royal governor, Lord Dunmore, offered freedom to any slaves who would join His Majesty’s troops in suppressing the American rebellion. Dunmore’s proclamation would animate the passions of George Washington’s own slaves. “There is not a man of them but would leave us if they believedthey could make their escape,” Washington’s cousin wrote from Mount Vernon, adding bitterly, “Liberty is sweet.” 57
“I really feel like this is a modern-day Intolerable Act,” Austin Hess said, about the new health care law, when we met at the Warren Tavern. Every time Hess talked about the Intolerable Acts, I got to thinking about the limits of tolerance, tolerance of racial equality, of religious diversity, of same-sex marriage, of a global economy, of democracy, of pluralism, of change. Hess labored in a world of uneasy alliances. I asked him if he was troubled by Christen Varley’s work with the Coalition for Marriage and the Family. “We do not discuss social issues and foreign policy issues,” he said. Hewas frustrated that journalists kept getting the Tea Party wrong.Hess’s girlfriend was black. He was tired of people calling the movement racist. “I will simply say this,” he e-mailed me. “I know what is in my heart.” 58
In 2010, nationwide polls reported that people who identified themselves as sympathetic with the Tea Party were overwhelmingly white, although estimates varied, and the Tea Party didn’t appear to be much whiter than, say, the Republican Party. 59 Whatever else had drawn people into the movement—the bailout, health care, taxes, Fox News, and, above all, the economy—some of it, for some people, was probably discomfort with the United States’ first black president, because he was black. But it wasn’t the whiteness of the Tea Party that I found most striking. It was the whiteness oftheir Revolution. The Founding Fathers were the whites of their eyes, a fantasy of an America before race,
without
race. There were very few black people in the Tea Party, but there were no black people at all in the Tea Party’s eighteenth century. Nor, for that matter, were there any women, aside from Abigail Adams, and no slavery, poverty, ignorance, insanity, sickness, or misery. Nor was there any art, literature, sex, pleasure, or humor. There were only the Founding Fathers with their white wigs, wearing their three-cornered hats, in their Christian nation, revolting against taxes, and defending theirright to bear arms.
“The first book I brought home from kindergarten was about George Washington,” Hess told me. “I made my mother read it to me, the whole thing.” Like Beck, Hess believed that the teaching of American history in the nation’s public schools had been corrupted by ideologues from the left. (One of the more bizarre things about this was that the far right, in rejecting historical scholarship as a conspiracy of the left, had conflated the hucksterism of Jeremy Rifkin’sPeoples Bicentennial Commission with the distinguished research and writing of the century’s best historians, including Edmund Morgan, as if Morgan’s attempt to desegregate American history, to weave together the stories of liberty and slavery, were the same as Rifkin’s specious comparisons of OPEC and the East India Company.) Hess believed that he had resisted the left-wing indoctrination that was part of his public schooling. “As much as the textbooks we read in school were biased in favor of the New Deal, I was never really sold on it,” he said.
The scholarship academic historians have written since the 1960s, uncovering the lives of ordinary people and examining conflict among groups and especially races, sexes, classes, and nations, was not without substantial shortcomings. Critics, both within and outside the academy, had charged scholars of American history not only with an inability to write for general readers and an unwillingness to examine the relationship between the past and the present, but
“I really feel like this is a modern-day Intolerable Act,” Austin Hess said, about the new health care law, when we met at the Warren Tavern. Every time Hess talked about the Intolerable Acts, I got to thinking about the limits of tolerance, tolerance of racial equality, of religious diversity, of same-sex marriage, of a global economy, of democracy, of pluralism, of change. Hess labored in a world of uneasy alliances. I asked him if he was troubled by Christen Varley’s work with the Coalition for Marriage and the Family. “We do not discuss social issues and foreign policy issues,” he said. Hewas frustrated that journalists kept getting the Tea Party wrong.Hess’s girlfriend was black. He was tired of people calling the movement racist. “I will simply say this,” he e-mailed me. “I know what is in my heart.” 58
In 2010, nationwide polls reported that people who identified themselves as sympathetic with the Tea Party were overwhelmingly white, although estimates varied, and the Tea Party didn’t appear to be much whiter than, say, the Republican Party. 59 Whatever else had drawn people into the movement—the bailout, health care, taxes, Fox News, and, above all, the economy—some of it, for some people, was probably discomfort with the United States’ first black president, because he was black. But it wasn’t the whiteness of the Tea Party that I found most striking. It was the whiteness oftheir Revolution. The Founding Fathers were the whites of their eyes, a fantasy of an America before race,
without
race. There were very few black people in the Tea Party, but there were no black people at all in the Tea Party’s eighteenth century. Nor, for that matter, were there any women, aside from Abigail Adams, and no slavery, poverty, ignorance, insanity, sickness, or misery. Nor was there any art, literature, sex, pleasure, or humor. There were only the Founding Fathers with their white wigs, wearing their three-cornered hats, in their Christian nation, revolting against taxes, and defending theirright to bear arms.
“The first book I brought home from kindergarten was about George Washington,” Hess told me. “I made my mother read it to me, the whole thing.” Like Beck, Hess believed that the teaching of American history in the nation’s public schools had been corrupted by ideologues from the left. (One of the more bizarre things about this was that the far right, in rejecting historical scholarship as a conspiracy of the left, had conflated the hucksterism of Jeremy Rifkin’sPeoples Bicentennial Commission with the distinguished research and writing of the century’s best historians, including Edmund Morgan, as if Morgan’s attempt to desegregate American history, to weave together the stories of liberty and slavery, were the same as Rifkin’s specious comparisons of OPEC and the East India Company.) Hess believed that he had resisted the left-wing indoctrination that was part of his public schooling. “As much as the textbooks we read in school were biased in favor of the New Deal, I was never really sold on it,” he said.
The scholarship academic historians have written since the 1960s, uncovering the lives of ordinary people and examining conflict among groups and especially races, sexes, classes, and nations, was not without substantial shortcomings. Critics, both within and outside the academy, had charged scholars of American history not only with an inability to write for general readers and an unwillingness to examine the relationship between the past and the present, but
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