Lepore’s The Whites of Their Eyes is interesting structurally. Like the Tardis (it is perhaps most like the Doctor Who episode "City of Death") the book bounces back and forth between the present, the present being 2009 in Lepore's book, and the past, the past being the revolutionary era of the so-called founding fathers of the American Revolution, the era from the late eighteenth century to the early 19th century.
The 2009 present in The Whites of Their Eyes is grounded in a kind of ethnography, but not a very deep or detailed ethnography, of people associated with the latter day Tea Party in Boston and the current events related to this latter day Tea Party in Massachusetts. Their various political rallies at various historical sights in Boston and the Boston area is grist for Lepore's mill. Another 2009 present is grounded in Lepore’s critique of this latter day Tea Party and how it approaches and interprets the history of the American revolutionary era.
The past of The Whites of Their Eyes is grounded in a historical synthesis of what was happening primarily in Boston during the revolutionary era. So, we get a discussion of the American colonial reaction to the various taxes imposed by the British government on the American colonies, taxes meant to reduce the British debt which was incurred partly because of its defence of the Colonies (see the French and Indian War). The Whites of Their Eyes also explores colonial response to those taxes, which led to the Boston Massacre, when British troops stationed in the American colonies fired on and killed several protestors, and the Boston Tea Party, when some colonials dressed as American First Peoples boarded ships in Boston harbour filled with tea and dumped it in the drink. Along the way Lepore introduces a gallery of characters including founding father George Washington, founding father John Adams, Adam's wife Abigail Adams, founding father Benjamin Franklin, Franklin’s sister Jane Mecom, printer and newspaper publisher Benjamin Edes, founding father Samuel Adams, founding father Thomas Jefferson, the man who road himself into American history books Paul Revere, the Black man Crispus Attucks who was shot and killed during the Boston Massacre, and poet Mercy Otis Warren. Lepore uses this past, which also includes discussions of the US Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution, a discussion of the tensions over slavery during the era in Boston, a discussion of the founding fathers response to religion in the era, and a discussion of the difficult life of Jane Mecom financially and the mental health problems within her family, to try to paint a broader and less mythhistorical picture of this era in American history than that of the latter day mythhistorical modern Tea Party.
Lepore also uses this synthesised past to distinguish professional history from mythhistory, the historical sensibility that dominates the contemporary Tea Party. For Lepore the “history” of the contemporary Tea Party is grounded in a romanticism that decontextualises the past jerking it, in the process, out of its cultural, economic, and political contexts or frames, sanctifies it, making the events associated with it sacred and the founding fathers saints with hagiographies to be written about them, and recontextualises it in a present, doing injustice to the real history of these events and these people in the process. For Lepore, and I agree with her entirely here, the mythhistory of the 2009 Tea Party is a fundamentalist history, a cherry picked history that tends to leave out the social and cultural lives of those who aren’t the great men of history, of women, and of Blacks. The fundamentalist Tea Party history, in other words, is a history grounded in the present and the culture and ideology of the present and which reads a romanticised and selective contemporary history, culture, and ideology back into the past turning it into a mythic history of that past. As a consequence, as Lepore notes, the mythhistory of the Tea Party really isn’t history, a history grounded in empirical evidence and valid interpretation. It is a disneyfied or disneyfornicated, pollyannish, and manichean history, nor history, in other words.
This mythic history of the present does injustice to the historical record as Lepore notes. It does injustice to the contradictory and situational attitudes the founding fathers of the past had to religion and the role religion should play in the new American state. Mythhistory, for example, leaves out the fact that the founding fathers said different things and meant different things about religion at the time and the fact that several of the founding fathers were not “orthodox” Christians at the time by the standards of what passes for “orthodox” Christianity today. As Lepore notes the founding fathers were diplomatic about religion (Washington), continually tinkered with it. Jefferson cut and pasted to take out the miracles of the Bible (the famous Jefferson Bible), and Madison defended it (in its natural religion not fundamentalist religion form). All of them did agree on one thing, as Lepore points out, however, that there should be no establishment of religion (theocracy) in the new United States. Additionally, as Lepore notes, the authors of the US Constitution specifically stipulated that there should be no theocracy in the new American state, that there should be no religious test for office holders, those running for office in the US did not have to be Christian, in other words, and that the civil rights of Americans was not to be grounded in religious ideology. She also notes that the treaty between the new United States and the Muslim “pirates” of the Barbary Coast stipulated that the US should not be a Christian nation though this reality has not stopped theocratic and generally nationalist Protestants from trying to make it in to one over the years (something that should tell you something about theocratic Christianity).
