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Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

Except, if you read that entry closely you’ll see that the Tea Act combatted smuggling. While the Wikipedia talks about the grievance of colonists, what I learned in high school in Boston (different from what my kid learned in California) was consistent with this: it was the smugglers who destroyed the tea.

New England remained a hotbed of smuggling. Consider the origin of the Kennedy fortune or the current heroin and people smuggling channels through New Bedford and Rhode Island.

Also note the opposition to pot legalization in some of the rural counties of California appears to mostly be lead by illegal pot growers afraid of their (de facto, though not de jure) government price support going away.

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Smuggling is just transporting stuff against the law. The salt marchers smuggled salt once they took it. I'm not sure what's "except" about your description. Both protests were about unreasonable restrictions on trade meant to enrich the British at the expense of their colonies. The main difference is that you don't need tea to live, so the Tea Act was somewhat less oppressive.

Where “smuggling” is defined as tea that was imported without paying duties to the crown; duties that colonists didn’t have any say in imposing. To make the comparison with alcohol in the 1920s work, it’d be like the government banning the purchase of alcohol from everyone except the government’s anointed “company”, and the voters having no say in the matter.

In fact that sort of smuggling goes on all the time with cigarettes and alcohol es with government monopolies, and as various ways of arbitraging different tax regimes.

My point is simply that, if you read contemporary documents, you’ll see that the smugglers, and others, exploited the situation to promote their respective positions. And the whole story is exploited today with the details filed off.

Propaganda is an important part of nation building.

You're overindulging in cynicism. It's fair to say that, smugglers or not, Boston as a whole wasn't too found of Crown rule: tea party, Boston Massacre, Powder Alarm, Intolerable Acts (inc. abolishing home rule), etc. The closing end of the Battle of Lexington and Concord were citizens[+] showing up just to take potshots at the retreating redcoats. The war basically started with British troops under siege in Boston.

[+] Admittedly, mostly drunk tavern patrons

I don't know if this is true (can't trust anything to not be propaganda anymore) but iirc we learned in school that less than a third of Americans supported Independence with more than a third being indifferent and about a third strictly loyal to to British government. If there was a referendum, we can assume that pro Independence would have likely lost.

I believe this is the case (it's been decades since I read the original docs but that is my recollection). It's pretty typical for revolutionary movements, successful or not, to be well in the minority.

Famously, in revolutionary pre-USSR Russia The "Bolsheviks" ("majority") were not in the majority but named themselves so in order to gain credibility and marginalize the majority opposition.

I don't know where that's famous (I've never heard it before) but I think the name Bolshevik simply derives from an internal party vote which Lenin's faction won (against what became known as the Mensheviks (minority)).

Across all 13 colonies, sure but Massachusetts might have tilted more heavily towards independence. Googling around quickly (because this is just a petty comment thread after all), there's a NYtimes OpEd that said it was more like 40+/20-/40abstain but then other sources indicate Massachusetts was far higher. Again, having the lion's share of rebellious acts, notable incidents, and the focus/ire of Parliament.

I'm not sure anyone thought to take a scientific poll. Obviously the Patriots were in favor of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suffolk_Resolves

> it’d be like the government banning the purchase of alcohol from everyone except the government’s anointed “company”

I think it's how it work in Canada for alcohol.

Right but this part doesn't apply

> and the voters having no say in the matter

Yeah, I missed that, thank you for pointing it.

There is no historical evidence linking Joseph Kennedy to bootlegging other than the totally unverified claims of a dying monster 50 years after prohibition ended. It’s a political smear.

What are you talking about, the rumors of the Kennedys being bootleggers/smugglers have existed since the end of prohibition due to the rather immediate appearance of their liquor importation and distribution business once prohibition was repealed. Plus there's the fact that they sold the family alcohol business to a known mobster who was a bootlegger. While the truth is probably much less exciting, such myths are definitely not due to some political smear in the 80s by a "dying monster" (no idea who you're referencing).

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