the writing of history as intrinsically controversial and contentious: “It advances by debate.” But, in a time dominated by what Richard Hofstadter rightly calls a conspiratorial and paranoid style of political rhetoric, there is not the mutual respect and common ground that could make debate either possible or useful.

Lepore is more sensitive to literary history than most social historians, but even she does not mention Hawthorne’s great short story “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” (1832), published two years before George R. T. Hewes’s A Retrospect of the Boston Tea-Party, the first time that name was mentioned in print. Hawthorne’s story exemplifies his artistic method of creating a “neutral territory” in which the actual and the imaginary meet and are influenced by each other. Young Robin is swept up in the tea-party action and finds a path to independence, no longer dependent on his Tory uncle, who is tarred and feathered by a mob. Hawthorne’s surreal mode of narration, mixing fact and fiction, has allowed his story to transcend its time and attract much attention from modern critics.

The experience of marriage is common to our time and the American Revolution, though the frequency of the divorce rate is not. William Gibson’s docudrama, American Primitive (1972), which stages a public reading of the wartime letters between John and Abigail Adams, marks both the difference and the connection. It is a drama of enforced separation, celebrating their sober civic fidelity to the Revolution and their sustained tender love for each other under stressful circumstances.

Lepore is wise to see that history is not just a matter of scholarly analysis: “it has a civic role to play.” Our nation born out of revolution looks for something stable and has a constitution that is meant to hold us together at a more profound level than baseball and Coca-Cola. “No history can easily or always bear that weight,” as she says, feeling it on herself. Historians “mocked the Bicentennial as schlock” but didn’t “offer a story to a nation that needed one.”

My colleague Michael Kammen in A Season of Youth (1978) writes extensively about uses of the Revolution by Americans. He demystifies much that has been made out of the Revolution, particularly the common metaphor of a national growing up, yet in the...