Edenton, North Carolina
Every day, Jackie and Ben Hobbs go about their modern lives inside walls hewn by hand before the In dustrial Revolution. The sounds of their TV and telephone mingle with the quiet creaks of wide slat floorboards laboring under 200 years of foot traffic, as the couple runs a small country bed-and-breakfast and restaurant outside Hertford, county seat of Perquimans County, North Carolina.
Ben, a math teacher turned entrepreneur and local elected official, is the kind of man who invariably has to take off his work glove to shake hands. He was digging trenches for irrigation lines when I arrived. But for the small back-hoe he was using, it might have been a scene from the 1700s, as he strode over to greet me against the backdrop of the inn’s modest early-American cabins, collected from across the state and restored by Ben himself, furnished with reproduction period furniture he makes onsite.
Jackie, also a public school teacher in the area before the Hobbses started the Beechtree Inn, showed me around their comfortable and slightly incongruous world of pencil-post beds and central air, where rooms feature both wainscoting and web access.
But this small business was not the only echo of colonial life in northeastern North Carolina last week. In nearby Edenton, a historic town of about 5,000, residents gathered for a “Tax Day Tea Party”–one of about 800 grassroots protests against expanding government held across the nation on April 15. The demonstrations drew more than 250,000 supporters and some openly hostile news coverage, as reporters painted the gatherings as rage-fests filled with antigovernment crackpots.
Ben, who laid aside his tools to head to the tea party, was unsurprised by the tone of the coverage. After all, he said, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano had just labeled small-government entrepreneurs like him potential terrorist threats. He was referring to the Department of Homeland Security’s report on the danger of “right-wing extremism,” which was fodder for many jokes at the Edenton Tea Party, as church ladies, veterans, and young moms chuckled about their allegedly subversive activities.
The demonstration, held on the town square facing the waters of the Albemarle Sound, attracted about 500 protesters. As was the case at many of the nation’s tea parties, their complaints were disparate–objections to the stimulus package, the growing deficit, a cigarette tax hike, a proposed reduction in charitable tax deductions, and just-plain-big government.
An elderly couple sat at the edge of the crowd, American flags and protest signs affixed to the baskets of their Hoveround motorized scooters. A red-headed high-school student stood with his father holding a sign that pinpointed the crowd’s disappointment with the president: “Keep the change. We need the cash.”
Several teenaged girls stood in the front row of the crowd with their mothers, a denim-clad, modern-day echo of the first organized protest by women in the American colonies, which took place in this very town on October 25, 1774, and went down in history as the Edenton Tea Party. Though the women of Edenton didn’t dump tea into the bay that day, as their revolutionary brethren in Boston had done the year before, they drafted a letter of solidarity, promising to forsake “British tea and cloth.”
Edenton was already a hotbed of political activity when Penelope Barker, the wife of the state treasurer, organized what guests thought was a routine tea party for about 50 Edenton women. When her guests arrived, she convinced them to sign a letter, which was later published in London newspapers:
As we cannot be indifferent on any occasion that appears nearly to affect the peace and happiness of our country, and as it has been thought necessary, for the public good, to enter into several particular resolves by a meeting of Members deputed from the whole Province, it is a duty which we owe, not only to our near and dear connections who have concurred in them, but to ourselves who are essentially interested in their welfare, to do every thing as far as lies in our power to testify our sincere adherence to the same; and we do therefore accordingly subscribe this paper, as a witness of our fixed intention and solemn determination to do so.
The women of Edenton were mocked in British editorial cartoons depicting the horrors of females’ meddling in politics. One mezzotint parody featured a helpless baby abandoned under a table with the pet dog while a bevy of women cavort with men, brandish gavels, and draft proclamations.
At last week’s tea party, the words of the 18th-century ladies of Edenton were read out and greeted with choruses of “That’s right” and “Amen.” It was not an overheated declaration that the oppression of today’s taxpayers is on par with what the colonists faced, as some commentators on the left have asserted. Instead, it was an affirmation of an American system born of resistance to burdensome government, and designed to make protesting it and changing it possible.
