The Whites of their Eyes Read Online Free PDF

their battle,” she said. “But we’re not melting down horseshoes for musket balls.”

CHAPTER 3
How to Commit Revolution
    CONTAINING A SINGULAR ENCOUNTER WITH THE NATION’S
STORYTELLER—THE MISDAVENTURES OF MR. NIXON—A
FURTHER ACCOUNT OF THE PURSUIT OF LIBERTY—THE
TRAVELS OF PHILLIS WHEATLEY—A SPIRITED DEBATE AT
OLD SOUTH MEETING HOUSE—ACTS, INTOLERABLE—AND
MORE THAN ONE PARTY OF TEA
    Shawn Ford used to work for a place called Paragon Tours and Travel. Then he tried retail. One day in the 1980s, he was laid off from his job at Jordan Marsh, a department store in Downtown Crossing. “I walked to the Boston Common and was sitting there drinking a Coke,” he told me, “and a trolley went by and I said, ‘Well, that’s something to do for the summer.’ ” He took a job at Old Town Trolley, with forty-three trolleys, the largest sightseeing fleet in Boston, making fourteen stops, including Faneuil Hall, the Old State House, and Fenway Park, the oldest major league ballpark in the country. 1 Sometimes, Boston seems to be sinking under the weight of its own history.
    Old Town Trolley was owned by Historic Tours of America, a heritage-for-profit outfit founded in the 1970s by three entrepreneurial Floridians who called their company “The Nation’s Storyteller.” Historic Tours of America has hosted two million visitors a year at attractions in six cities and soldwares at twenty-five gift shops, or “historically themed retail environments.” It was also the owner of the Boston Tea Party Ship, the
Beaver
, that boat that was tied up in Gloucester. Ford was vice president of international and domestic sales. I went to see him in March of 2010, in his office on the second floor of a warehouse on Dorchester Avenue in South Boston. Ford, nattily dressed, took me into a conference room to show me a promotional DVD about the plan for an ambitious expansion of the site on the Congress Street Bridge. Drum and fife music played during the opening scenes, over footage of the
Beaver
, before she was towed away.
    “Today there are few symbols of American freedom more recognizable and compelling than the Boston Tea Party,” said the narrator.
    “Gosh, that guy’s voice is really familiar,” I said. “Who is that?”
    Ford smiled. “Frank Avruch.”
    The name didn’t ring a bell.
    “Because of its significance to American history, and relevance to current events,” Avruch went on, “the Boston Tea Party Ship and Museum has played a continuing role in political protests, education, historical interpretation, and the advancement of patriotic ideals.” 2
    “Who?”
    “He used to be Bozo the Clown,” Ford said. Avruch was Bozo, on Boston television, in the 1970s.
    After the
Beaver
gets back to Boston, Ford said, it will tell the story of “why we are such a great country.”
    “Our children have been taught to be ashamed of their country,” Richard Nixon said, on January 20, 1973, in his second inaugural address. “At every turn, we have been beset bythose who find everything wrong with America and little that is right.” The Bicentennial could help fix that: “Let us pledge together to make these next four years the best four years in America’s history, so that on its 200th birthday America will be as young and as vital as when it began.” 3 Meanwhile, in
How to Commit Revolution American Style
, Jeremy Rifkin of the Peoples Bicentennial Commission was insisting, “It makes no sense for the New Left to allow the defenders of the system the advantage of presenting themselves as the true heirs and defenders of the American Revolutionary tradition. Instead, the revolutionary heritage must be used as a tactical weapon to isolate the existing institutions and those in power.” 4
    And so it went, back and forth, the battle over the Revolution. Nixon, though, was distracted. Five men had broken into the Watergate hotel on June 17, 1972. Over the next weeks and months, an FBI investigation had tied the