We traveled to Nashville, Tennessee, to attend the National Tea party Convention in early February. We were curious outsiders determined to make sense of this burgeoning movement. We had attended Tea Party events in Southern Illinois in the Spring of 2009 and had come away with a view at variance to many of the national commentators. We had seen what appeared to be ordinary citizens reading the Constitution aloud, heard demands for politicians to listen to the “people”, and witnessed what we thought of as a “grass roots” political movement in action. In contrast, most of the national commentary portrayed the Tea Party as “astroturf” controlled by shadowy corporate interests, or worse as an incipient fascist movement in the US.
We wanted to talk to the people of the Tea Party without relying on the filter of the national media and its pundits. We wanted to learn for ourselves the nature of this insurgent movement. We are not partisans of the movement, but observers.
The Tea party Convention was unfolding at the Opryland Hotel just above the “Delta Island”, a vast, glass enclosed atrium that takes its theme from the Mississippi Delta. Greeting us were polite, well mannered Tea Partiers. Moving among them, like apparitions, were men dressed as Revolutionary War soldiers and statesmen. There was Benjamin Franklin and John Adams and Paul Revere. However, no Betsy Ross or Crispus Attucks.
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal built its most ambitious project, the Tennessee Valley Authority, along the Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers. At the time it was called a “socialist enterprise”. But in the intervening years has proved to be a major catalyst in the prosperity of the region. Massive government projects dot the region, from the Oak Ridge National laboratories to the Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama
The people of the Upland South played a critical role in the reunification of the nation after the Civil War when, in some tellings, they were viewed as the most American of Americans – “Scots Irish” ancestry in the British Isles, lying between the North and the South, fiercely independent men of the old frontier. Alternatively, the residents of the hills and hollows of Appalachia and the more westerly parts of the Upland South were viewed as impoverished, ignorant hillbillies, left behind by “progress.”
It was here at the iconic Grand Old Opry that the Tea Party gathered.
For some time we’ve been thinking about the changing nature of what it means to be “American.” When we were children, during the post-WWII period, the “American Dream” was represented in our schoolbooks and public media as a culture defined by white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant Northeasterners (Yankees). Those who are descendents of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe – Jews and Catholics –, those who are from the mid-south hills that stretch from Appalachia to the Ozarks, and rural folk in general did not fit easily into this paradigm. Blacks, American Indians, Latinos and Asians were, virtually by definition and, in some parts of the country, legally, excluded from the body politic.
The social movements of the 1960s and 1970s were as much about opening up what it meant to be “American” as they were about changes in the culture regarding race and sex and the role of government. The “culture wars” began in the seemingly placid 1950s, with rock-n-roll breaking out at the same time as the Freedom Rides and lunch-counter sit-ins. Characterized not only by youth, but by its flamboyant Jews, Blacks, Italians, Poles, hillbillies and Redneck southerners, rock and roll closely tracked the events of the late 50s and early 1960s. including the ascent of women on the national stage.
All of this was captured and transmitted to the nation on the emerging platform of national television.
Jane has studied the transformation of rural life for the past 30 years, largely in the swath of America that straddles the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. Together, we have done extensive research into “white people” in the Delta. One of the things that has most impressed us is the ubiquitous “roots research.” Genealogists are among the most sophisticated users of the new technologies of the web; genealogical resources have been among the first government documents to be scanned and made available on the internet. It is rarely monetized, subscriptions paying only for the actual costs of running the services, and genealogists almost fiercely defy efforts to commoditize their passion.
What spurs this deep interest? It is not, or is only rarely, the passion that spurred Jane’s fraternal grandmother to trace her ancestry to the American Revolution and join the Daughters of the American Revolution. Born in 1878, she was American Baptist, from an old Rhode Island family, a tea-totaller. Her husband’s family were Massachusetts Adams, linked somewhere in the past to the presidents. The family fought the battles of the Civil War as their evening recreation. For Jane’s grandmother the DAR membership concretized her American-ness. And, despite her staunch loyalty to the Union, it joined her to the white Southerners whose ancestors also fought for American independence.
Jane’s mother’s relatives, Jews, were exterminated when the Nazis invaded Poland. D’s family trace their roots back to the founding of America with the patriarch, Samuel Gorton, settling in Rhode Island in 1636. Moving to the South in the 1830s, the family pursued cotton to the “Western Lands” of the Mississippi Delta.
