The Whites of their Eyes Read Online Free PDF Page B

burglars to the Committee to Re-elect the President. As the two hundredth anniversary of the dumping of the tea approached, Nixon’s Bicentennial Commission, mired in controversy, failed in every attempt to organize a national celebration. A $1.2 million plan to build a bicentennial park in all fifty states had been abandoned, as had plans for a world’s fair to be held in Philadelphia. In Massachusetts, Kevin White, Boston’s mayor, and a man with presidential aspirations, was determined to make the Bicentennial a highlight of his administration; he set up his own commission, Boston 200, and searched for corporate sponsors. That’s when those three Boston businessmen bought an old Baltic schooner and had her refitted as an English brig, an undertaking funded by the makers of Salada Tea.
    On the Fourth of July, 1973, the
New York Times
reported that an investigation into Nixon’s Bicentennial Commissionby the Government Accounting Office and the House Judiciary Committee had found a “startling lack of concrete ongoing programs.” 5 That same day, at an event sponsored by another rival to Nixon’s commission, the Afro-American Bicentennial Corporation, James Earl Jones read Frederick Douglass’s 1852 speech, “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro,” at Douglass’s house, in Washington, DC:
    What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicingare empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. 6
    This, presumably, was just the kind of thing Nixon was talking about, this finding everything wrong with America. It wasn’t invented by the New Left in the 1960s. It was quite old, in fact. Nixon’s Bicentennial Commission wanted to offer a different history, one not only without Frederick Douglass but also at considerable variance with the best emerging scholarship, including the work of David Brion Davis, whose
The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution
won the National Book Award in 1976, while Edmund S. Morgan’s
American Slavery, American Freedom
was a runner-up. 7 But removing slaveryfrom American history, even from eighteenth-century Boston, takes some doing, and means misunderstanding theRevolution, not least because, as Davis and Morgan argued, slavery made liberty possible.
    Two months after the Boston Massacre, John Hancock’s uncle, the Reverend Samuel Cooke, delivered a sermon before the Massachusetts legislature, urging passage of the proposed antislavery bill: “We, the patrons of liberty . . . have dishonored the Christian name, and degraded human nature, nearly to a level with the beasts that perish. . . . Let not sordid gain, acquired by the merchandize of slaves, and the souls of men harden our hearts against her piteous moans. When God ariseth, and when he visiteth, what shall we answer!” Unfortunately, voting to end slavery threatened to undo what the Boston Massacre seemed, possibly, to be on the verge of accomplishing: unifying the colonies in their opposition to Parliament, and turning what looked to a lot of people to be Boston’s fight into everyone’s fight. And here, on this stark choice, everything seemed to turn. Either Boston, and Massachusetts, could join with England in the effort to abolish slavery (in 1772, England would end slavery, if vaguely, in the landmark
Somerset
case), or it could lead the colonies in the effort to resist parliamentary rule. Either the Sons of