Misappropriated History and Tea-Bagging

One of the peculiarities of recent conservative efforts to mobilize public opinion against the Obama administration's stimulus and budget plans has been their uncritical adoption of the mantle of the American Revolution on behalf of the conservative cause.

Witness Nebraskans chanting "no taxation without representation," Or the risible "tea-bagging" parties being held by a bunch of astro-turf conservative organizations promoted by Fox News.

On one level, this shouldn't be surprising. Conservatives like to think of themselves as the true heirs of the American Revolution (see "original intent"), in order to claim the mantle of legitimacy and authenticity, and the anti-tax theme at least makes the fit better than other historical analogies. In addition to supporting their current political aims, this theme also does the yoeman work of insinuating that the U.S has always been a conservative, anti-tax nation, and that freedom equates with not being taxed. Winning the historical imagination, like winning the rhetorical battle for other powerful symbols such as the flag, mothers, "freedom," has a powerful impact on people's political thinking.

But as a historian, I would caution the modern conservative movement that historical analogies can be dangerously double-edged. The American Revolution was a tumulteous, and quite radical time period, and a lot of the ideas advanced by the Revolutionary Generation (a term I personally prefer to the Founding Fathers) go far beyond the anti-tax, small-government, negative liberties, property rights ideology of modern conservatives.

Consider, for example, Tom Paine. For a long time, I've considered Tom Paine to be my favorite member of the Revolutionary Generation - he wasn't rich (a struggling corsetmaker/tax-collector/pamphleteer), he wasn't a slaveowner (Paine was a fervent abolitionist), and he wasn't yet another bucolic farmer (Paine lived in London, Philadelphia and Paris).

Add to that his internationalism, his commitment to universal suffrage, and his quite radical economic policies - although a fan of Adam Smith, Paine advocated the distribution of public lands, progressive taxation, and an early version of social insurance. Eric Foner's book, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America, is a brilliant overview of how Paine emerged from the world of Philadelphia's self-educated artisans, his participation in drafting the radical Pennsylvania Constitution, and his engagement with the question of controlling the price of food versus laissez faire in the commodtiies market.

Over on DailyKos, Sam Wise Gingy's excellent diary reminds us of how radical Tom Paine could be with this quote:

Separate an individual from society, and give him an island or a continent to possess, and he cannot acquire personal property. He cannot be rich. So inseparably are the means connected with the end, in all cases, that where the former do not exist the latter cannot be obtained. All accumulation, therefore, of personal property, beyond what a man's own hands produce, is derived to him by living in society; and he owes on every principle of justice, of gratitude, and of civilization, a part of that accumulation back again to society from whence the whole came.

This is putting the matter on a general principle, and perhaps it is best to do so; for if we examine the case minutely it will be found that the accumulation of personal property is, in many instances, the effect of paying too little for the labor that produced it; the consequence of which is that the working hand perishes in old age, and the employer abounds in affluence.

It is, perhaps, impossible to proportion exactly the price of labor to the profits it produces; and it will also be said, as an apology for the injustice, that were a workman to receive an increase of wages daily he would not save it against old age, nor be much better for it in the interim. Make, then, society the treasurer to guard it for him in a common fund; for it is no reason that, because he might not make a good use of it for himself, another should take it.

Here you see a lot of the elements of radical republicanism in the 18th century - the deep understanding of the social nature of economic activity, and the attendant social nature of property; a strong belief in the labor theory of value from an artisan's perspective, and a budding awareness that capitalism might cheat workers of the fair value of their work; and the almost unspoken idea that the commonwealth and the common good should be the foundation of society and economy. I doubt that modern conservatives would want to claim this American Revolutionary as their figurehead.

But even if you focus on more conservative Founding Fathers, you keep coming across comments so radical that they explode the staid veneer of patriotic memory. Even the arch-moderate John Adams argued that ""All the perplexities, confusion and distresses in America arise not from defects in the Constitution or confederation, nor from want of honor or virtue, as much from downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit, and circulation.," and called for speculators in grain to be shot. If you look at Thomas Jefferson's writings on corporations and banks, you begin to get a sense why the northern urban worker joined the Democratic Party - ""If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. "

One of my favorite works on the American Revolution, Gordon Wood's Radicalism of the American Revolution, should remind us that the idea that the American Revolution was exception in that it was conservative, is a nonsense. The American Revolution turned society upside down, dispossessed much of the colonial elite, saw huge transfers of political and economic power, and set down new and newly combined languages, traditions of thought, and structures of government and politics. Inside the first twenty years of the new government, there were no less than two separate rebellions "from below," the emergence of the first American trade unions, and the first stirrings of abolitionism.

Remember that the next time you see some right-winger wave a tea-bag in your face.