John C. “Chuck” Chalberg, is retired professor of history at Normandale Community College in Bloomington, Minnesota, and the author of Rickey and Robinson: The Preacher, the Player, and America’s Game as well as Emma Goldman: American Individualist. Here Professor Chalberg responds to the recent Star Tribune op-ed column (linked below) by former Star Tribune reporter, former Minneapolis Mayor, and current Minneapolis Foundation CEO R.T. Rybak. For some reason or other the Star Tribune found this historically oriented response unfit to print. Professor Chalberg writes:
Now that it’s post-mortem time for recent events in Minneapolis, leaps back in history seem to be very much in order. Former Minneapolis mayor R. T. Ryback certainly seems to think so, given his recent commentary comparing our winter of discontent with events in Boston of long ago.
But is what happened on our streets somehow comparable to what transpired in Boston circa, well, circa what? Would that be the years of 1765 and 1766 when the Stamp Act riots engulfed the city? Or perhaps it might be 1770, which was the year of the Boston Massacre. Or are we closer to the Boston Tea Party of 1773 or closer yet to 1774 and the aftermath of the passage by Parliament of the Coercive Acts (called the Intolerable Acts here) that finally triggered the fateful step of breaking with England?
Mr. Rybak doesn’t tell us where he thinks we are on our possibly revolutionary road, but he seems to be convinced that we are on the way to something much bigger and more earth-shattering. He even suggests that perhaps the day will come when Minneapolis will be a Disneyland-like destination city for tourists looking to rekindle images and memories of revolutionary days of old.
But before we get carried away by such misguided fervor, much less by thoughts of a distant future devoted to celebrating revolutionary days gone by, let’s stay grounded long enough to ponder just what sort of “revolutionary” era we may – or may not – be in.
As of 1763 the citizens of Boston had had better than a century and a half of largely undisturbed freedom and independence as citizens of the British empire. But that began to change after the end of the Seven Years War with France. In that war England did the bidding of its New England colonists by defeating France and eliminating Catholic French authority to their north. That successful effort proved to be so costly that England thought that their American colonists ought to help pay for it; hence the despised Stamp Act and all that followed.
Yes, this is a very brief history, but it’s a history that seeks to make a very important point. Parliament suddenly changed the rules after 1763. Taxes were to be imposed domestically. And more than that, they were going to be collected. Boston soon proved to be the flashpoint of the colonial response.
Still, it took a dozen years before things got to the breaking point in 1775-76. The colonists did ultimately become revolutionary-minded, but they were, by and large, reluctant revolutionaries. After all, they had had that long history of freedom and independence, and who knew where revolutionary action might lead.
And who knows where revolutionary action might lead today–especially when we may or may not be in a revolutionary situation. Before we start contemplating the renewal of Minneapolis as a future mecca for tourists bent on visiting landmarks of the “sparks” of revolutionary days of yore, maybe we should first ponder the original American revolution. Only then might we be in a position to draw any comparison to subsequent issues and events that might have revolutionary potential.
Having just done a bit of that right here, the next step might be to examine our recent history. Is there a Stamp Act moment to be found? Are ICE agents comparable to troops marching in the city of Boston? Has Congress passed draconian laws akin to those so-called Intolerable Acts that shut down the port of Boston, revoked the colony’s charter, forced local citizens to house British soldiers, and let British soldiers and officials return to England where they might or might not face trials and punishment for any violations of colonial laws?
In sum, are we actually on a revolutionary road today? And if so, just where are we on it? Has the current administration really done anything that is comparable?
The previous administration let untold millions simply stream into the country–and in the midst of a covid shutdown no less. The opposition party nominated a candidate who promised that, if elected, he would take serious steps to close the border and remove many of those who were here in violation of entry, beginning with those who were criminals before they came or had committed serious crimes once here. That candidate won the election and began to fulfill not just any campaign promise, but a promise that was very much a key to his victory.
One could expect that the party out of power might not be pleased with the actions of the new president. But one might not have anticipated that leaders of the opposition party in places like Minnesota would work to obstruct those actions. And yet that is precisely what happened.
On the way to the original American revolution the cry was “no taxation without representation.” Is there a comparable cry today? There might have been. After all, the previous administration had changed the rules and opened the borders. There was a time not all that long ago when a young Paul Wellstone and a younger Bernie Sanders thought that any such action was to be strongly opposed, given its negative impact on the wages of American workers, plus the added pressures on state budgets.
There might well have been large public protests, but there weren’t. And not simply because the late Senator Wellstone is no longer with us. Life is simply still too good for the vast majority of Americans to consider taking to the streets. By and large, such twenty-first century Americans do not think of themselves as revolutionary, not even so much as being reluctantly revolutionary.
Nonetheless, a Wellstone might have led a campaign defending a country’s authority to control its own borders. But that cry did not animate those who recently stood against ICE officers in the streets of today’s Minneapolis. For that matter, the former senator might have objected to state and local officials standing in the way of a legitimate federal action. Again, that was not the concern of those who took to the someday-to-be-storied streets of a post-revolutionary Minneapolis.
The chief concern of the former mayor, not to mention the current mayor, was quite otherwise. Beyond that, one wonders if the correct response to the policies of the incumbent president really ought to be that of encouraging local citizens to think of themselves as nothing less than American patriots/revolutionaries, circa, what, 1765 or 1770 or 1775, especially when many of them seem to aspire to be Frenchmen prior to 1789 or Russians on the eve of 1917. And look at how those revolutions turned out.
In any case, it’s entirely possible, nay, highly unlikely that the year of 1776–or a year on
the road leading to it–has any relevance at all to what transpired this past winter in what is not
exactly a 21st century version of the Boston of two-and-half centuries ago.
It would be much more sensible, not to mention much less apocalyptic, simply to call upon citizens to work hard to organize and defeat the incumbent party and its presidential candidate in future elections. It would also be worthwhile to have a real debate over immigration. Such a debate could be between an openly open border party and a party that opposes such a policy, or a debate that we might have had in 2020, but didn’t.
Then what? Well, if the Democrats win, the result might be a very open-door policy, but at least such a victory–and the ensuing border policies of the victors–would have been honestly achieved. Of course, Democrats-in-power have a history of governing well to the left of Democrats-as-campaigners. Think back to candidate Franklin Roosevelt, who in 1932 charged President Hoover with being a budget-busting big spender. Or think no further than Governor Walz of Minnesota and Governor Spanberger of Virginia today.
Something similar was certainly the case when one compares the absence of any border issue debate in the 2020 campaign with the subsequent action of border policy–or should that be non-action–on the part of the Biden administration following that election. Could that be the pattern when it comes to significant national issues in the years to come as well? Perhaps so.
Might at some point Washington, DC become an American version of the London of somewhere between 1765 and 1775? That would be a Washington devoid of both a real king and any individual leader who might be accused of kingliness. Instead it would simply be a Washington of overwhelming power exercised by one-party government. Who knows. But if that is in the American future, the result could be a new American story, a story once again of reluctant revolutionaries, or at least a story of those much more reluctant about taking such a fateful step than some would-be revolutionaries seem to be today.
