Not many people realize that the very name of the so-called “Tea Party” of today’s radical right-wing political attitudes is based on a distortion that turns the meaning of the original 1773 Boston tea party inside out and upside down.
Samuel Adams and other participants in the 1773 event were protesting not against the British government itself (although Patrick Henry, Thomas Paine, and others would soon take up that banner. But that’s another matter). Rather, Sam Adams and others were protesting but against its alliance with the era’s largest corporation, the East India Tea Company, and against the monopoly that the English Parliament granted to it for importing tea to the colonies, enforced by the ships and guns of the Royal Navy. All other merchants who owned ships, and even the shopkeepers who bought and sold their tea, were labeled “smugglers,” subject to attack by the British Navy or British soldiers or other agents on shore. It was as if today the U.S. government were to grant Wal-Mart an exclusive right to sell coffee in the United States and shut down any other business that dared to do so.
In late November of 1773 the East India Tea Company ship Dartmouth arrived in Boston Harbor, and soon was joined by two more tea ships, the Eleanor and the Beaver. On December 16, about 7,000 people gathered around the Old south Meeting House to protest the tea monopoly and a tax that Parliament had passed on tea. That evening a group variously estimated at between 30 and 130 men, some disguised as Mohawk Indians, boarded the three vessels and dumped 342 chests of tea into the water. Sailors on board three three British Man-O-Wars that were anchored in Boston Harbor lounged around and looked on nonchalantly as the tea party members chopped open and threw overboard the crates of tea on the East India Company ships.
Samuel Adams argue that the Tea Party action was instead a principled protest and a defense of the people’s rights. Its essence was a protest against the corporate lobbying and influence on government policy by the East India Tea Company that was jacking up prices and putting hundreds of small enterprises (independent ship-owners and mom and pop tea importers) out of business. Its action in the harbor was against the company whose payoffs were buying the government’s backing, and against the British government’s support of the company’s monopoly, which bears a suspicious resemblance to todays’ corporate political donations to Congress.
If the present “Tea Party” succeeds in its declared goal of “shrinking government” (except that it shows no interest at all in shrinking the most gigantic and expensive element of big government, the Department of Defense, which until the mid-Twentieth Century was more accurately named the Department of War), then even greater corporate influence in Washington than exists today would be the likely result.
Many of today’s “Tea Party” members have been taken seduced by the stories and symbols produced by lavishly funded right-wing think tanks and a few media-savvy elitist leaders. These leaders include such figures as Dick Armey, who was previously a lobbyist for the People’s Moudjahidin Organization of Iran. Armey even tried to push through legislation that would provide U.S. taxpayer support for that organization –“MEK”—which was branded a terrorist group by the State Department. (Great role modeling for your “Tea Party” members, Dick!)
The tragedy is that many of the ordinary citizens who make up the cadres of “Tea Party” members have been duped by Big Money and Big Business oligarchs into acting against their own interests as well as those of the nation. The original 1773 tea party patriots would probably soil their undergarments if they could see how their name is being used today.
The “Tea Party” has claimed to be populist, standing up for ordinary people against big government. I call that baloney—real populists don’t look down on working people or poor people. Historically, populists are for the people and against abuse, tyranny, lying and cheating from any source, whether government, business, political parties, or anyone else. But most of the “Tea Party” congresspersons who swept into office in 2010 raced faster than hungry pigs to the big business cash troughs to rake in corporate donations, violating every principle the original Boston tea party stood for. In response to the antidemocratic 2010 “Citizens United” ruling (i.e. “Corporate Moneybags United” vs. We the People), the “Tea Party’s” utter silence was utterly deafening. Whoever chose the “Tea Party” name was either incompetent at reading and understanding history, or a very clever manipulator who liked the name and intentionally spread a grotesquely distorted version of the original tea party’s motives.
What actions can you take now? Well, at the very least, you can work to keep the wrong people out of positions of power–especially those who appear to be morally and ethically challenged. And be well aware that in order to promote their hyper-partisan program they are well organized and focused on specific goals, and that to defeat them we will have to do likewise, and be more creative too.
There is an interesting true story about how ordinary people can turn politics around when they act with compassion and integrity. Kathryn Watterson tells of a Jewish couple that received repeated threats from the Grand Dragon of Nebraska’s Ku Klux Klan, Larry Trapp. They contacted him on a human level in a way that no one else had done, suspecting that he was “a destructive but vulnerable, messed-up person who needed a new perspective on the world.” They listened to his life story, shared theirs and how he was affecting them, and stayed with him emotionally as he left the Klan and the American Nazi Party. Larry went on to apologize to people and groups he had hurt or harassed. At one point he said, “They’re confused people, the Klan and the Nazi Party. They really hate themselves is what their problem is. They don’t want to punish themselves, so they want to try to punish someone else.“ Ultimately the couple, Michael and Julie Weisser, took care of the wheelchair-bound Trapp for the last year of his life.
If Michael and Julie could find a way to make their peace with a Ku Klux Klansman who had threatened them personally, then just about anyone ought to be able to find some kind of an opening to discover common ground with those whom they have seen as their opponents. By contrast if you have been committed to an extreme right-wing view, you face a different question. Are you willing to let go of an erroneous ideology that you’ve been advocating and take a step toward something that incorporates its best ideas and lets go of its worst ones?
Ironically, in 2012 the “Tea Party” vowed to do its best to run out of office all elected representatives who did not vote exactly as it told them to. That stance directly opposes the liberty of encouraging their members to follows their own consciences and best judgment That stance directly violates Article 10 of their own platform. There is no individualism there. It is The Political Organization making itself into Big Brother: “Act as we tell you to. Think our thoughts, not your own.” George Washington disliked hyper-partisanship. The so-called “Tea Party” is a good example of why.
***********
Portions of the above comments are drawn from The author’s recent book The Radical Wrong: Lies Our Founding Fathers Never Told – Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln & Others Refute Right-Wing Extremists. Available as an e-book and in paperback from amazon.com, your local bookstore, or other online retailers.