Far from the media’s portrayal of the protests as outside the mainstream and angry, the Edenton Tea Party was almost eerily polite. Held at 5 P.M. so people could attend after work, it betrayed some inexperience with traditional protesting, as participants were overly reliant on lawn chairs and speakers hesitant to start any chant but “U-S-A.”
I went primed to report rude signage, Muslim-conspiracy theorizing, and speculation about Obama’s birth certificate if I saw them, but there were none to be found. Not one bumper sticker, not one T-shirt, not one errant word. Don Harris, retired Army special operations, was characteristic. He stood near the back of the crowd, sans sign, chatting with friends and quietly listening to speakers, who included representatives of groups like the state chapters of the Federation of Republican Women and Americans for Prosperity.
For many in the crowd, the onerous nature of overzealous government is not merely theoretical. These demonstrators were no Ayn Rand enthusiasts reciting John Galt’s 60-page speech from memory, just in from “ultra-libertarian survivalist compounds in rural West Virginia,” as David Corn described tea-party goers in his CQ blog.
A veteran of the local volunteer fire department, Ben Hobbs served eight years on the school board before being elected to the county commission. He is now in his tenth year as a commissioner and planning to leave office in 2010 (he term-limited himself). He has struggled to keep Perquimans County (population 11,000) fiscally responsible while himself being held accountable at every covered-dish dinner. When his fellow commissioners passed a 6 percent tax on rental and hospitality income, Ben was voting on his own livelihood. His stand as described in county records: “He opposes the tax because he does not like to enact new taxes.”
For Frank Lathrop, a retiree sporting a homemade sweatshirt that read “Pay your own taxes,” the April 15 protest was for future generations. He was in Vietnam during the ’60s, he said, grimacing slightly at the memory of the protests in the New Left’s heyday.
“I’m no protester. We’ve never protested, but we have eight grandchildren,” Lathrop said. “All of this [money for stimulus, bailouts, and deficits] is being taken from them.”
His wife, Anna, whose matching iron-on political message read “Stop stealing our kids’ future,” jumped in: “I’m not even a Republican! And, to say that this is a party or a race thing is just ridiculous,” she said, alluding to news coverage. “The idea that they’re stealing from our children and grandchildren to remove tattoos in California? That’s not worth my grandchildren’s future. It’s not.”
The surrounding counties have been controlled by Democrats since Reconstruction. Ben Hobbs was the first Republican elected to the county commission since 1868, drawing strength from name recognition in a county where his parents (both descended from early Plymouth Colony settlers) farmed and raised their family and where he and Jackie raised their three boys. Though John McCain pulled off a narrow win in the area, Democratic registration outnumbers Republican significantly, which gives the lie to the media portrayal of the tea parties as solely Republican and anti-Obama.
After the protest, the Hobbses had a group of community leaders back to their Beechtree Restaurant for dinner, where Jackie mans the kitchen, cranking out three-course meals for guests. In another real-life run-in with burdensome government, Jackie had to install a giant, commercial kitchen for what she intended to be a tiny operation, because the inn’s potential capacity for guests is over a certain limit. “I think I ended up with seven sinks before I met all the regulations!” she said with a laugh.
The tea party movement was characterized by liberal commentators as “AstroTurf”–fake grass roots–“manufactured by the usual suspects” simply because several national conservative advocacy organizations jumped on the bandwagon, collecting email addresses and alerting their memberships. In fact, there’s great uncertainty as to where the movement goes from here, precisely because it is not centrally organized.
Some communities are touting plans for July 4 tea parties, and at least one organization is trying to galvanize the diffuse protesters at www.aftertheteaparty.com. Ben hopes the events will be a wake-up call to those who have steered clear of both local and national politics.
“They were telling people today to get involved. I’ve been involved my whole life,” he said, sighing at the memory of arguing sometimes futilely for restraint and responsibility on countless local committees and boards.
If nothing else, for this right-leaning dinner party, the protests signal the promise of a new way forward, new recruits, and someday, new policy victories, all made possible by–dare they say it?–a little bit of community organizing.
“When I’m done with the commission,” Ben said with a sly smile, “I might become a little conservative ACORN. I don’t want to be just like them. We can do it politely, but we’ve got to do more.”
Mary Katharine Ham is a staff writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
