Everyone loves a good demonstration with a party atmosphere and creative flair that doesn’t involve anyone getting hurt and that generates stories you will later tell your grandchildren. Usually, the side having the most fun wins.
We’ve lost our sense of playful protest. No one was having fun during the George Floyd riots in 2020. And almost everyone who broke into the Capitol on January 6, 2021, looked angry and glum as they marched through the building. Both were terrible demonstrations.
Compare this to the yearlong Montgomery Bus Boycott. Or the demonstrations that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. The Czechs were particularly entertaining as they overthrew communism: their “Velvet Revolution” involved Andy Warhol, Lou Reed, the Velvet Underground and another band called the “Plastic People of the Universe.” The activities around the Berlin Wall and Prague’s Wenceslas Square were simultaneously protests and parties!
Warhol and Reed were building on a revolutionary tradition dating back to 1773: the Boston Tea Party. On December 16, 1773, a group calling themselves the “Sons of Liberty” boarded three East India Company ships and dumped more than 90,000 pounds of tea into Boston Harbor.
The Sons of Liberty had famously dressed as Mohawk Indians to dump the tea. There are different ways to spin this, but making a protest over tax policy into a costume party probably was one of the keys to the event’s success. It took a complicated issue — the insider politics of East India Company debt and bureaucratic favoritism — and turned it into a memorable image to which everyone could relate. No one identifies with a bunch of angry thugs destroying property; everyone wants to be a part of a group of people with paint on their faces and feathers in their hair — think Woodstock.
The Boston Tea Party’s relevance didn’t end with the American Revolution. Later revolutionaries, such as Mahatma Gandhi, the father of post-colonial India, said they were inspired by the Tea Party. In 2009, when CNBC’s Rick Santelli called from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange for a new “tea party,” many people joyfully took to the streets to protest the government’s willingness to bail out big banks but not average citizens.
Back in the 18th century, however, events didn’t move quickly. It took more than three months for the British Parliament, on March 31, 1774, to respond to the tea protest by passing the Boston Port Act, closing the Port of Boston and imposing a hefty fine on the city. This was the first of what became known as the Intolerable Acts.
More than the Tea Party itself, this British reaction, 250 years ago this month, fanned the flames of the American Revolution. With the Boston Port Act, Britain said, “Behave — OR ELSE.” Realizing they would have to take sides, many colonists chose “OR ELSE.”
Britain’s punishment of the Bostonians solidified the colonists around a common cause of resistance and added to their growing feeling of Americanness.
It’s no accident that the Boston Tea Party was a protest about trade and commerce. Commerce has always been central to the American spirit. The first colony at Jamestown, in Virginia, was a purely commercial venture. Even the Plymouth Colony, formed by “Pilgrims” seeking religious freedom, was financed by investors who cared more about earning a profit than freedom of worship.
Many Americans in 1773 made a lot of money not only through trade but in smuggling. John Hancock, the first to sign the Declaration of Independence, was a smuggler. Until 1773, taxes on tea made this a lucrative business. Americans would smuggle untaxed Dutch tea into the colonies and sell it below the taxed price of British tea. The Tea Act, passed by Parliament in May 1773, changed that, allowing the East India Company to dump untaxed tea into the American market below the smuggled price.
While the rallying cry from the colonies was “No Taxation without Representation,” it wasn’t really the taxes the colonists were protesting but the uneven application of the taxes, which offended the colonists’ deep sense of fairness — an American sensibility that remains to this day.
