READ ONLINE ATWSJ.COM/BOOKSHELF THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. **** Saturday/Sunday, February 22 - 23, 2020 |C7
BYGORDONS.WOOD
T
HE 1619 PROJECT,
launched in August 2019
by the New York Times
and designed to revise
the teaching of Ameri-
can history in schools, claims that one
of the primary reasons the Americans
decided to declare independence from
Great Britain in 1776 was to protect
their institution of slavery. To back up
this remarkable claim, the editor of
the New York Times Magazine, where
the project first appeared, cited the
November 1775 proclamation of Lord
Dunmore, the royal governor of Vir-
ginia, offering freedom to any en-
slaved person fleeing to the British
army—a military expedient only.
Then, to confirm the importance of
this proclamation, the editor quoted
the words of historian Jill Lepore
from her recent history of the United
States: “Not the taxes and the tea, not
the shots at Lexington and Concord,
not the siege of Boston; rather, it was
this act, Dunmore’s offer of freedom
to slaves, that tipped the scales in
favor of American independence.”
Mary Beth Norton, in her new
book, “1774,” suggests otherwise. Her
account of the long year 1774, from
the Boston Tea Party in December
1773 to the outbreak of hostilities in
April 1775, shows conclusively that
the scales had been tipped in favor of
independence long before Dunmore
issued his proclamation. Ms. Norton,
who is professor of history at Cornell
and a former president of the Ameri-
can Historical Association, does not
fundamentally challenge the tradi-
tional trajectory of events in that
decisive year. What she does do is
enrich the narrative, filling in the
story with a staggering amount of
detail based on prodigious research in
an enormous number of archives. She
doesn’t just tell us how many pounds
of tea (“nearly 600,000”) the East
India Co. placed on seven ships sailing
to Boston, New York, Philadelphia and
Charleston, S.C., in late 1773, but she
describes the kind of tea that was
sent: “1,586 chests of Bohea, 70 chests
of Congou, 290 chests Singlo, 70
chests of Hyson, and 35 chests of Sou-
chong.” Some readers might think
this is specification run wild.
But for Ms. Norton this is the point
of her book. She wants to re-create
as much as possible the past reality
of this momentous year in all of its
particularity. Only then, she suggests,
will we come to appreciate the com-
plexity of what happened and to un-
derstand all of the conflicts, divisions
and confusion that lay behind events,
like the Tea Party, that historians
highlight and simplify. At times she
relates events week by week, and
occasionally day by day. She seeks to
be as inclusive as possible and tries
to incorporate all the varying points
of view in her narrative. She seems
to have read every newspaper in the
period, and she delights in describing
the give and take of debates between
patriots and loyalists that took place
in the press.
By the early 1770s, the crisis be-
tween Great Britain and its colonies
that had begun with the Stamp Act in
1765 seemed to have eased. Faced
with mobs and boycotts of British
goods, the British government had
twice backed away from trying to tax
the colonists. It had repealed the
Stamp Act in 1766, and, in 1770, had
withdrawn the Townshend duties,
keeping only the duty on tea as a
symbol of Britain’s authority to tax
the colonists. This proved to be a big
mistake.
The Americans had generally ig-
nored or dismissed this remaining
duty on tea until the British inadver-
tently called attention to it, and disas-
ter followed. In 1773 the British gov-
ernment decided to bail out a nearly
bankrupt East India Co. by giving it
a monopoly of the American market
for tea. Although the British govern-
ment had not intended this Tea Act as
a means of forcing the colonists toaccept Parliament’s right to tax them,
Americans interpreted it that way.
Ms. Norton painstakingly describes
the colonists’ emerging opposition to
the imported tea. The opposition took
different forms in each of the ports,
in some cases forcing the resignations
of the merchants consigned to receive
the tea, in others compelling the ships
carrying the tea to sail back to Eng-
land with their cargoes intact. Boston
was different. The consignees refused
to resign, and Gov. Thomas Hutchin-
son, a stickler for the law that pre-
vented any ship once docked from
departing without paying duties,
refused to allow the tea ships to sail
back to England with their cargoes.