Not long ago Jane had an “aha” moment when talking with a university colleague who is researching Lithuanians in this country. A group of Lithuanians settled in Texas a century and a half ago, part of a larger German migration to America’s rural lands. For several generations they considered themselves, if they thought about it, as “German”. But, recently, some women discovered their Lithuanian roots, both in their genealogy and, more intimately, in relics handed down in their family. They have now reclaimed their Lithuanian ancestry and, with support from the State of Texas, are establishing a museum focused on the history and culture of this Lithuanian community in America.
Another group of Lithuanians emigrated to Chicago after WWII, when the Soviets brought their country under its domination. They established a Lithuanian center where they keep the memory of their homeland alive, teach their children Lithuanian and try to instill the idea that Lithuania is their homeland. Although most have become U.S. citizens they still experience themselves as exiles from their real homeland. Strongly nationalist, their identity lies mainly in Lithuania, not America.
In contrast, the descendants of the Lithuanian farmers in Texas experience themselves as “American” – but in an America that sees their specific cultural and national heritage as integral to the nation.
This is not the America of the melting pot, where the slag of Old World cultures drains off, leaving a pure American metal behind – a pure American metal that, coincidentally, looked mostly like an idealized WASP culture. Rather, this is an America that sees no contradiction between one’s specific cultural and religious heritage and being American. It is an America in which one’s Irish, Cherokee, Creek, Iroquois, Apache, Chinese, African, Mexican, Italian, Scots, English, Welsh, Japanese, German or other ancestry is to be appreciated, not denied.
After the Civil War and up through the Depression, there was an intense debate on the nature of America, a nation that had been riven by sectional jealousies and the issue of slavery. Who were we? Were we Brits who left behind Europe to find religious freedom and found a new world? Were we the new immigrants pouring through Ellis Island who looked dark and swarthy? The rise of the “new” Ku Klux Klan that was manifested in massive marches in Washington, DC in the 1920s was part of that roiling debate. Ironically, the Klan’s presence appeared stronger in the Midwest and Far West than in its old home in the Deep South. In that period Democratic President Woodrow Wilson purged the Federal bureaucracy of African Americans, who had received their jobs as loyal Republicans. Wilson’s attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, pursued political radicals, especially immigrants. A number of these radicals, stripped of their constitutional rights, were deported from the United States. The ACLU was founded as a result of these actions.
The “culture wars” of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were won by those who defined an idealized American – with northern European stock – but it excluded vast numbers of both old and new Americans who did not, or could not, conform to its homogenizing strictures. We should note that America’s nationalist dream was of a piece with the ideas of the nation that developed in Europe requiring a uniform language, a unitary “race”, and often religion, as well as a literature, music, and other cultural forms that everyone would recognize as characteristic of that nation.
That idea – that to be members of a nation we must share a common culture – is what has been contested again over the past half century. After WWII most Americans of all races and religions recognized that the definition of the American nation as white and Protestant could not stand. But we have continued to struggle to find a common definition of “American” that most people will assent to.
Protestant hegemony crumbled when John Kennedy was elected President in 1960. Racial hierarchies have been up-ended and, in some areas, reversed. Sexual norms and gender roles embedded in the old Puritan traditions have been overthrown. Counter-histories that foreground the injustices institutionalized in the founding documents and actions of the early Republic – especially those of slavery and Indian removal, but also of class domination – have become dominant within the educational system, pushing aside the older heroic story of the American Revolution….. the City on the Hill.
In the late 1970s, as the old order was crumbling under the transformations of the previous decades, the Vietnam War, and an economy reeling from the global effects of the oil cartel, a counter-movement emerged under the banner of America’s Judeo-Christian heritage. It was a period of millennial prophecies and religious revival. The leaders articulated a vision of a Christian (sometimes Judeo-Christian) America, and of heroic (and Christian) founding fathers. It did not address race and rejected the sexual revolution, linking Evangelical Protestants and Catholics in opposition to abortion and pre-marital sex. It was conflicted over the massive movement of women into the paid labor force.
There was another aspect to the cultural divide, as well – one that focused on our economy and our place in the world. Ronald Reagan ushered in this part of the culture wars, making common-cause with the Christian evangelicals. The schism in our polity, for which Reagan became the popular emblem, distinguished domestically between small vs. big government, particularly in the areas of environmental and other regulations and social welfare; between entrepreneurial vs. welfare capitalism; and between a large vs. small military presence in the world, which in turn revolved around viewing the global situation as largely benign or as threatening to U.S. security and prosperity. Reagan led an unapologetic campaign to defeat Communism – what he called the “Evil Empire.” Whether his efforts were the proximate cause of the collapse of the Soviets is a heated debate. But with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989 and a resurgent Islam, Islamist extremism became the new arena of debate, along with the reorganization of the global economy under the banner of free trade.
The Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as the threat of Islamist terror has transformed the American polity, in some ways like the War in Vietnam overshadowed the Civil Rights Movement.
Which brings us to the Tea Party movement.
Some of the people with whom we spoke with have been active to one degree or another in the culture wars of the past 3 decades, particularly in pro-life and Fundamentalist Christian organizations. There are, however, more people who were not politically animated by the fights over abortion and who may not have resonated to the rhetoric of an evangelical Christianity, but who now find themselves profoundly alarmed over the future of this country. At one general session we attended the facilitator (there is no one who will call themselves a leader) asked for a show of hands of those who had never worked in political campaigns before. Almost everyone in the room raised their hands.
Based on our observations, the large majority of people who attended the Tea Party Convention are baby boomers; few people under 40 appear mobilized by it, and few people over 70. Many, perhaps a large majority, have never been involved directly in politics. The Tea Party activists appear almost entirely white and older. They appear to be people whose parents benefited from the post-WWII affluence and are themselves relatively privileged. Their material well-being, and those of their children and grandchildren, are deeply jeopardized by the financial crisis and the global situation.
The Islamist attack of 9-11 and the financial melt-down of 2008 have focused the discontent. Among the people that we spoke with there is a broad sentiment that, since the collapse of Communism and the rise of Islamist extremism in the late 1980s, neither political party has been able to articulate a vision of the place of the U.S. in this new world, or of a “new world order” that leaves America secure and prosperous. Nor have the political parties been able to establish a majoritarian view of what is an “American” response to these threats.
At times of crisis, people need to know what their foundational values are – Why, beyond pure self-preservation, a person should care about what happens to their country. The Tea Party movement could have coalesced under the banner of Evangelical Christianity, as the Christian Coalition did 30 years ago. But it didn’t. Instead, it is congealing under the banner of the American Constitution.
In1967 Robert Bellah wrote an essay on “America’s Civil Religion.” He argued that America’s deepest aspirations have been “sacralized” through references to a beneficent Providence and rituals that, while embedded in a Biblical framework, constitute a civil, rather than sectarian, religion. By its adherence to profound values it avoids becoming superficial cant, but by avoiding references to any specific faith it remains broadly inclusive of the vast majority of Americans.
The Tea Party participants we listened to are animated by a return to the founding documents of the American Republic. That is encoded in the very name of the movement, a reference to the Boston Tea Party of 1773 that protested a British tax on tea – “taxation without representation.” They invoke the Constitution, read the words of the Founding Fathers, call one another Patriots, and join in “huzzahs” with those who garb themselves in the recognizable costumes of Paul Revere, and other American revolutionaries. They rarely invoked the Bible, turning their purifying zeal instead upon politicians and other leaders, including the “Main Stream Media”, whose self-serving venality they view as failing the nation in our time of need.
We heard that most participants accept the idea of a nation made up of people with many different religious faiths and cultural traditions, although the degree to which they are comfortable with cultural and religious diversity probably varies considerably. It is the most difficult part of the American experiment, after all.
They argue about the legal and moral boundaries of acceptable behaviors (such as abortion and same sex marriage on the legal front, homosexuality and abstinence before marriage on the moral front), but in general appear to be guardedly tolerant of a wide expression of individual behavior. In fact, the rhetoric tends more toward the libertarian than toward the morally absolute.
Tea Partiers in Nashville explicitly rejected social hierarchies based on race, and say they are firmly committed to the rule of law. The unity they seek to institute is a unity rooted in the nation’s sacred texts, of which the Constitution is foundational. There are undoubtedly many different interpretations of what that means. Some use “conservative” as defining the movement’s thrust, while others prefer to use the more politically inclusive “Patriot.” The Ensuring Liberty Corporation, established by some of the convention’s organizers, defined a short list of unifying principles: fiscal responsibility, lower taxes, less government, states’ rights, and national security.
