The Whites of their Eyes (20 page)

In the world into which Franklin and his sister were born, very few beat through. Of their father’s seventeen children, Benjamin was the only one. That world was changing. Massachusetts had already abolished slavery. In 1789, Boston, for the first time, mandated the education of girls.
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Franklin’s escape, America’s birth, an age of revolutions, made possible
a new world, a world of fewer obstacles. Franklin liked to think of his life as the story of America, and in a way, he was right. He never finished his autobiography. And maybe that’s because he knew that, since he had made his life into an allegory for America, it could have no ending. The Revolution is the story of America because it is a story of beginning.

The day after George Pataki came to Boston was Patriot’s Day, which has been a Massachusetts state holiday since 1969. The nineteenth of April was also the day of the Boston Marathon, and, for a long time, it was the day of the Red Sox home opener. There was also an annual reenactment of the Battle of Lexington and Concord, but it started at dawn, and, in my house, we had never once managed to get out of bed fast enough to make it there in time. We shambled, and breakfasted, and then biked from Cambridge to Lexington along the Minuteman Bicycle Path. By the time we got there,
the battle was over, but costumed reenactors were still wandering around, waiting for the parade to start. Late but undefeated, we bought, from a street vendor on Massachusetts Avenue, a small arsenal of cheap wooden muskets and, recruiting some other sleepy-headed colonials, waged our own battle on the green. The redcoats, leaning against a stand of trees, gave every appearance of being undaunted by our assault. Bloody lobsterbacks. Then we ate hamburgers and talked about the men who had died on that spot, all those years ago, and what they died for. By then, we had all gotten a little weary of Longfellow—“Li
sten, my children, and you shall hear”—but once you commit a thing to memory, it gets stuck there:

For, borne on the night-wind of the Past,

Through all our history, to the last,

In the hour of darkness and peril and need,

The people will waken and listen to hear

The hurrying hoof-beats of that steed,

And the midnight message of Paul Revere.
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We had another musket fight. It got pretty fierce. We ate some ice cream. We biked home, thinking about the night-wind of the past.

What was the Revolution about? What is history for? Who are we? I tried to stop watching, but every story in the news seemed to ask the same questions. On April 23, Arizona governor Jan Brewer signed into law a bill making the failure to carry immigration documents a crime and authorizing police to question anyone who might possibly be an illegal immigrant.
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Five days later, Jeff Perry, a Republican from Cape Cod, introduced an amendment in the Massachusetts legislature to deny public assistance to illegal immigrants. With Palin gone, the Boston Tea Party turned its attention to plann
ing a “Pass the Perry Amendment” rally.
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(Perry had also introduced, in 2009, the Massachusetts Tenth Amendment Resolution. Tenth Amendment resolutions, asserting state sovereignty and opposing the expansion of the federal government, had been introduced in forty states and had passed in four.)
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On April 30, Glenn Beck launched a series called “Founders’ Fridays.” He began with Samuel Adams. He lamented the founders’ fall from greatness: “Our Founding Fathers were once revered in this country as divinely inspired, courageous visionaries. But now, after the past one hundred years of ‘enlightenment,’ we’ve come to realize that they were nothing but old, white, racist, heathens.” He explained his purpose: “In order to restore the country, we have to restore the men who founded it on certain principles to the rightful place in our national psyche.”
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On the next Founders’ Friday, May 7
, Beck
reported that the ratings were so good during that first show that he was thinking about extending the series. “It seems like America, for some reason or another, is interested now in our Founding Fathers and meeting who they really, truly are.” He introduced his guests, Earl Taylor, president of the National Center for Constitutional Studies, and Andrew Allison, coauthor of
The Real George Washington
. He urged viewers to read Washington’s own words. “When you read these guys,” Beck said, “it’s alive. It’s like, you know, reading the scriptures. It’s like reading the Bible. It is alive today. And it only comes alive when you need it.”
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Just like Jesus in the Gospels.