On Dec. 16, 1773, the night before the
tea was to be unloaded and taxed, a
band of men disguised as “Mohawks”
threw 342 chests containing more
than 46 tons of tea worth more than
£9,000 into Boston Harbor. This be-
came the famous “Tea Party.”
The colonists’ reaction to this
destruction of private property wasimmediate but mixed, some condemn-
ing it, others celebrating it, with
many remaining uneasy and uncertain
about what to say or do. Although
nearly all Americans remained ada-
mantly opposed to paying tea duties,
many suggested that Boston, or per-
haps all the colonies, ought at least
to pay for the destroyed tea. Many
colonists outside of New England
worried that the hot-headed Bostoni-
ans were much too rash and violent.
But, of course, the British govern-
ment came to the rescue of the Bosto-
nians’ reputation. British leaders were
furious at the destruction of the tea.
They had for far too long appeased
the colonists, repealing acts of Parlia-
ment and retreating at every sign of
colonial opposition. It was high time,
the government declared, to show the
colonists the power the British nation
could wield over its dependencies.
The British government passed a
series of acts—acts that were so
severe, so uncompromising, so dras-
tic, that they fundamentally alteredTARRED AND FEATHERED‘The Bostonians Paying the Excise Man,’ a 1774 cartoon.
FOTOSEARCH/GETTY IMAGESThe Big Goodbye
By Sam Wasson
Flatiron, 397 pages, $28.99
BYGEOFFREYO’BRIEN
F
RAUGHT WITHportent,
the title of Sam Wasson’s
account of the making of
“Chinatown” evokes the
“last years of Hollywood”
under the sign of Raymond Chandler,
perhaps with the implication that a
“Big Goodbye” must give way to a
“Long Sleep.” As the book proceeds, it
says goodbye not just to the remnants
of the classic age of the Hollywood
studios and to the brief promise of
youthful rejuvenation in the wonder
years of the early 1970s, but to larger
things: the liberated exuberance of the
late 1960s; the possibility of artistic
commitments that transcend corpo-
rate greed, and an American optimism
able to hold firm despite what screen-
writer Robert Towne called “the futil-
ity of good intentions.” The movie
becomes a divinatory tool, an artifact
for channeling the waylaid energies of
a departed era.
A book about the making of a
movie is paradoxical: It seeks to show
the reality behind a fiction, but the fic-
tion persists in a permanent present:
the first glimpse of Faye Dunaway’s
Evelyn Mulwray in Jack Nicholson’s
detective agency; the spurt of blood
as the elfin Roman Polanski, playing
a bit part in his own film, slits Mr.
Nicholson’s nose with a knife outside
the reservoir; the low rumble of John
Huston’s L.A. powerbroker as he
makes menacing observations on the
nature of evil (“Most people never
have to face the fact that at the right
time and the right place, they’re capa-
ble of anything”). Meanwhile, the
world the film was made in has de-
volved into a mix of conflicting recol-
lections, unsubstantiated rumors, am-
biguous documents. The reporting Mr.
Wasson deftly weaves into his densely
populated narrative only makes the
actors, producers, writers and director
more elusive. People go to moviesdeed the book has the feel of a meta-
screenplay about the writing and
realizing of a screenplay. The narrative
arc is like that of a heist movie:
assembling the crew, working out the
details of the caper, executing the
crime, dealing with the fallout. The job
gives significance to lives otherwise
apt to lose their mooring. After “Chi-
natown” came the debacles that Mr.
Wasson charts in his final chapters:
the cocaine-fueled meltdowns of Evans
and Mr. Towne, the arrest of Polanski
for raping a 13-year-old, and in the
background the emergence of a more
ruthlessly marketing-oriented Holly-
wood inflamed by the extraordinary
profits of William Friedkin’s “The Ex-
orcist” and Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws.”
