How the George Floyd/BLM Protests Are Like the Boston Tea Party . . . and Are Not

As in years past, I’ve seen familiar complaints about how vandalism and destruction of property during the protests here in Portland and elsewhere across the nation “lose me” and “violate the message.”

Another familiar trope has been for leftists to refer to the historic precedent of the Boston Tea Party, to which members of the right reply that that event “focused its damage on the actual items [or business or people] at fault.”

Curious about the truth of the matter — there’s almost always more to the story than can be captured in a sentence, or is relayed in high-school history classes and textbooks, which is what most of us know — I decided to look into the matter. I learned a lot . . . and neither of the narratives above is accurate.

This is what I found:

The (disguised) protesters who dumped 342 chests of tea of tea into Boston Harbor from the Dartmouth, the Beaver, and the Eleanor at Griffin Wharf on the night of Dec. 16, 1773 were expressing their displeasure with an act of Parliament, which did not own either the ship, the tea, or the wharf.

Most of the roughly 100 participants were under the age of 40, and sixteen were teenagers — imagine that. Thanks to their disguise as Native Americans, only one was arrested and imprisoned later.

The vandalism took three hours to accomplish, and the dumped chests contained more than 92,000 pounds (or 45 tons) of tea, so we’re not talking about a small act of destruction here. In today’s dollars the loss, about $18,000 at that time, has been estimated at around $1.7 million.

The tea was owned by the British East India Company, which, though incorporated by Queen Elizabeth’s royal charter 173 years before, was a joint-stock company . . . which means that wealthy merchants and aristocrats owned the shares. In other words, they were the corporate fat cats of that era — not the government that had passed the tax on tea (though it’s probably fair to say it may have done so at the behest of, if not hand in hand with, the wealthy owners of the East India Company).

A 2019 National Geographic feature referred to the East India Company as “the world’s most powerful business”: the Google AND Apple of the 17th and 18th centuries, that was all but synonymous with the British Empire.

And it wasn’t just one night’s work. For weeks after, to keep looters from salvaging the dumped tea chests, members of the Sons of Liberty went out in boats to hit the tea with clubs and oars to make sure it all sank beneath the waves and would be useless.

Even after American independence, participants in the Boston Tea Party refused to reveal their identities because they feared they might still face civil and criminal charges for destruction of private property . . . in other words, they were breaking the law and they knew it (which is more than you can confidently say about the current president, I’m afraid).

In response to this act of vandalism, the British Parliament cracked down even harder — a classic move by authorities which often proves to be utterly counterproductive — and passed the Coercive Acts (aka by the colonists as the Intolerable Acts) in December 1773, which in turn led to the colonists organizing the First Continental Congress the following September.

One might perceive a similarity between the Crown’s reaction and that of various police officers and agencies who, having acted with impunity for so long, have continued to abuse Black Americans, members of the media, and peaceful protesters weeks after the unconscionable murder of George Floyd on camera.

A second Boston Tea Party occurred four months after the first, in March 1774, during which 60 Bostonians boarded the Fortune and dumped another 60 chests of tea into the bay. So I guess they hadn’t learned their lesson . . . and this round encouraged further tea dumpings in Maryland, New York, and South Carolina.

Now, the naysayers today have a respectable array of predecessors who looked askance at the protest in Boston. Although the future leader of the Revolutionary army and first president would write in June 1774 that “the cause of Boston … ever will be considered as the cause of America,” he also strongly voiced his disapproval of “their conduct in destroying the Tea.”

Like other members of the colonial elite, Washington held private property to be sacrosanct and believed the perpetrators should compensate the East India Company for damages. Benjamin Franklin also insisted the company be reimbursed for the loss and even offered to pay it himself . . . but I haven’t managed to find any record that he made good on the offer. My guess is the East India Company ended up eating the loss.

I found another nuance of complexity to the story. The Boston Tea Party protesters made an explicit effort to avoid damaging anything other than the tea: the ships were American owned, and the only damage they reportedly suffered was a broken padlock.

George Hewes, one of the protesters who dressed up as Native Americans, later reported: “One Captain O’Connor, whom I well knew, came on board [to steal some tea], and when he supposed he was not noticed, filled his pockets, and also the lining of his coat. But I had detected him and gave information to the captain of what he was doing. We were ordered to take him into custody, and just as he was stepping from the vessel, I seized him by the skirt of his coat, and in attempting to pull him back, I tore it off; but, springing forward by a rapid effort he made his escape.”

So that protest organized and executed by the Sons of Liberty ran a tight ship, ethically speaking. They could control execution, having planned ahead and being only a hundred strong. Captain O’Connor was an opportunist, more like the high-spirited vandals and thieves who have taken advantage of chaos and confusion, and are NOT to be equated with the vast majority of the protesters today.

You might say a modern counterpart to Hewes would be Patrick Hutchinson, the Black Lives Matter protester who carried a white BLM counter-protester to safety in London on June 13 after the crowd started to beat him up. They had their ethical values straight, and acted on them. Closer to home, I saw a moment during the live coverage of a demonstration in Pioneer Courthouse Square in downtown Portland on June 1 when a young man with more spirit than sense started to try to cut down the American flag and was booed and yelled at by the crowd around him, which dissuaded him.

Also, the colonists were not protesting the actual killing of one of their own by authorities who represented the government — unless you count the Boston Massacre more than three years before, and that’s nothing like the long, long line of police killings of Black Americans in the U.S. Frankly, if you know how little they were taxed, both prior to 1773 and as proposed by London, I think the average person would say they were acting like entitled brats . . . that the principle of the matter may have been righteous, but the practical reality was more arguable.

One of the many ironies of the United States in the 21st century, I would wager, is that most of the citizens who have adopted the label “Tea Party” would most likely have been Tories in 1776. They would have decried destruction of property and the disrespect for authority displayed by the Sons of Liberty.

I don’t seek to justify or defend this year’s violence and damage to property — or in any other year. My goal is nothing more than clarity of thought and understanding. I would never do such things myself; however, just like the Occupy Portland protests I witnessed almost nine years ago, the rallies the past month clearly have involved an array of mixed and even conflicting players and goals.

I’ve seen increasing reports that riots, violence, and destruction have been cheered, fomented, and even executed by agitators who roused one another via social media to cross state lines and raise hell in hopes of sparking more distrust and even hatred of the left . . . and at worst, an upheaval of our entire society. Their numbers may be minuscule, but their reach and power is oversized — and unfortunately rouses ignorant support from frightened conservative Americans in their homes.

I’m not inclined to be a conspiracy theorist — as Edward Dahlberg was fond of saying, “Doubt was my Rock of St. Peter” — and that goes for everything, so I’ll reserve judgment on this until I see more concrete evidence.

However, any simple and sweeping judgment is impossible . . . and best avoided. I find the darker facets of recent national turmoil unpleasant and regrettable, but understandable. We’ve been here many times before, and peaceful protests have not put an end to what was clearly wrong and broken all along.

Despite charismatic leaders who advocated nonviolent action, every great shift in social policy and history — from the Magna Carta in 1215 AD to the independence of India in the 1940s and the passage of U.S. civil rights legislation in the 1960s — has included, and possibly even required, acts of force and violence.