Bicentennial memories

The American Revolution came early in Boston. 

By 1776, the action had moved south from Boston to Philadelphia. 

Boston was the hotbed of anti-tax, revolutionary fervor in the British colonies of North America. Boston was the problem child. Britain had to station troops in Boston, which brought public order while simultaneously exacerbating an angry public mood.  

We can relate. Consider the National Guard troops Trump sent to Minneapolis.

The Revolutionary War events we learned about in school preceded the Declaration of Independence. The Boston Massacre took place in 1770; the Boston Tea Party in 1773; Lexington and Concord's "shot heard round the world" took place in April,1775; George Washington took command of the Continental Army in July, 1775 on Cambridge Common.

I helped organize the celebration of the Bicentennial celebration. It was my first professional job after college and my one year of a Ph.D. program in history at Yale. I decided that the world would not change for the better because of the work of historians. I thought politics was the way to do it. 

My job at Boston's celebration of the bicentennial was a job in politics. I was hired by the office of the mayor of Boston, Kevin White. He hoped that a city in celebration would give him a  national reputation as a can-do, effective big-city mayor and a potential vice presidential pick in the 1976 or 1980 election.

The bicentennial programs avoided "rah-rah" flag-waving. It wasn't the mood. In Washington, D.C. Nixon was caught in the tar pit of his Watergate crimes and cover-up and Boston was experiencing ugly disorder in opposition to court-ordered busing to integrate schools in the racially-segregated neighborhoods of Boston and its nearby suburbs.

We staged a large exhibit in a newly-redeveloped Quincy Market, three huge century-old buildings converting from derelict into a vibrant "festival marketplace" crowded with shops, restaurants, and tourists. The years 1974 and 1975 were at the front end of that process. Our job was to bring people into the free exhibit and make sure they left exhilarated and ready to tell their friends and neighbors about the goings-on in the redeveloping city.

We used a prominently displayed Honeywell computer to tally the votes of people as they confronted several contemporary issues that closely mirrored issues that led to the revolution.

South Boston, October, 1974

-- We showed a brief movie of police attempting to control an unruly crowd, and then asked: Would you be part of, or at least be in agreement with, a crowd throwing rocks and snowballs at troops trying to maintain order? Or did you support the police? That situation depicted student protests five years prior and police trying to restrain crowds at anti-busing protests. Were we doing it today we might have shown anti-ICE demonstrations now. This was analogous to the Boston Massacre, when harassed British soldiers fired into a crowd.  

--  Would you protest a small, lawful tax by participating in a riotous takeover and destruction and looting of private property of merchants trying to obey the law and sell their goods? The exhibit showed then-contemporaneous vandalism. 

Today it might show organized shoplifting looters, feeling righteous anger over Lululemon selling leggings for $99. The looters consider the price ridiculous and unjust; the stores need to be sent a message. We see this on loops on Fox News. Bostonians who threw tea into Boston Harbor felt entitled and righteous, too. 

--  Would you support semi-organized local militias stockpiling guns and ammunition in a suburban warehouse, or would you be happy that lawful authorities travelled to the site to seize these items to protect public safety? That was the issue facing Bostonians surrounding the events at Lexington and Concord.

We showed a half-dozen scenes of then-contemporary controversies. What would YOU do? People marked their ballots, and they received a score: Which of ten prominent Bostonians were their responses most similar to. Sam Adams? John Hancock?  The exhibit was a hit because of the surprise factor and the controversy the exhibit created. Many people who presumed they were "patriots," i.e. on the side of the revolution, found that when the events were translated into contemporary events, they were instead on the side of law and order. 

I left Boston in the fall of 1975 to return to Medford, Oregon, and pursue my own, brief political career. The ethnic politics and endemic racism of Boston baffled me. I was a fish out of water there. 

Forty-five years later, in 2020, I watched rioters storm the Capitol in an attempt to overturn an election. It looked like revolution to me; a coup d' état. I sided with the Capitol Police. President Trump called people storming the doors and windows to take direct action to install the government of their choice "patriots."

I think they were traitors to their country. Of course, so was Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Franklin, Hancock, and the rest of the signers of the Declaration.

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