The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with
Jeff Rigenbach.
Jill Lepore is a professor of history at Harvard and a journalist whose work appears in the
major mainstream media.
The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times are on the list of publications to which she
Contributes, as is The New Yorker, where she's listed on the masthead as a staff writer.
Her latest book, which was published back in September by Princeton University Press,
is called The Whites of Their Eyes, The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle over American
History.
Unsurprisingly, it reads rather like a long magazine article.
It meanders here and there in a leisurely fashion.
includes tidbits from Lepore's reading in American history and other tidbits from interviews
she conducted with members of the contemporary Tea Party movement, but it seems never to
really reach any particular point.
In the end, it doesn't really end, it just stops.
She raises some big questions, what was the revolution about, what is history for, who
are we, but never really answers them.
If there is any overarching argument to the whites of their eyes, it would seem to be
this.
The members of the contemporary Tea Party movement believe, according to Lepore, in
a version of American history that she dismisses as a fantasy, an 18th century with no slavery,
poverty, ignorance, insanity, sickness or misery, only the Founding Fathers, with their
white wigs, wearing their three-cornered hats, in their Christian nation, revolting against
Taxes and Defending Their Right to Bear Arms.
This outright fiction, Lepore argues, may, for example, be accused of having compressed
a quarter century of political contest into the founding, as if ideas worked out over
decades of debate and fierce disagreement were held by everyone from the start.
She quotes an exchange between Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin.
Who's your favorite founder?, Beck asks Palin.
Um, you know, well, she replies, all of them.
It is not, of course, clear whether Mrs. Palin actually knows the names of any of these founders
Beck was asking her about, as it is not clear whether she knows anything else at all about
them either.
It is relatively certain, however, that Glenn Beck does know both who the founders were,
and at least something about what they said and did.
He has claimed, for example, that Thomas Paine was the Glenn Beck of the American Revolution,
a not entirely implausible interpretation of the facts.
The problem, however, at least as Lepore sees it, is that Beck is a devotee of the Tea Party
movement's version of American history, which she calls not just kooky history, but anti-history.
Then she decides that perhaps a better term for it is historical fundamentalism.
Historical Fundamentalism is to history, she writes, what astrology is to astronomy, what
alchemy is to chemistry, what creationism is to evolution.
More specifically, historical fundamentalism is marked by the belief that a particular
and quite narrowly defined past, the founding, is ageless and sacred, and to be worshipped.
that certain historical texts, the founding documents, are to be read in the same spirit
with which religious fundamentalists read, for instance, the Ten Commandments, that the
founding fathers were divinely inspired, that the academic study of history, whose standards
of evidence and methods of analysis are based on skepticism, is a conspiracy, and, furthermore,
blasphemy, and that political arguments grounded in appeals to the founding documents as sacred
Texts and to the Founding Fathers as Prophets are therefore incontrovertible.
As Lepore points out, the Founding Fathers weren't even called the Founding Fathers
until Warren G. Harding coined that phrase in his keynote address at the Republican National
Convention in 1916.
He used the phrase again a few years later during his inauguration in 1921, in an inaugural
It was in that very same speech that Harding attested
his Belief in the Divine Inspiration of the Founding Fathers.
Lepore provides inconclusive anecdotal evidence, which I nevertheless find persuasive, that
the Tea Party movement is mainly just a bunch of disaffected Republicans, who really care
nothing for small government or individual liberty, but merely want to see the GOP back
in the White House and back in control of Congress.
For example, she cites a 2010 New York Times CBS News poll as revealing that 63 percent
of self-described Tea Party supporters gain most of their television news from Fox, compared
with 23 percent of all adult Americans, and Fox News is of course little more than the
outsourced publicity arm of the Republican Party.
She also presents such evidence from her own interviews with members of the Tea Party movement.
She found that Tea Partiers liked to describe their movement as a catch-all.
Austin Hess identified himself as a libertarian.
Kristen Varley described herself as a social and fiscal conservative.
But it didn't catch everything.
Opposition to military power didn't have a place in the 21st century Tea Party.
It did, however, have a place in the revolution.
Moreover, the commitment to individual liberty exhibited by many of those Lepore talked with was rather scant, to say the least.
She interviews one tea-partier, Kristen Varley, who is working to try to get a ban on same-sex marriage on the ballot.
Lepore asked her whether that didn't amount to more government interference.
But the problem, she said, was that the government had interfered so much already that it had nearly destroyed the family.
and the only thing for it was to use the government to repair the damage.
In other words, I oppose large intrusive government except when I don't.
Where could you find a better definition of conservatism?
At another point in her period of interaction with the Tea Partiers, mostly in Boston,
Lepore asked a self-proclaimed libertarian, Austin Hess,
if he was troubled by Kristen Varley's work with the Coalition for Marriage and the Family.
We do not discuss social issues and foreign policy issues, he said.
Later, I asked Austin Hess whether he was worried Sarah Palin was hijacking the Tea Party.
He shrugged.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend, he said.
I don't agree with her about a whole lot of things, but we're not conducting purity tests.
We're building coalitions.
Lepore also finds anecdotal evidence of historical ignorance among the contemporary Tea Partiers.
