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Theodore R. JohnsonContributing columnist|AddFollowDecember 14, 2023 at 6:30 a.m. EST(iStock) Listen5 minShareComment on this storyCommentAdd to your saved storiesSave
Two hundred and fifty years ago this week, a group of men descended on Boston Harbor, boarded three privately owned ships, and dumped more than 45 tons of tea overboard. They were upset about the Tea Act of 1773, part of a suite of taxes that the British Parliament used to fund the British governors in the colonies. The size of the tax wasn’t the problem — the legitimacy of it was. The people who would soon become Americans resented being forced by a legislature they didn’t elect to pay for leaders they didn’t choose.
Need something to talk about? Text us for thought-provoking opinions that can break any awkward silence.ArrowRightThe story of that night became lore — and the lore evolved into national myth. The Boston Tea Party has come to symbolize the revolutionary spirit that led to independence. It engraved the catchphrase “no taxation without representation” on the country’s cornerstone and signified the embrace of democracy.
Yet there’s another version of the event, one less suitable for national mythology. A horde of White men disguised themselves as Native Americans — coppering their faces and donning headdresses in the same tradition that would lead to blackfaced minstrel shows decades later — to commit seditious conspiracy and destroy private property. The riotous mob trespassed on three ships and destroyed goods worth nearly $2 million in today’s money — all because they didn’t want to obey a duly passed law.
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Only one of these versions is central to our national identity. The other is swept under history’s rug to prevent the colonists from being cast as common criminals hiding behind racist face paint. How a country chooses to remember a historic event, and the parts it chooses to forget, reveals its character. The event’s characters matter, too.
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A nation’s myths — exaggerated or imagined as they might be — shape its identity. Scholars claim these myths merge fiction and truth, transform incidents into parables, become sacred and resilient in the face of scrutiny, and influence personal and group behavior. If you want to know what a nation thinks of itself, listen to the stories that persist. And if you want to know whom a nation values, look to the heroes of those myths.
American myths say something about our nature, about who we are, about where we’re going. Whether George Washington truly confessed to cutting down a cherry tree is less important than making the prototypical American honest and a lover of truth. The self-made man is also a mythical American creation, consecrating the link between hard work and prosperity; it suggests that failure is either a personal choice or a personal defect. The collection of myths about the nation’s providence and the melting pot and manifest destiny feed the idea of American exceptionalism — a shining city on a hill, the first thing the light touches.
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They are moving stories. But the heroes of these myths don’t look like the majority of Americans today. Many of us descend from people labeled threats or, at best, sidekicks and free riders. It leaves us wondering when we’ll get to be the protagonists in a core national myth.
It’s for this reason that there’s a growing clamor for new American stories. Not because the lessons of the foundational myths are invalid but because heroes should look like the nation they embody, the people they represent. Being able to see yourself in a story validates both the person and the example. Harriet Tubman and Rosa Parks and Thurgood Marshall, for example, made the United States truer to its principles. They demonstrated how a previously excluded people can be the fullest expression of — not a threat to — the nation’s virtue.
New stories, however, disrupt old myths. The main characters change. And the folks who identify with the people in the earlier telling feel displaced. Debates about historical facts disguise the true source of tension: which of us is at the center of the story.
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Benjamin L. Carp, author of “Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party & the Making of America,” says that night on the wharf is such a formative myth because it reveals a core tension between two values: democratic protest and law and order. It was principled and nonviolent, carried out by common folk who believed virtue was on their side. It was also criminal — Carp notes that a comparable event now might be classified as an act of terrorism.
The paradox remains alive and well. The civil rights movement was both a First Amendment triumph and branded unlawful by officials who sent in police with batons and dogs. Some considered Black Lives Matter protests to be legitimate civil disobedience while others focused on the property damage that sometimes occurred alongside the protests and declared the movement fundamentally un-American. Many rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, were duly convicted of seditious conspiracy and property damage while a quarter of the country regards them as patriots and “political prisoners.”