That same day, and also on Fox News, Bill O’Reilly interviewed Sarah Palin. “Why do you think America is a Christian nation?” O’Reilly asked. “Nobody has to believe me,” Palin said. “You can just go to our Founding Fathers’ early documents and see how they crafted a Declaration of Independenc
e and a Constitution that allows that Judeo-Christian belief to be the foundation of our lives.” O’Reilly, playing devil’s advocate, suggested that some people might say that the United States had changed, “and now we’re a much more secular nation than we were back in 1776.” Palin called that kind of thinking “an attempt to revisit and rewrite history.” She wanted to “go back to what our founders and our founding documents meant. They’re quite clear that we would create law based on the God of the Bible and the Ten Commandments.”
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Take back Washington. Take back America. Take back the past.

I thought about Langston Hughes:

O, let America be America again—

The land that never has been yet.
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On May 11, the executive board of the nine-thousand-member Organization of American Historians passed a
resolution urging the Texas School Board to reconsider its proposed amendments to the state’s social studies curriculum and instead “adopt a history curriculum that reflects the understanding of history developed by the historians and history teachers of Texas.”
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Similar statements were issued by, among other organizations, the National Council for History Education.
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These resolutions, though, were hardly likely to exert an influence, given the views board members held about the historical profession. The day the Organization of American Historians released that statement,
the governor of Arizona signed into law a bill prohibiting the state’s public schools from offering courses in ethnic studies. The new bill was targeted at a Mexican American studies program in the Tucson school district that, according to the Associated Press, was believed by the state’s head of public education to teach “Latino students that they are oppressed by white people.”
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When the Texas School Board convened on May 18, its meeting opened with remarks by Cynthia Dunbar, a Republican member of the board with a degree from Pat Robertson’s Regent University School of Law and who was, at the time, a visiting professor of law at Liberty University, an evangelical school in Virginia. Dunbar prayed,

I believe that no one can read the history of our country without realizing that the Good Book and the Spirit of the Savior have, from the beginning, been our guiding geniuses. Whether we look to the first Charter of Virginia, or the Charter of New England, or the Charter of Massachusetts Bay, or the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, the same objective is present—a Christian land, governed by Christian principles. I believe the entire Bill of Rights came into being because of the knowledge our forefathers had of the
Bible, and their belief in it: freedom of belief, of expression, of assembly, of petition; the dignity of the individual; the sanctity of the home; equal justice under law; and the reservations of powers to the people. I like to believe we are living today in the spirit of the Christian religion. I like also to believe that as long as we do so, no great harm can come to our country. All this I pray, in the name of my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.
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Why bother fighting over school prayer when you can teach evangelical Christianity in history class? For Dunbar, who leapt from the New Testament to the New World and then collapsed the nearly two centuries separating Virginia’s royal charter and the Bill of Rights, as if James I were the same man as James Madison, history
was
religion.

All week, while public hearings were held in Austin about the set of history standards known as Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (or TEKS), the Tea Party was in the news. On Tuesday, Rand Paul, Ron Paul’s son, won a Kentucky primary for a U.S. Senate seat, running as a member of the Tea Party. When the Texas School Board met in Austin on Wednesday, the Texas NAACP held a protest rally outside, called “Don’t White-Out Our History.” Inside, Benjamin Jealous, national president of the NAACP, said, “We wake up every morning, and try to push our country forward, not trying to
keep it from running backwards. And this, my mom, reading through these TEKS with me, a very well-educated woman, says, ‘This is taking us in a direction toward the way I was taught in the 1940s.’ ”
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That night, on MSNBC, Rand Paul talked about his reservations about the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Rachel Maddow asked him, “Do you think that a private business has the right to say we don’t serve black people?” Paul hemmed and hawed.
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The Texas School Board was scheduled to vote on Friday. That morning, I went to a public school in my neighborhood to visit a third-grade classroom, where the kids, including one of mine, were studying the Revolution.

Jocelyn Marshall handed out folders to each of six groups of kids.

“Lexington and Concord, can you come up and get your stuff? I got you guys maps.”

After they grabbed their folders, the kids gathered around their desks, sitting in chairs whose feet were covered with tennis balls, to hush the sound of scraping.