She talks with a midwesterner named Patrick Humphries, for example, who tells her he was
born in Indiana and grew up in Iowa.
Humphries believes, like most of his fellow Tea Partiers, that the policies of the Obama
administration represent a radical change, a government takeover of the economy.
But of course, Obama's actual policies are merely the policies all presidential administrations,
both Republican and Democratic have pursued for nearly 80 years.
They are virtually indistinguishable from the policies of his predecessor, George W.
Bush.
Much of the Tea Party talk about the supposed evil of the Obama administration is really
just empty rhetorical excess.
And Lepore does have a tendency to take the contemporary Tea Partiers' somewhat overheated
rhetoric a bit too literally.
She seems to think, for example, that they really want to return to the 18th century,
or to be more exact, to the way government was conducted back then.
And that is something Lepore herself does not want.
She tells the sad story of Peter Franklin Mecham, Benjamin Franklin's nephew, the
son of his sister Jane.
When Jane's husband, Edward Mecham, died, Lepore writes, he left his wife with nothing
The care she provided did not, however, meet Jill Lepore's standards.
Whenever I hear people talk about getting back to what the founders had, she writes,
a government that won't give money to people who don't work, I think about Peter Franklin Mecham.
He was tied up in a barn like an animal for the rest of his life.
Nor does Mecham's case represent the full extent of Lepore's dissatisfaction with the politics of the late 18th century.
In 18th century America, she writes, I wouldn't have been able to vote.
I wouldn't have been able to own property either. And her rejection of that prospect is flat and final.
She writes, I don't want to go back to that. She approvingly quotes Thurgood Marshall's 1987 remark
in which he mocked what he called the complacent belief that the vision of those who debated and
compromised in Philadelphia yielded the more perfect union it is said we now enjoy. Marshall
Still expressed a certain skepticism about the wisdom, foresight, and sense of justice
exhibited by the framers, and noted that the government they devised was defective from
the start, requiring several amendments, a civil war, and major social transformations
to attain the system of constitutional government and its respect for the freedoms and individual
rights we hold as fundamental today.
There is merit in this statement, though a historically literate libertarian would remonstrate
a bit about Marshall's wording.
It's doubtful, for example, that a civil war was actually required to get rid of slavery,
and not all of those constitutional amendments Marshall seemed to hold in such high regard
were required either, not if the end you had in view was the protection of individual rights.
The one in 1920 that permitted women to vote was doubtless required for that objective
to be achieved.
But what about the provisions of the Reconstruction Amendments that effectively turned over to
a monstrously enlarged federal government all the matters that had previously been concerns
of the various states?
Did this have the effect of better protecting the individual rights of Americans?
The matter is, at the very least, debatable.
The important point, however, is that no Tea Partiers I know of are asking that the government
policies of the late 18th century be adopted anew, that slavery be reinstituted, that women
be denied the right to vote and the right to own property.
What the Tea Partiers are asking is rather that our current government be run according
to the principles that underlay the American Revolution.
But there's the rub.
For what are those principles?
The Founding Fathers didn't agree with each other about everything.
In fact, the more you read their letters and other writings, the more it seems that they
agreed with each other about virtually nothing, except the desirability of breaking with England
and establishing a new government for what had been thirteen separate English colonies.
This is, presumably, why Glenn Beck asked Sarah Palin to name her favorite founder,
And it was her ignorant belief, or so at least it seems to me, that the founders all agreed,
that made her unable to answer his question.
If you think of the American Revolution as most modern libertarians do, as having been
a major event in the libertarian tradition, as having been underlain by essentially libertarian
ideas, if what at least some tea partiers want is that our current government be run
and according to libertarian principles, well then, what they want is a federal government
that scarcely exists, a federal government closer to the one that operated under the
Articles of Confederation than to any U.S. federal government that has existed since
adoption of the Constitution.
If like most Tea Partiers, however, you're a conservative, then the principles you probably
believe underlay the American Revolution were no taxation without representation, the
The Right to Bear Arms, and, of course, the doctrine that the United States was to be
a Christian nation.
It is a skewed understanding of the revolution that permits such a view as this, of course,
which is Lepore's point.
What today's Tea Partiers think they know about the American Revolution is partial and
selective when it isn't absolute bunkum.
Jill Lepore believes, and I agree with her, that it would be better if the Tea Partiers
She has got their facts right, so that their understanding of the meaning of the American Revolution was more nuanced and closer to the actual truth.
She is inclined to blame her own profession for the problem.
Academic historians stopped writing for the general reader decades ago, she argues, and began turning out highly specialized scholarship that frankly didn't expect any readers other than fellow professors.
She has a point, but I myself am a firm believer in the view that you can lead a horse to water,
but you can't make it drink.
The horse has to want a drink.
The American electorate has to want the truth about American history.
Too many Americans really don't want truth, any truth.
What they want is mythology that will confirm their prejudices.
Those of us who communicate with the public about history do have to get the word out
about what American history really is, but just doing that won't guarantee a change
in public attitudes toward the American Revolution.
We still need a thirsty horse.
This is Jeff Riggenbach.
Thank you for watching!