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WHAT DOES THE BOSTON TEA PARTY AND THE REPUBLICAN TEA PARTY HAVE IN COMMON? 7/2/2010 7:51:28 AM
WHAT DOES THE BOSTON TEA PARTY AND THE REPUBLICAN TEA PARTY HAVE IN COMMON?
According to history, not much.
It was nine days before Christmas in 1773—a most wonderful Yuletide Season—that thirty or maybe 130 disgruntled British-American colonists dressed up like Mohawk Indians and boarded three ships docked at Griffin’s Wharf. Their objective was to dump 342 chests of tea into Boston Harbor. This was an act the Whig activist Samuel Adams tried valiantly to halt after he had whipped about 7,000 citizens into a frenzy over supposed “taxation without representation,” a ploy having more to do with Britain’s attempt to save the East India Company from certain bankruptcy than penalizing the tea drinking aficionados of Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Charleston.
Historian Alfred Young says the phrase "Boston Tea Party" did not appear in print until 1834, sixty-one years later. Before that time, the event was usually referred to as the “destruction of the tea.” Mr. Young goes on to suggest that American writers for many years were reluctant to celebrate the destruction of property, and the event was usually ignored in histories of the American Revolution. This began to change in the 1830s, however, especially with the publication of certain biographies of a man named George R.T. Hewes, a gentleman among the then still-living participants of the "tea party", as it became known.
The Boston Tea Party has often been referenced in other political protests. For example, when Gandhi was involved in a widespread burning of Indian registration cards in South Africa in 1908, a British newspaper compared the event to the Boston Tea Party. Gandhi, while meeting with the British viceroy in 1930 after the Indian salt protest campaign, allegedly took some duty-free salt from his diaper and said, with a wry smile, that the salt was "to remind us of the famous Boston Tea Party."
American activists with a variety of political viewpoints have evoked the Tea Party as a symbol of protest. In 1973, on the 200th anniversary of the “Indian raid,” a mass meeting at Boston’s famous Faneuil Hall, where icons such as Sam Adams once held forth, called for the impeachment of President Richard Nixon and protested oil companies in the ongoing crisis of the time (BP was still called British Petroleum back then.) Afterwards, radicals boarded a replica ship in Boston Harbor, hanged Nixon in effigy, and dumped several (empty) oil drums into the harbor. In 1998, two conservative U.S. Congressmen placed the entire federal tax code into a chest marked TEA and dumped it overboard.
In 2006, a libertarian political party called the “Boston Tea Party” was founded. In 2007, the Ron Paul "Tea Party Money Bomb” was held on the 234th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party and broke the one-day fund-raising record by collecting donations of $6.04 million in 24 hours.
In early 2009, a series of citizen gatherings called “Tea Parties” began to protest everything from recent increases in government spending, particularly as asserted in President Obama's budget and economic stimulus packages, to the inability of victory by the McCain/Palin ticket—and the resurrection of at least half its dramatis personae. One of the first of these events was held on April 15, 2009, on Boston Common, just a few blocks from the original Boston Tea Party.
Today the “Tea Party” gatherings appear to have the sole objective of moderate Republican conservatives to replace Democrat and liberal members of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives—not to mention the elected President himself. All that may be well and good until one realizes that only a miniscule percentage of protesters have a modicum of understanding what the original Boston Tea Party was all about. Nescience seems to be the only requirement for admission.
As Benjamin Franklin suggested, reparations should be made to the British government for all 90,000 pounds of tea so foolishly destroyed. The Boston Tea Party eventually proved to be only one of the many reactions that led to the American Revolutionary War, and a minor one at that. For decades bona fide historians have debated its significance.
As symbolic gesture, the Boston Tea Party, like its current and countless imitations, has served a number of purposes, somewhat like a sea anchor dangling beneath a rudderless ship. It will, in all likelihood, go the way of the Federalists, the Anti-Federalists, the Bull Moosers, the America Firsters, the Know Nothings, the Populists, the Progressives, the New Dealers, the Dixiecrats, the John Birchers, the New Righters, et al—but before it does, it will certainly have an impact (for good or bad) on the American ideology of democracy and our unique way of life.
We, as a people endowed with the unalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, will always be a nation, a republic, subjected to the nuances of political hyperbole. The “tea parties” are just the anomalies we need to bring our idiosyncrasies into perspective, and we will undoubtedly survive their philosophical nonsense and historical inaccuracies as we plod with steadfast purpose into our limitless future.
As Will Rogers would say, “That’s what America’s all about, ain’t it?” Happy 4th!