“Boston Massacre, right here.” Three boys came up.

“Can I also have, Battle of Bunker Hill? Battle of Bunker Hill!”

“And remember, Boston Tea Party,” Marshall shouted out the door, “I’m letting you work in the hallway, but please don’t make me regret it.”

The kids were using a textbook called
Massachusetts: Our Home
. Marshall had also brought in a whole library of books. They’d been researching, mining sources, and now they were writing scripts for a video they were going to be making, a television newscast. Each group was supposed to have at least one news anchor, field reporter, and eyewitness.

Julie, Charlotte, and Fiona were Taxation without Representation, and they were way ahead of everyone else. They’d finished their script, days before, and were already rehearsing.

JULIE
: Hello I’m Julie and this is
Colonial Times Today
. We are here to tell you about Massachusetts in the 1760s. Here is Charlotte to tell you more about taxation without representation.

CHARLOTTE
: Thank you, Julie. Here in Massachusetts we’re experiencing strong emotion about the taxes issued from
England. People are being taxed on sugar, molasses, stamps, glass, and even tea. (
Turning to Fiona
.) This is Fiona, with her strong opinion. Now tell us Fiona, do you think the king is taxing you unfairly?

FIONA
: Of course I do! He’s taxing us on silly things like stamps. That’s
ridiculous
!!!!!

This, I guess, was the belly of the beast, the alarming left-wing lunacy, the godless irreverence, the socialist political indoctrination taught in the public schools of the People’s Republic of Cambridge: an assignment that requires research, that raises questions about perspective, that demands distinctions between fact and opinion, that bears an audience in mind—
an assignment that teaches the art of historical writing.

“Hey, Fiona!” Simon had wandered over. “What else did they tax besides tea and paper?”

“Oh, I’ve got a whole list.” She reached into her folder. “Look!”

Earlier in the year, the class had studied the Pilgrims, building colonial houses and Wampanoag wigwams out of hay and mud, and I had learned that if you put a marshmallow on top of a Girl Scout mint cookie, cover the whole thing with chocolate sauce, let it harden, and stick a butterscotch Lifesaver on it, for the buckle, it makes a pretty good Pilgrim hat. Fiona had been a star of the Pilgrim unit. In a skit on animal husbandry, she stole the show, playing, by turns, a pig, a sheep, and a chicken. She turned to Charlotte and Julie, “I think I should do this when I say, ‘ridiculous.’ ”
She crossed her arms in front of her chest and pouted.

Julie shook her head. “That king must have been insane.”

I followed Simon back to the Boston Massacre, where there was much talk of Crispus Attucks.

Peter, leaning over his desk, suggested, “How about we have him say, ‘When I ran away from Framingham, I became a ropemaker’?”

Most of what happens is forgotten. Most of the past is lost, gone the way of Benjamin Edes’s spectacles and Phillis Wheatley’s unpublished poems and James Otis’s papers and Thomas Paine’s bones and Royall Tyler’s right shoe and Jane Mecom’s house. Historians sometimes rescue things. I pictured William Cooper Nell, digging in the archives and discovering that runaway ad from the
Boston Gazette
, and I was glad it had made its way, down through the years, and onto Peter’s desk.

“Right,” agreed Simon. “Because, remember, he’s mad at the British soldiers because they started taking his job.”

The study of history requires investigation, imagination, empathy, and respect. Reverence just doesn’t enter into it.

Jazire, who has silver-rimmed, Franklinian glasses and who used to have a mohawk, but which was growing back in, was going to get to play Attucks, who was going to be their eyewitness. He was taking everything down with a black Sharpie. I asked him how he was going to be interviewed, given that he was killed during the massacre.

“No, that’s the good part,” he said, grinning. “In the middle of the interview, I get shot!”

In the hallway, the Boston Tea Partiers were lying on their stomachs on linoleum tiles of speckled blue, writing out cue cards on giant sheets of white-lined paper. Lucy and Zeyla were planning to be coanchors. They practiced their head-of-the-hour patter.