Bread Riots, Class Power, and the Myth of Colonial Unity

Claire Brooks

In seventeen thirty-seven, a mob in Boston literally tore down the city's public market house. They ripped it apart bit by bit. And, and, and it wasn't some, you know, random act of property destruction. Colonial officials themselves had admitted just a few years earlier, in the seventeen thirties, that a great number of the poor could, um, scarcely procure their daily bread.

Oliver Hart

Scarcely procure daily bread. Right. But, Claire, I, I think where Howard Zinn goes off the rails a bit in Chapter Three is framing every single food riot as this proto-socialist revolution. You're seeing in seventeen thirty-seven Boston, or in New York, it's classic European moral economy. It's people protesting grain hoarding and price gouging, not trying to overthrow the entire capitalist class structure.

Claire Brooks

Okay, but, but look at how the merchant elites actually reacted at the time. They didn't see it as a, a mild moral reminder. Boston merchants put out this totally panicked statement calling the rioters a, quote, riotous tumultuous assembly of foreign seamen, servants, Negroes, and other persons of mean and vile condition.

Oliver Hart

Foreign seamen, servants, Negroes, and other persons of mean and vile condition. Yes, it's, uh, it is extraordinary language. But that is the elite reaction, isn't it? That's the fear of the crowd, not necessarily evidence that the crowd had a unified anti-capitalist manifesto.

Claire Brooks

But that exact fear is the point! The fact that you had poor whites, indentured servants, and enslaved Black workers rioting side by side in urban centers, that scared the living daylights out of colonial authorities. When I first dug into the court records from those bread riots, back when I was researching colonial court archives, I mean, I, I was blown away. My school history textbooks completely left this out. We were taught this peaceful, cozy picture of unanimous patriotic unity, everybody harmoniously preparing for seventeen seventy-six.

Oliver Hart

Well, the textbooks simplify things, certainly. But Zinn swaps one myth for another. He takes real, local grievances over bread prices and paints them as a systematic, conscious class war, when really, most rioters just wanted affordable grain so their families wouldn't starve.

Claire Brooks

Whether it was conscious marxism or just sheer survival, Oliver, the result was the same. The colonial elite saw a massive, combustible lower class, and they realized they needed a strategy to keep that rage from burning down their houses.

Oliver Hart

Which brings us to Zinn's main thesis for the pre-revolutionary era, this idea of the middle class buffer. He argues that the wealthy merchant class deliberately engineered a middle tier, craftsmen, small property owners, farmers, to act as a kind of human shield between themselves and the impoverished majority. Give them just enough property to defend the status quo.

Claire Brooks

And you can see that mechanism playing out so clearly in seventeen sixty-five with the Stamp Act protests. Samuel Adams and the Loyal Nine, they, they explicitly recruit the Boston street mobs, right? The shipwrights, the tavern keepers, the lower class laborers, to smash the tax collector's house. But then, the second those same working class crowds turn around and start ransacking the mansion of Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson, suddenly Adams and the merchant leaders step in and say, woah, woah, woah, hold on, that is going too far! They cracked down on the very mob they just armed!

Oliver Hart

Wait, but, but to say Samuel Adams was just cynically manipulating a mob ignores the fact that people actually cared about representation and imperial overreach! You're reducing genuine political convictions about liberty to a, a top down conspiracy where rich guys pull the strings and everybody else is just a mindless puppet.

Claire Brooks

I'm not saying they were puppets without minds, Oliver! I'm saying the elite managed the direction of that anger. They took a deep, boiling domestic anger over economic inequality inside the colonies, and they brilliantly redirected it toward London. Instead of asking why a few Boston merchants owned half the city's wealth, everybody was taught to blame British tax stamps.

Oliver Hart

It is a effective political tactic, certainly. Redirection of internal conflict to an external enemy is as old as politics itself. But I still think Zinn strips working class colonists of their own agency. When a shoemaker joined the Sons of Liberty, he wasn't necessarily being tricked by Samuel Adams. He might have genuinely believed in local self-governance.

Claire Brooks

Sure, both things can be true at once. But you can't deny how conveniently that ideology served the merchant class. It allowed rich plantation owners and wealthy traders to stand shoulder to shoulder with poor farmers, yelling about liberty, while keeping the fundamental economic hierarchy completely intact.

Oliver Hart

So the lingering question is really about how we interpret that history. Is Zinn giving us a crucial reality check on how elites preserve power through calculated division, or does his rigid class framework strip real historical figures of their genuine beliefs?

Claire Brooks

I think it forces us to look past the oil paintings and ask who actually gained what in seventeen seventy-six. Good chatting, Oliver.

Oliver Hart

Talk next time.