A Tale of Two Tea Parties

Haven't heard a whole lot from the Tea Party lately, ever since they changed their name to the Freedom Caucus, and one of their higher profile members has taken a new job, delivering letters between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.  I haven't seen too many of their expropriated "Don't Tread On Me!" flags, either.  But then again, with all the air being sucked out of the atmosphere and spewed back as bloviated hate mongering or silent dog-whistles to the violent, racist fringe groups that our *President (asterisk intended) counts as his political base, it's no wonder that a quasi-respectable insurgent group like the Tea Party might want to lie low for a while.

And to my friends in the Tea Party, let me say that you have
Un-Be-Lievable Spec-Tac-U-Lar taste in friends, like ME!

This current low profile of the Tea Party got me to wondering: what about THAT OTHER Tea Party?

No no, the other, OTHER Tea Party -the one held in Boston, back when it was a fairly important trading port in the British Empire.  What was the perturbed state of mind of the good people of Boston that produced this touchstone of American resistance to imperial rule?  Why did the British overreact the way they did afterwards?  But the biggest question we all have: why did Sam Adams & Co. take out all their frustrations on tea?  Crumpets just wouldn't do?

Ah, what a pity that zis war is so..., so,... meaningless!

Faithful readers of this blog will be disappointed that the roots of the Boston Tea Party don't go all the way back to the Sumerians (the rest of you will be relieved).  We've only to go back a mere ten years to the end of the French and Indian War.  Besides being blamed on a colonel in the Virginia Colonial Militia named George Washington who was sent to support General Braddock in the Virginia back-country, the French and Indian War was not, in fact, a war between the French and Indians.  It was a war that pitted the French, their colonials and their Indian Allies, against the British, their colonials and their Indian allies against each other. My town of Methuen, Massachusetts produced one of the heroes of that conflict, a character named Richard Rodgers, who helped to teach colonial militia and British soldiers how to fight "Indian style" so they could whack the French, who insisted on fighting the French way by drinking wine, eating exquisitely prepared meals served in redolent sauces, and making ironic, existential comments on the futile condition of the world in general and their own armies in particular.  There isn't any monument to him because he picked the British side during the Revolution.  Oh well...

The war ended with the French kicked out of Canada and the Ohio Valley, the American colonies right where they were, and the British in possession of about 1/2 of North America.  Oh, and they were also broke.  You see, the world of the 18th Century hadn't yet figured out that the way to finance wars was to invent a Federal Reserve Banking System and have a floating currency, whose value would constantly fluctuate relative to other currencies based on investor confidence in the underlying macroeconomic soundness of a national economy.  Silly British! THEY thought the best way to pay off their war debt was to ratchet-up taxes on their subjects.  And WHO should pay these new taxes? Why, the colonial Americans, whose collective butts were just saved by the expense of British Blood and Treasure, that's who.

Jolly-good! Now: who fancies a spot of tea?

There was one small problem with this scheme, besides the economic mumbo-jumbo cited supra: colonial people just hated to pay taxes!  -and nowhere was this more the case than in the Province of New England (New England: more wild and barren and with nastier weather than Old England).  Those cheapskates insisted that the only valid taxes were those that their legislatures voted to impose on themselves.  They had this strange notion that tax money should be spent on stuff they could see and stuff that benefited people in the community, like fixing roads, caring for widows and insane people by -and I am SO not making this up! -auctioning them off to the LOWEST bidder, and building schools.  Colonial legislatures specifically DID NOT think spending money on maintaining a standing army to protect themselves against the beaten French and the vanished Indians was a good idea AT ALL.

But no matter, the British went ahead and instituted the Stamp Act, a revenue raising scheme where a bunch of goods like anything printed (calendars, almanacs, tide charts, newspapers, playing cards, porno-mags), glass, lead, and legal documents, all had to have a tax-stamp on them, showing that the manufacturer had paid the penny or so tax on it.  This cost was then passed onto the seller, who in inimitable capitalist fashion passed it onto the consumer.  

The Stamp Act touched a raw nerve in the New England colonies, who were already struggling under a post-war economic recession.  Tax collectors were harassed, tar-and-feathered, had their housed broken into and in some cases burned down.  Tax offices were similarly attacked by mobs who styled themselves "Sons of Liberty" instead of "That Great Big Scary Bunch of Drunks with Crowbars and Torches."  Broadsheets and newspapers attacked the tax, boycotts were organized, and committees were formed to coordinate resistance in other colonies.  It was at this point that the King and his Ministers had the extremely good sense to repeal the hated Stamp Tax, and All Sang Hallelujah!

Suck it, Jim Koch, I'm a
Maltster, not a Brewer!