Mr. Wasson has shown deftness
in this genre with his “Fifth Avenue,
5 A.M.,” an account of the making of
“Breakfast at Tiffany’s” that entertain-
ingly mixed production history, cap-
sule biography and observations about
the shifting sexual roles and budding
possibilities of the early 1960s. “The
Big Goodbye” ranges more darkly and
ambitiously, from the Manson killings
of 1969 to Hollywood’s corporate up-
heavals of the late 1970s. The author’s
Please turn to page C8Eucalyptus
And Orange
Blossoms
in part to find a coherence and reso-
lution lacking in everyday existence;
“The Big Goodbye” suggests that those
who make them are similarly motivated.
Mr. Wasson begins with quick
glimpses of future star Nicholson (sit-
ting at a bar with the man he believed
to be his father, an alcoholic he barely
knew), future producer Robert Evans
(vowing not to be a frustrated failure
like his dentist father), future screen-
writer Towne (wistfully recalling the
California of his childhood) and futuredirector Polanski (staring out from
behind Nazi-patrolled barbed wire in
Kraków). “When these four boys grew
up,” the author announces announces,
“they made a movie together called
Chinatown. Robert Towne once said
that Chinatown is a state of mind....
Dreaming you’re in paradise and wak-
ing up in the dark—that’s Chinatown.
Thinking you’ve got it figured out and
realizing you’re dead—that’s China-
town.” The tone of this passage is very
much that of a movie trailer, and in-JAKEJack Nicholson in ‘Chinatown’ (1974).
EVERETT COLLECTION1774: The Long Year
of Revolution
By Mary Beth Norton
Knopf, 502 pages, $32.50
the imperial debate and forever
changed the relationship between
Britain and its colonies. The govern-
ment closed the port of Boston,
ordered Thomas Hutchinson back to
England, and appointed a military
general, Thomas Gage, as the new
royal governor of Massachusetts.
The closing of the port of Boston
shocked all the colonists, but Vir-
ginians especially. They had been
upset at the clandestine destruction
of private property, but the British re-
action was too much to take. George
Washington declared that “the cause
of Boston...nowisandeverwill be
considered as the cause of America.”
Many colonists suggested a meeting of
all the colonies to deal with the crisis.
The British government followed
with two more acts that made mat-
ters worse. The first altered the Mas-
sachusetts charter by having the
council, the middle branch of govern-
ment, appointed by the Crown rather
than elected by the two houses of the
colony’s legislature; and it forbadetowns to hold more than one meeting
a year without permission. The sec-
ond, dubbed the Murder Act by the
colonists, provided that military or
customs officials who killed colonists
in the performance of their duties
would be brought to England for trial
rather than face biased colonial juries.
The other colonies realized at once
that, if Britain could coerce Massa-
chusetts in this outrageous manner,
it could do the same to them.
The Massachusetts citizens forced
the resignations of most of those
appointed to the council, ignored the
prohibition on town meetings and
effectively closed the colony’s courts.
In September a dispirited Gen. Gage
told the colonial secretary in London
that “civil government is near its
end.” And the fever was spreading.
No one, he later reported, could have
imagined that the acts designed for
Massachusetts alone “could have
created such a ferment throughout
the continent and united the whole in
one common cause.”
As the colonies gathered together
in a Continental Congress in Phila-
delphia in September 1774, New Eng-
landers were actually preparing to
fight. When a rumor spread that Brit-
ish troops had killed some Bostonians,
as many as 20,000 men from various
parts of New England mobilized to
march on Boston before they learned
that the rumor was false. Although
Americans in the other colonies were
not as jittery as the New Englanders,
many realized that the imperial re-
lationship was disintegrating.
Whatever royal authority was left
in the colonies now simply disap-
peared. The royal governors stood in
helpless astonishment as new, infor-
Please turn to page C8BOOKS
Kingdom of Nauvoo
The brief life
of a ‘lost’
Mormon cityC9A Romantic Nature
The eye, hand and
mind of Caspar David
FriedrichC11The Year That Changed the World
What shocked colonists like George Washington into war? Britain’s imperious actions in Boston.
The British crown hoped
to bail out the flailing
East India Co. by forcing
colonists to purchase
the company’s tea.