Tea Parties and the American Political Tradition
So far the movement looks a lot like the opposition to Roosevelt's court-packing scheme.
By RICHARD BROOKHISER
Sarah Palin wants to lead it. Liberals mock it. The curious who watch clips of its rallies will note both the absence of ordinary partisan iconography (donkeys, elephants) and the presence of Revolutionary War gear, as if they had come across a convention of re-enactors.
The tea-party movement has made a mark on the politics of the Obama era, and it has historical parallels—less in this country's founding era than in two great "anti" movements of the last two centuries: the resistance to Thomas Jefferson's embargo (1807-09) and to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's plan to pack the Supreme Court (1937).
Both episodes befell presidents who had enjoyed spectacular political success. Jefferson, who won the White House in the nail-biting election of 1800, had given America peace, low taxes and the Louisiana Purchase. In 1804 his Democratic-Republican Party (ancestor of today's Democrats, not the GOP) blew away the opposition Federalists, as he carried 13½ of 16 states (Maryland voted by electoral districts, which split). The man who had vowed to sink Federalism into "an abyss" seemed to have done it.
FDR in 1937 was even more potent. Although the Depression lingered, the New Deal was the only political game in town. In the election of 1936 Roosevelt won 46 states to the Republicans' two; there were 333 Democrats in the new House and 75 in the new Senate. Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, eat your hearts out.
The two presidents decided to use their strength to address longstanding problems. Jefferson had pursued his peace policy in the teeth of the Napoleonic Wars, a superpower struggle between Britain and France, both of which bullied the neutral United States with onerous trade restrictions. Jefferson's horror of military spending was matched by an almost mystical faith in the value of the country's agricultural exports. Since he would not fight America's tormentors, he decided to spite their faces by cutting off America's nose. And so in December 1807 Congress passed an embargo, forbidding foreign trade.
At the start of his second term, Roosevelt decided to tackle the only remaining political obstacle to his program, the Supreme Court. Led by Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes (a former Republican presidential candidate), the court had overturned several pieces of New Deal legislation. And so in February 1937 FDR proposed a bill allowing him to nominate up to six new justices, one for every sitting justice over 70½ years old. Hughes was 74. The new blood, the president said, would "save the Constitution from the Court, and the Court from itself."
The embargo and the court-packing scheme both provoked bitter, bipartisan resistance.
New England Federalists, who made their money from shipping, raged at their losses; smuggling to Canada sprang up overnight. But as the embargo dragged on into mid-1808, Jefferson's allies also lost heart. Albert Gallatin, his Treasury secretary, called it "dangerous and odious;" James Monroe, another protégé, advised Jeffersonians not "to bury ourselves in the same tomb with it."
The Supreme Court did not like Roosevelt's plan to pack it—Chief Justice Hughes let it be known that the court's old fogies handled their work load just fine and needed no help. But his was not the only dissenting voice.
Bar associations mounted a letter-writing campaign against the plan. A National Committee to Uphold Constitutional Government was formed in opposition, taking care to draw on liberals and Democrats. In June 1937 the Senate Judiciary Committee called Roosevelt's bill "needless, futile and utterly dangerous." John Nance Garner, FDR'S vice president, warned him that he didn't have the votes to pass it.
The Obama administration and the tea-party movement have followed the same symbiotic trajectory.
Barack Obama's inauguration was a secular equivalent of the Rapture. Flush with praise, he accepted a porked-out stimulus package and pushed for an old liberal goal—federalization of the health-care system. Tea parties sprang up to push back.
They had organizers and cheerleaders, Republican and libertarian, but they caught on by appealing to a diverse and anxious audience. A McLaughlin & Associates poll for the National Review Institute last month found that a fifth of the respondents who had participated in tea parties said they had voted for Obama.
In the summer of 2009, the tea parties mourned a spending binge that seemed uncontrollable. By the fall, they railed against a Democratic phalanx that looked to be set on its program, no matter what. With the labor unions' tax exemption for "Cadillac" insurance policies and the payoff to Ben Nelson to cover Nebraska's increased Medicaid costs, the tea parties smelled blood. Scott Brown's election was victory.
If I have my precedents right, the tea-party movement by itself will not take lasting political form. The spontaneity and diversity of such revolts unfits them for the long haul.
Congress repealed Jefferson's embargo in March 1809, the very end of his second term, and he left the White House a broken man. But he was succeeded by two allies, James Madison and James Monroe. While they governed, Federalism simply died.
In July 1937, Roosevelt's court-packing bill was sent back to the Senate Judiciary Committee, which gutted it, and Democrats took a big hit in the off-year elections of 1938. Even so, the GOP remained the minority party in Congress until the late 1940s, and could not elect a president until 1952.
A political revolution is different from a political revolt and takes a lot more leg work. The postwar conservative movement's takeover of the GOP began with the nomination of Barry Goldwater in 1964, led through the false dawn of Richard Nixon, and bore fruit only with Ronald Reagan's third run for the nomination.
The tea parties have made history, though. They stopped a monster of social engineering, stole a president's halo, enraged their enemies, and made a fashion statement. Stockings and hair powder, anyone?
Mr. Brookhiser is the author, most recently, of "Right Time, Right Place: Coming of Age with William F. Buckley Jr. and the Conservative Movement" (Basic Books, 2009).
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