“To praise their act is to set a bad example”

On 8 Aug 1929, two days after the Boston Herald reported on the dedication of a historic marker at Marshfield’s Tea Rock Hill, the newspaper ran this letter to the editor:

The Tea Rock chapter, D.A.R., did a very questionable thing yesterday when it dedicated a bronze tablet to the memory of the men of Marshfield who in 1773 burned tea brought there by the British to sell. After all, that tea was private property and it was illegal for the men of Marshfield to burn it. and to praise their act is to set a bad example before certain elements today.

LLOYD M. COSGRAVE.
Framingham, Aug. 6.

Because sarcasm is just as hard to detect in ink as in pixels, the paper headlined this letter “SATIRICAL.”

Some internet sleuthing indicates that Cosgrave graduated from Indiana University in 1909 and studied economics at Harvard University as the Henry Lee Memorial Fellow. He then taught economics at Indiana, the Carnegie Institute of Technology, and the Pittsburgh Trade Union College.

By the mid-1920s Cosgrave was working for the Workers’ Education Bureau of America, established to assist labor colleges and worker training centers. He gave speeches and published articles with titles like “Labor in the Ancient World,” “Is Rent Justifiable,” “Organized Labor and the Schools,” and “Christmas Clubs.” (Sometimes his last name was reported as “Cosgrove.”)

In April 1929, a few months before his letter about the Marshfield tea burning, Cosgrave signed letters to the Columbus Evening Dispatch identifying himself as publicity agent for the Ohio State Federation of Labor. That same year, the American Federation of Labor took over the W.E.B.A. and pulled it away from more radical unions. Cosgrave remained active in the labor movement, whether or not with that organization, because around 1940 the A.F.L. was promoting his series of articles titled “After the War.”

I haven’t found any source linking Cosgrave to Framingham aside from this letter. Having grown up in Muncie, he was back there by 1933, and seems to have done most of his work in the country’s industrial heartland. But his job took him to speak to many groups of workers. Perhaps Cosgrave was traveling through Massachusetts in August 1929, saw the Boston Herald article, and had to comment on the irony of the D.A.R. commemorating the destruction of private property to make a political point.

For nearly two hundred years now, per the argument in Alfred F. Young’s The Shoemaker and the Tea Party, Americans have debated the political resonance of the Boston Tea Party for contemporary issues. Cosgrave’s letter extended the same argument to the Marshfield tea burning.

Most Americans have agreed, perhaps based on nothing more than pictures in their schoolbooks, that the colonial resistance to the Tea Act of 1773 is a fine model of political activism. But is the lesson that sometimes protesters need to destroy private property to make their point and save society from a worse fate? Or is it that the good protests were tightly controlled and, furthermore, deep in the past, over esoteric issues that have little relevance today?

TOMORROW: This weekend in Marshfield.

(The photo above, courtesy of Digital Commonwealth, shows the People’s Bicentennial Commission demonstrating at Faneuil Hall during the Boston Tea Party bicentennial in 1973.)