Mythhistory also, Lepore argues, does injustice to the fact that both Jefferson and Madison did not argue for an originalist position with respect to the US Constitution. Originalism or original intent theory is an ideology which tries to ascertain what the writers of the Constitution meant at the time. For founding fathers Jefferson and Madison, however, the Constitution was alive and had to adapt to changing times because times changed and animated minds had to change with the changing times if their minds were to remain alert and alive. For them history was progressive, moving in a direction that would invariably lead to improvements. It should also be noted that the originalist position that dominates so many legal minds these days, including at the US Supreme Court, really isn’t originalist since an originalist interpretation of the right to bear arms would have to rule that the arms Americans had the right to bear were only those present in late 17th century colonial America since that is what the writers of the Constitution had in mind when they talked about the right to bear arms. Originalists thus aren’t really originalists. They are actually proponents of the Constitution is a living document that can and should be amended given that times change position though they don't recognise it unable to see the motes in their own politically and ideologically correct eyes. They see the Constitution as a living document since they magically turn muskets into AK-47s, something the founding fathers simply did not have in their minds when they inserted the right to bear arms into the Bill of Rights.
By counterpointing the realities of the past with the political and ideological correctness of the Tea Party of the 2009 present Lepore shows that the history of the contemporary Tea Party is not the real history of the American revolutionary past. This is, of course, important and critical but it raises a fundamental question: will the Tea Partyers of the present (or their populist Trumpian children) actually read Lepore’s book? Personally, I doubt it. As my old religion professor said to me once, arguing with fundamentalists, in this case with the political and ideological fundamentalists, is akin to arguing with a brick wall since true believers, by and large, simply create their own political, economic, cultural, geographical, and demographic realities. And even if these politically and ideologically manufactured realities are challenged cognitive dissonance generally leads to few defections and paradoxically often ends up strengthening the attachment of true believers to the socially and culturally constructed "realities" that are a central part of their identity formations.
Like so many history books, particularly those aimed, as Lepore’s book is, at a popular reading audience, The Whites of Their Eyes is full of anecdotes including anecdotes about the disappearance of, for example, Thomas Paine’s bones, the Thomas Paine who was an agnostic and who Glenn Beck, one of the televangelists of the Tea Party who was briefly on Fox news, magically transformed into an exemplary “orthodox” Christian founding father. She provides information on when the Boston Tea Party was first referred to as the Boston Tea Party, 1834. Anecdotes like this, I am sure, play well with the general audience Lepore aims the book at. But?
At the same time The Whites of Their Eyes provides excellent summaries of the significant Revolutionary history of the American colonies, summaries on the American Revolution, particularly in Boston, which was an important centre of revolutionary activities in the colonies at the time, explorations, if we can generalise from the stories Lepore tells about Mecom and Warren, on the history of women in the Revolutionary era, and summaries relating to the tensions over slavery in Colonial America and, again, particularly in Boston
Lepore does make some important general theoretical points. She rightly points out that the mythhistory of the contemporary Tea Party is similar in form to the lost cause mythhistory of the post-Civil War US White South. Myths, she shows, and she is not alone in showing this, can be similar in form but different in content in that they can sacralise different tales whether of the American revolutionary past, the Southern post-Civil War past (the myth of the lost cause), the Canadian myth that it was the destiny of the nation to settle from the Atlantic to the Pacific, or the Australian myths associated with the great men who settled the Outback. She rightly points out that the Tea Party mythhistory is, because of silences about what their mythhistory elides, such as the stories of women and Blacks during the Revolutionary era, anti-pluralist. Its mythhistory is tales of "great" men, “great" White men. She rightly notes that mythhistorians fail to differentiate between opinion, the belief that the US was a Christian nation, for example, and the fact that it wasn’t as the treaty between the US and the Barbary “pirates” makes clear. She rightly notes that mythhistorians generally prefer politically and ideologically correct opinion to empirical fact. Cultural sociologists and, particularly cultural and social anthropologists, of course, have long been familiar with the fact that mythic symbols work this way still it is nice to know that some historians are cottoning on.
If you know someone who has deeply imbibed American mythhistory but still has an open mind (open to quantitative and qualitative empirical and scientific research grounded in evidence) you might give them The Whites of Their Eyes to read. Whether they will have a road to Damascus experience or a gradual change of mind is an open question since, as social scientists have noted for some time, it is not easy to open the closed minds of most true believers. At the same time we know it is possible to open closed minds. Several members of the Westboro Baptist Church, for example, have left, the Church something that shows that seeing the light is possible. That many Mormons who have left the LDS faith and become mirror images of themselves when they were Mormons, given that now instead of evangelising for Mormonism they are now evangelising for some variety of Mormonism was a fiction I was brainwashed into, shows that even those who leave retain some aspect of who they were (see, for instance, the YouTube videos of John Dehlin and Alyssa Grenfell). Moreover, it must be remembered that at the same time as some have exited the faith many still remain faithful members of the Westboro Baptist Church despite widespread polemical and apologetic and empirical criticism of them. And if the Westboro Baptist Church tells us anything it tells us that groups with a strong identity grounded in symbols associated with their own mythhistories often see criticism through the prism of persecution and see themselves as suffering servants of the Truth, making undermining their mythhistory with the facts difficult at best.
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