The nature of freedom — and what tactics are justified to win it — remains a divisive question today. “Impassioned Destruction: Politics, Vandalism and the Boston Tea Party,” an exhibition at the Old State House, looks at moments of politically motivated property destruction across American history, and poses a question: When is it justified “to violently destroy property in the name of a cause?”
Matthew Wilding, the exhibition’s curator, said the idea started taking shape on Jan. 6, 2021, when he was watching television coverage of the assault on the Capitol by supporters of President Donald J. Trump.
In his early days as a costumed interpreter on Boston’s Freedom Trail, Wilding depicted a Bostonian who participated in the Stamp Act Riots of 1765. But watching the events at the Capitol, he said, “I realized what I had never experienced was the seriousness of a full-scale riot.”
Back in 1773, the Tea Party was itself highly polarizing. The British royal governor denounced it as an act of treason. While many patriots celebrated it, Ben Franklin and George Washington were appalled, denouncing property destruction as an illegitimate tactic. (The more than 92,000 pounds of tea tossed overboard would be worth between $1.5 million and $1.8 million today, the anniversary’s planners estimate.)
And the fractures extended to individual families. “Impassioned Destruction” includes a decorated tea caddy from the household of a prominent Bostonian, whose wife (the story goes) threw its contents into the harbor after he refused to do it himself.
Other events covered in the show include the 1877 Reading Railroad Strike in Pennsylvania (where workers burned a number of train cars, setting off riots that left roughly a dozen people dead), and the Weather Underground’s 1974 bombing of the Gulf Oil Company’s headquarters in Pittsburgh.
Assembling the Jan. 6 section was particularly fraught, Wilding said. Some visitors have said that including the Capitol riot somehow “validated” the event, he said. A few others have angrily disputed the statement that seven people lost their lives in connection with the Capitol riot.
Visitors may also wonder about a notable absence. As one person wrote earlier this month on the feedback blackboard at the end of the show: “Where was the BLM/George Floyd summer of violence? More violent, deadly, costly than Jan. 6.”
What to call the property destruction during the racial justice protests following the murder of George Floyd in 2020 — looting? rioting? vandalism? — and whether it could be labeled violence was among the most charged aspects of the protests. Some journalists (and museum curators) who criticized the destruction of statues or buildings were disciplined or fired.