Jane was involved in the social movements of the 1960s, working in the civil rights movement in Mississippi in 1964 and 1965 and becoming National Secretary of Students for a Democratic Society in 1967. D. was a SNCC civil rights organizer in Mississippi and Georgia. He also was an officer in SDS. We were struck at the Tea Party Convention by parallels to that 60s movement whose unifying slogan was “let the people decide.” Similarly to the protest movements of SDS and SNCC, the Tea Party folks at the convention explicitly rejected leaders, seeking instead to create a leaderless network of activists.
In a manner similar to 1960s activists, they also expressed feeling betrayed by their political representatives. That betrayal, which in the 1960s exposed the hypocrisy regarding fundamental American values of equality and freedom, was expressed at the Tea Party Convention as a betrayal of the basic social compact between the people and the government. The Tea Party participants deplored the replacement of statesmanlike service to the nation by venal, narrowly self-serving politics, in which politicians place their individual or party welfare over the welfare of the nation.
There are serious apparent deficits, however, that may undermine this nascent movement. All broad popular movements contain within them many tendencies. If the nation’s leaders fail to negotiate the contemporary crises and are unable to stabilize our economy and establish the security of our nation and our individual lives – that is, if the crisis deepens – the movement will have to produce a far clearer agenda for action. Its unifying principles, at this point, provide more of a basis for critiquing existing policies and institutions than for providing clear guidelines to resolve the current crises. Andrew Breitbart, in an all-to-short, and therefore telegraphic, conversation, snorted at our asking about the meaning to the Tea Party of “social justice.” It is true that the solutions created in the U.S. to grinding poverty and material insecurity, policies and programs promoted under the broad term “social justice,” are inadequate. They have come up far short of providing enduring solutions, and in some instances they have congealed nets of dependency, and worse, around those they aim to help. Outside our borders, totalitarian systems that claim to create economic well-being have trampled on fundamental human rights. But unless human material suffering is a central movement concern, the movement will inevitably support policies that serve to entrench their privileges, with the by-product of intensifying suffering among other segments of the nation and the world. We did not hear any rhetoric that recognized those issues.
The movement’s specific demographic holds other seeds of its potential failure. Tea Partiers unite around the symbols of the nation’s founding. But America’s civil religion is more than its establishment. Abraham Lincoln is as iconic of America as Washington, and we celebrate labor and the accomplishment of civil equality by African Americans in our national ritual cycle. But the Civil War, the labor movement, and the civil rights movements are strikingly absent in Tea Party iconography.
The term “Patriot,” which invokes the highest sentiments of citizenship, can also be used to brand those who disagree with specific policies as “traitors” to the nation. Such language can challenge a foundational principle of American citizenship – that it inheres in all those born or naturalized in the country. The movement runs the risk of falling into narrowly nativist or sectarian interests, dividing rather than uniting the populace, and defeating the best hopes of those involved in it.
Most importantly, the difficulties of organizing and unifying Americans is an extraordinary challenge. The inevitable failures and disappointment can drive movements to seek simple solutions from jingoism to racism to ideological purity.
Robert Bellah saw three periods of crisis when the unifying principles were most at risk, and that were, therefore, key in establishing the civil faith: The revolutionary period, which created the foundational documents and founding leaders; the Civil War which, through great sacrifice, eliminated slavery; and the WWII period which thrust the U.S. into the world as a military force. He wrote in 1967, in the throes of the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement that were challenging the foundations of our common dreams.
The movements of the 1960s devolved into sustained critique of the American project, now focusing entirely on the flaws within the nation’s history. It left the old culture in tatters, denying the heroic tales of American nation building and its exceptionalism. Significantly, it denied America’s “goodness”, holding up Vietnam, imperialism, racism, sexism and the eradication of the Native Americans as flowing inevitably from America’s flawed soul. The conservative counter-movements that marched into the culture wars of the last 40 years, until this one, have created unifying themes that excluded significant groups of Americans, bolstering the 1960s critique that those who organized themselves under the patriotic American flag sought a nation governed by white Christians.
The Tea Party movement is an effort, we believe, to renew the American civil religion with a more inclusive view of who are Americans and what is America. We believe that the deep interest in ancestral roots, with its celebration of diverse ancestries, is part of this same cultural stream. Unlike the counter-movements of the last century, that defined the nation by those it sought to exclude from the body politic, this one appears to be more inclusive and tolerant of racial, religious, cultural, and individual diversity. Whether it will be able to broaden its activist core, and whether it will be able to develop specific programs as well as support for honest statesmen, remains to be seen.
Jane Adams and D. Gorton
Carbondale, Illinois
February 2010
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