Ever since she was young, my daughter has been interested in history. It might partly be my fault. Before elementary school in the morning we used to watch Professor Eugen Weber’s Western Civ lectures on public TV, and our vacations often headed for places heavy with memories of the past — Washington, Philadelphia, Gettysburg, Dearborn Village. But somehow we never got around to Boston, though I have long been telling her she ought to see it someday.
Well, recently she said she could get four days off from work and we ought to go to Boston, so I was reeled in on my own line. Before setting off, we read “Paul Revere’s Ride,” by the admirable David Hackett Fischer, which uses that small, famous moment to paint a larger picture of the very different perceptions of Royal Britains and American Colonists, and how they led to the inevitable clash.
Having for generations largely ignored a New England populated by unwanted dissenters and transatlantic entrepreneurs, a cash-strapped Crown and a Tory Parliament suddenly decided to treat the colonists as a source of ready cash, levying taxes without giving the victims a say in the matter.
But for 150 years these people — literate, inventive, pious and self-reliant — had been ruling themselves by democratic town meeting, moral precepts and English law. The attempt to treat them like vassals inevitably was met with resistance. And the harder Britain cracked down, the more New England came to regard the struggle as a classic clash of autocratic arrogance and democratic rights.
Everything the occupying power did to raise the colonial hackles was first complained of in “The Declaration of Independence,” then enshrined in the Bill of Rights. Freedom of the press, of speech and of assembly. The rejection of a state religion such as England sought to impose. Freedom from unlawful search and seizure. The rights to speedy and public trial by one’s peers, to due process and, in effect, the primacy of the rule of law. Naturally enough the requirement that taxation must only be imposed by elected representatives was central.
And, since the British tried to control access to arms, the Second Amendment exists.
On our little trip, we saw this story embodied in the homestead of five generations of the Adams family in Quincy, in the Battle Road between Lexington Village Green and Concord’s Old North Bridge, and along the Freedom Trail in Boston at places associated with self-government and resistance to tyranny — the Old State House, Paul Revere’s House, Old North Church, Faneuil Hall, the site of he Boston Massacre, and in the graveyards where the remains of patriots and signers of the founding documents lie — Sam Adams, John Hancock, James Otis and many others.
Our trip was also accompanied by current events reminding us democracy is always under threat, has often has been lost to autocrats and oligarchs in the past, and could be again.The founders knew well the stories of Athens and the Roman Republic and saw an echo in their own time.
It often seems the present occupant of the White House is unaware of American History. His impulse often seems less to uphold the Constitution than to undermine it. He has been taken to court over discrimination on the basis of race and religion. While we were in Boston he said, “It is frankly disgusting that the press is able to write whatever it wants to write,” and he has threatened to punish such effrontery.
George III has apparently been reincarnated and is unaware that the First Amendment remains in force. Trump also seems unaware that ours is a government, intentionally, of separate and co-equal branches and that the executive cannot rule by fiat nor expect the legislative and judicial branches to obey royal dictates.
It was also entirely appropriate that Ryan Zinke, the Secretary of the Interior, was in the news as we visited Boston. Almost every site we visited was either managed by the National Park Service that he oversees or carried a plaque announcing that, under provisions of a 1935 Act of Congress administered by the Interior Department, it was “a site which possesses exceptional value in commemorating or illustrating the history of the United States,” and as such should be preserved for the benefit and inspiration of the people.
Yet Mr. Zinke, like so many of Donald Trump’s appointees, seems not to be deeply committed to serving the interests of all the people, but only those of a select few, what we might call “special interests.” So, at taxpayer expense he has jetted around the country, not on government business but to attend political fundraisers where donors have an interest in the actions of Interior.
He’s popular with such a crowd since his agenda for the Interior Department is less concerned with preserving fish, lands, water and wildlife for future generations but in opening them up to those who wish to mine, drill, log, fish, pollute and otherwise despoil. This goes under the rubric of multiple use of public land, but that’s simply code for policies to benefit the few at the expense of the many.
Shades of the corrupt Interior Secretary Albert Fall of the Harding Administration’s Teapot Dome scandal, though some of Zinke’s actions seem more akin to those of a spoiled princeling. For example, Zinke has taken to announcing that he is present at his desk by having a personal ensign run up the departmental flagpole, just as the Queen of England does to signify she is in residence at Buckingham or Windsor or Balmoral.
Echoing the childish tantrums of his president, Zinke has whined that 30 percent of Interior employees are “not loyal to the flag.” He may have meant either Old Glory or his own personal flag. Or, since he was speaking to an audience of the oil and gas executives to whom he actually reports, he may have had in mind the flag of ExxonMobil. Unsurprisingly, his deputy is a former lobbyist for that industry, primed to do their bidding.
Under the provisions of the Trump budget, Zinke hopes to cut 4,000 of these disloyal Americans, the better to serve the aptly named exploitive industries. And he has already begun by listing national monuments he wants to open to exploitation or privatize. Unsurprisingly, Zinke is also a climate denier.
In treating government service as a way to enrich private business, Zinke is hardly alone. He is joined by Goldman Sachs money men like Mnuchin, Cohn, and Powell, billionaires DeVos and Ross, oil executive Tillerson at State, anti-environmentalist Pruitt at EPA and the rest of the Trump plutocrats, especially the various members of the nepotistic First Family who are already cashing in. This is the sort of entrenched aristocratic power Middlesex farmers fought against 242 years ago.
At the Adams House, we were reminded of a quotation from a John Adams letter of 1800. Writing to Abigail, the first president to occupy the White House, said, “I pray heaven to bestow the best blessings on this house and all that shall hereafter inhabit it. May none but honest and wise man ever rule under this roof.”
In 1945, this was carved on a fireplace in the White House State Dining Room. Since Donald Trump, who has called the White House a dump, does not read, it is unlikely that he has run across these words. But those of us who can remember a little history will read them and weep.