JOHN D. WOLF: New tea party would not resonate with the original
John D. Wolf Post-Tribune guest columnist February 16, 2012 2:50PM
John Wolf
Updated: February 18, 2012 3:30PM
It is easy to forget history when you want to make a point. The influence of today’s tea party movement in the Republican Party seems to be coming to an end, maybe none too soon.
The Founding Fathers were not the privileged class of the American Revolution. It is easy to credit John Hancock, John Adams or James Otis. In fact, the Boston Tea Party was the work of the underclass, the patriots, the craftsmen, the mechanics, which today would be the unions. The movement today missed the point.
In 1999, Alfred F. Young published “The Shoemaker and the Tea Party.” He followed the career of George Robert Twelves Hewes (1742-1840), a Boston shoemaker, the last survivor of the Boston Tea Party. Hewes’ life reflects the period that led up to the founding of the nation.
Hewes lived and died in poverty. Standing only 5 feet 1 inch tall, he was nearly illiterate, and was apprenticed to make shoes in a small shop in North Boston, near the Griffin Wharf where three ships of the East India Tea Co. were docked. He lived and worked in the midst of revolutionary fervor. Boston was crowded by British occupation troops. Hewes took orders for custom-made officer boots, for which he wasn’t always paid.
Hewes witnessed the Boston Massacre at which Crispus Attacks was killed, Bunker Hill, Dorchester Heights and the Liberty Tree. On Dec. 16, 1773 he joined 150 Bostonians at the Old South Meeting House to plan the dramatic protest that launched the colonists on the road to independence. Sworn to secrecy and silence, they crudely disguised themselves as Mohawk Indians with hatchets to break open the 350-pound chests and dump the tea into the harbor.
Tea was important to English colonists who were addicted to it. It was the poor man’s drink and was actually cheaper in the colonies because of smuggling from Holland to avoid paying tax. The dumping of the tea was a protest against the East India Co., the British arrogant occupation and the many abuses suffered by the colonists.
In the years following the Revolution, citizens were so busy becoming Americans that their heritage was not observed. As veterans began to die off, citizens began to realize that the Boston Tea Party had a significant part in the new nation.
Hewes was discovered in western New York as the last survivor of the Tea Party. He had come to represent all the journeymen mechanics, the men who had been labeled “mobs.” They separated themselves from the privileged property owners who alone had the right to vote. Young points out they were the foot-soldiers of the American Revolution. They were the proud and angry poor.
Today the tea party movement has come to represent corporate money power funding the radical right wing of the GOP and dictating its policies.
In the Republican presidential campaign they are represented by Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney. Neither would understand the patriotism of a George Hewes. Their ideology would be strange to all those on the bottom of the economic ladder. Unless the GOP sheds the tea party power, they will guarantee a second term for Barack Obama. They might even run a third party candidacy and thus split the conservative vote.
American voters demand a higher standard than the tea party movement candidates portray.
Thomas Friedman of the New York Times says, “Money in politics is out of control today. Our Congress has become a forum for legalized bribery Americans are losing faith in the instruments of government because they think the game is rigged by big money — and they are right.”
George Robert Twelves Hewes would understand that point of view.
John D. Wolf is a retired minister who lives
in Valparaiso.
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