However, one Boston son-of-a-b... errr, Son of Liberty was not all that happy.  Samuel Adams was a leading figure in the Boston Town Meeting and a leader behind Boston's resistance to the Stamp Tax.  By the time the tax was repealed, Adams had run his father's malt business into the ground and had become a full-time political agitator.  Now that the King had repealed the hated tax, what was he going to do -work for a living? Not our Sam!  Here's what he did: he and his group of radical Whigs (High-top Fades? Beehives?) seized on the one puny, little tax that remained- a tax on the import of tea- and blew it up into a giant conspiracy theory aimed at the heart of colonial America.  Without the rhetorical invective, here's how his tinfoil-hat-wearing argument went: 

1) everybody liked tea 

2) tea only came from India and China 

3) the crown had granted the East India Company a monopoly on the tea trade

4) NO COLONIAL MERCHANTS like Adams' friend John Hancock could legally ship tea, so they were forced to smuggle it 

5) this made everyone connected to the tea trade a de-facto criminal who might be arrested and thrown in prison at a moment's notice 

6) the tax on tea was part of an evil plan by George III's ministers to SET A PRECEDENT for taxing colonials WITHOUT CONSENT of their legislative assemblies, leading to 

7) eventual slavery of EVERYONE in colonial America, or 

8) their eventual sale to France or Spain, which would put them in the clutches of the dreaded Catholics and their Pope.

Again, I am not making this shit up.

In reality, the tax was a minuscule tax on middlemen merchants to help defray the cost of inspecting cargoes and policing thieves and smugglers (which was pretty much everybody in colonial Boston).  The average consumer would have to drink an entire gallon of tea every day to pay a $1 tax at the end of the year.

The rest of the story is familiar to grade school kids and even a few of my undergrads: a bunch of rowdies dressed themselves up as Mohawk Indians, broke into three tea laden ships in Boston Harbor, threw the tea into the sea, and took care to try and NOT do any harm to people or other property that night.  On a personal note, my wife's family counts as one of its ancestors a character named Boardman who was somehow identified through his Indian disguise and arrested afterwards.  He later jumped out of a second story window and ran for it, not stopping until he had reached Isleboro Island, Maine, where his direct descendants live to this very day.

For the LAST TIME, there is NO SUCH THING as ICED TEA! Just dump what's THERE!

What happened next was exactly what Sam Adams and his radical Whigs (French Braids? Beatles Bowl-cut?) knew would happen: the British took a complete nutty, closed the port of Boston, shut down the provincial legislature, moved Massachusetts' capital to Salem (yep, THAT Salem!), shut down courts of law, and sent a couple boatloads of red-coated Regular Army regiments to keep the peace.  This was all spun by Adams and his crew as a preposterous and tyrannical assaults on their English liberties, blah-blah-blah etc. and b.s.  You see, Adams knew that the English would go off their collective crumpets if the colonials made a deliberate attack on the PROPERTY INTERESTS of the British Empire, i.e. tea and the tea trade monopoly.  Remember that this was an era where most crimes against property carried the death penalty.  By provoking this arguably unreasonable reaction, Adams could then advance his Deep State Plan of replacing the British governing elite with a home-grown American governing elite.  

The Boston Tea Party was, therefore, Samuel Adams' last ditch effort to remain politically relevant in the Anglo-Colonial back-and-forth of the 1760-1770's, an effort that succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.  Once troops were quartered amidst a rebellious population, it would not be long before shots were fired, Continental Congresses were formed, armies raised, allies sought, and the Anglo-American Civil War (we call it the Revolutionary War -I wonder what it would have been called if we had lost it?) was raging up and down eastern North America.

But how do YOU know so much about what Samuel Adams was thinking and planning, Ex-Prof, I hear you all cry.  Simple: I read a lot.  That, plus I am a direct descendant on my mother's side to Sam and his cousin, John Adams.  Call it family insight.

No family insight is needed to explain the current day Tea Party.  What started out as a protest on April 15 highlighting government waste and fiscal irresponsibility, quickly took on a more socially conservative and libertarian cast as its organizers parlayed their popularity into elected seats in Congress.  Once there, the Tea Party members caucused with the Republicans, becoming an ultra-

conservative wing of that party.  Now calling itself the Freedom Caucus, they have used their influence to frustrate Democratic legislation like the Affordable (Health) Care Act, and, ironically, blocking Republican attempts to repeal and replace the ACA with a more watered-down version.  Like those behind the original Tea Party, the contemporary organization uses the press and that new terror, social media, in order to further its agenda.  Also like their predecessors, today's Tea Party manipulates patriotic symbols in order to lend political legitimacy to their cause.

I think that their fiscal frugality smacks more of Jeffersonian Democratic-Republicanism, but Monticello just isn't as cool a symbol as the Don't Tread On Me snake.  That, and there's also the problem of Jefferson's affair with Sally Hemmings on the d.l. that might not play to the more racially discriminative members of their caucus.  

But the real reason for the decline of the Tea Party's influence in today's political blood-splattered arena is this: it's being quietly absorbed by the Republican Party and will probably become a footnote to some boring historian's thesis on the influence of third parties on the American legislative agenda.  Which sounds like an awesome title for a thesis paper.  If I ever wanted to get a PhD. And go back to teaching bored undergrads for slave-wages.  Just sayin'.

So, one night in 1773, American colonials threw tea into Boston Harbor as a symbolic protest against taxation without representation.  And in the late 20th Century, American taxpayers threw copies of their 1040's W-2's, 1099's and 403-B's into bonfires to protest taxation with representation.  Patriots both? -or mere political opportunists struggling to retain their relevance?  I leave it to you, my wise and discerning reader, to decide.

Is he still, like, talking and junk?