Today’s Tea Party may be more like the revolutionary version than I thought

by David Safier

Was the original Tea Party, the one that threw 90,000 pounds of British tea in the Boston Harbor in 1773, actually a ploy by merchants who were smuggling Dutch tea into the colonies to preserve their profits? If so, today's Tea Partiers, who are so often doing the bidding of the business-friendly puppet masters pulling the strings, have chosen the name of their movement well.

Full disclosure: I'm no historian. But according to a New Yorker review, a new book, American Insurgents, American Patriots by T. H. Breen, paints a rather sordid picture on the Tea Party incident.

Here's a too brief summary of what he says. Colonial Tea merchants who undersold taxed British tea by smuggling their goods in from Dutch sources, were threatened by Britain lowering the cost of its tea by refunding the tea tax (yes, refunding it, not adding a new charge) and allowing the East India Company to cut out the merchant middle men and export their tea directly. That would mean the smugglers would be undersold by the British and lose lots of money. So the merchants riled up the populace, filled out the Tea Party ranks with their own employees, and engineered the dumping of the British tea in the harbor to protect their lucrative businesses.

If so, how ironic, and how apt, that today's Tea Partiers chose that incident as their model.

Incidentally, according to the review:

George Washington disapproved of the Tea Party, and Benjamin Franklin called it 'an Act of violent Injustice on our part.'"

Two of our greatest Founders disapproved of the Tea Party? Say it ain't so, George and Ben. Say it ain't so.

What followed the actual Boston Harbor incident make the parallels between then and now even more interesting. Colonists apparently were so charged up by the Tea Party, they continued rebelling on their own, sometimes going against the interests of the merchants, who thought they could keep the attack dogs on a leash and tell them who to bite. It will be interesting to see if something similar is going on right now. It looks like some of the puppet masters in the business sector and in Congress are a bit concerned that the Tea Partiers, drunk with their victories in the primaries and the election, might getting a bit out of control. Who knows? Maybe these folks aren't as easy to manipulate as it seemed.