In a review of a recent book by Edmund Morgan, Russel Baker mentions this story:
Two Boston carters [were] hauling a wagonload of wood along a narrow snow-drifted road one wintry day in 1705 when they met the oncoming coach of the royal governor of Massachusetts and refused to pull aside. The governor later testified that after he jumped from the coach and ordered them to clear the road, one of them “answered boldly, without any other words, ‘I am as good flesh and blood as you; I will not give way, you may goe out of the way.'” When the governor drew his sword to assert respect for high office, the carter “layd hold on the governor and broke the sword in his hand.”
It was “a supreme gesture of contempt for authority and its might,” Morgan writes. One shudders to think what might happen to this stubborn working stiff and his supreme gesture in today’s world of terrifying political motorcades with their heavily armed bodyguards.
Indeed.
The election of Barack Obama and the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor remind us of our society’s great progress in social mobility, but in some ways we really do seem to be moving backwards.