Both democratic protest and law and order are widely regarded as vital American values. Yet we disagree about which protesters should be deemed patriots and which should be gathered up by the long arm of the law. Who will be the champions of our myths? It is a foundational quandary worth marking, one engraved into the nation’s cornerstone.
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Two hundred and fifty years ago this week, a group of men descended on Boston Harbor, boarded three privately owned ships, and dumped more than 45 tons of tea overboard. They were upset about the Tea Act of 1773, part of a suite of taxes that the British Parliament used to fund the British governors in the colonies. The size of the tax wasn’t the problem — the legitimacy of it was. The people who would soon become Americans resented being forced by a legislature they didn’t elect to pay for leaders they didn’t choose.
The story of that night became lore — and the lore evolved into national myth. The Boston Tea Party has come to symbolize the revolutionary spirit that led to independence. It engraved the catchphrase “no taxation without representation” on the country’s cornerstone and signified the embrace of democracy.
Yet there’s another version of the event, one less suitable for national mythology. A horde of White men disguised themselves as Native Americans — coppering their faces and donning headdresses in the same tradition that would lead to blackfaced minstrel shows decades later — to commit seditious conspiracy and destroy private property. The riotous mob trespassed on three ships and destroyed goods worth nearly $2 million in today’s money — all because they didn’t want to obey a duly passed law.
Only one of these versions is central to our national identity. The other is swept under history’s rug to prevent the colonists from being cast as common criminals hiding behind racist face paint. How a country chooses to remember a historic event, and the parts it chooses to forget, reveals its character. The event’s characters matter, too.
A nation’s myths — exaggerated or imagined as they might be — shape its identity. Scholars claim these myths merge fiction and truth, transform incidents into parables, become sacred and resilient in the face of scrutiny, and influence personal and group behavior. If you want to know what a nation thinks of itself, listen to the stories that persist. And if you want to know whom a nation values, look to the heroes of those myths.
American myths say something about our nature, about who we are, about where we’re going. Whether George Washington truly confessed to cutting down a cherry tree is less important than making the prototypical American honest and a lover of truth. The self-made man is also a mythical American creation, consecrating the link between hard work and prosperity; it suggests that failure is either a personal choice or a personal defect. The collection of myths about the nation’s providence and the melting pot and manifest destiny feed the idea of American exceptionalism — a shining city on a hill, the first thing the light touches.
They are moving stories. But the heroes of these myths don’t look like the majority of Americans today. Many of us descend from people labeled threats or, at best, sidekicks and free riders. It leaves us wondering when we’ll get to be the protagonists in a core national myth.
It’s for this reason that there’s a growing clamor for new American stories. Not because the lessons of the foundational myths are invalid but because heroes should look like the nation they embody, the people they represent. Being able to see yourself in a story validates both the person and the example. Harriet Tubman and Rosa Parks and Thurgood Marshall, for example, made the United States truer to its principles. They demonstrated how a previously excluded people can be the fullest expression of — not a threat to — the nation’s virtue.
New stories, however, disrupt old myths. The main characters change. And the folks who identify with the people in the earlier telling feel displaced. Debates about historical facts disguise the true source of tension: which of us is at the center of the story.
Benjamin L. Carp, author of “Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party & the Making of America,” says that night on the wharf is such a formative myth because it reveals a core tension between two values: democratic protest and law and order. It was principled and nonviolent, carried out by common folk who believed virtue was on their side. It was also criminal — Carp notes that a comparable event now might be classified as an act of terrorism.
The paradox remains alive and well. The civil rights movement was both a First Amendment triumph and branded unlawful by officials who sent in police with batons and dogs. Some considered Black Lives Matter protests to be legitimate civil disobedience while others focused on the property damage that sometimes occurred alongside the protests and declared the movement fundamentally un-American. Many rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, were duly convicted of seditious conspiracy and property damage while a quarter of the country regards them as patriots and “political prisoners.”
Both democratic protest and law and order are widely regarded as vital American values. Yet we disagree about which protesters should be deemed patriots and which should be gathered up by the long arm of the law. Who will be the champions of our myths? It is a foundational quandary worth marking, one engraved into the nation’s cornerstone.
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