ROMAN MARS: It’s 1984, and journalist Jack Hitt is walking up Broadway in Manhattan toward Columbia University. Jack is 27 at the time, recently out of grad school and obsessed with American history.
JACK HITT: I’m a Constitution nerd. And my girlfriend and I’ve decided to write a book about marginalized figures in American history.
ROMAN MARS: [LAUGHS] Romance, right there!
ROMAN MARS: So on this particularly romantic day, Jack was on his way to do some research on the Revolutionary War in the stacks of Butler Library.
JACK HITT: Butler Library is one of these libraries, when you walk in the front door, it looks like it has about like four or five stories. But it’s actually, like, 12 stories underground. So I’m down, like, in the ninth floor. And you know that setting, right? It’s just wall-to-wall books. And there’s nobody down there. It’s this wonderful feeling of–come off the elevator or walk down the stairs–you’re in this dark envelope of books. And each aisle is only illuminated by this little 15-minute timer that you turn when you walk down it. And so I’m heading down towards the American Revolution section.
ROMAN MARS: On his mind is one particular figure from the American Revolution, someone Jack thought history had almost entirely overlooked.
JACK HITT: We’d come across this guy named James Otis who had written this sort of inflammatory pamphlet really early on, the early 1760s, a good 10 or 15 years before the Declaration of Independence. Some people say this is the document that sort of got the ball rolling.
ROMAN MARS: Jack was fired up about this pamphlet. And if you’re thinking this is kind of a brochure that you get at a doctor’s office with a diagram of the food pyramid, think again. Pamphlets were how big ideas were spread at the time. They could be printed quickly and disseminated widely.
JACK HITT: And it was also the place where you might have a hot take, right? So think of the famous pamphlets that we all learn later in American history–Thomas Paine’s Common Sense or Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania by John Dickinson–they’re the ones that lasted and were famous. And that’s why my girlfriend at the time and I wanted to write this book; Otis’ pamphlet deserves to be that famous. But what made the story kind of great for us is that things go sideways for Otis–actually horribly tragic. That’s like Shakespeare. A man, you know, soaring into greatness, crashing into unbelievable humiliation and then madness. And of course I romance the idea that these dangerous ideas that he was entertaining so early on are taking him over the edge.
ROMAN MARS: So without the internet to rely on, Jack is looking for a book that might tell him more about this tragic proto-founding father and his inflammatory pamphlet.
JACK HITT: And I’m poking through the books, looking for which ones I should check out. And I look behind one of the books and I see that there’s something back there, a thin volume, hand-sewn binding. I’m like, “What?” I pull out some books, pull this thing out… And this is the pamphlet that James Otis wrote. And this is an original copy. It’s a 1764 edition of the pamphlet that made him famous. My first thought, of course, is I should steal this. And I’m thinking that in the most virtuous way. They don’t know what they have! They don’t appreciate it! It’s rotting into dust back there behind these books. I know what it is! It’s the Magna Carta of America. I know what I’m holding in my hand. Wouldn’t it just sit back there and turn into dust over the next hundred years if I don’t save it?
ROMAN MARS: The only moral option is to take it.
JACK HITT: Right. And then the light timer cut off and I was plunged into darkness.
ROMAN MARS: Matching the darkness of your soul.
JACK HITT: Exactly. So, of course, I crab walked out of there, took the elevator to the ground floor and up to the sixth floor, into the bright light of the rare books division, and handed it to the curator. And I told her, “this jewel of the American Revolution has been rotting away in the stacks. And I hope that they will take it and preserve it.” And that’s where it is today. But James Otis is still sort of in that hidden place in American history.
ROMAN MARS: But to tell the story of James Otis and his seminal pamphlet is to tell a story of a bolt from the blue, a spark that would electrify the American Revolution. Before the Declaration of Independence was even a twinkle in the Founding Fathers eyes, there was James Otis. And you could argue that the story of this pamphlet is the story of the founding document of the United States of America.
From 99% Invisible and BBC Studios, this is A History of the United States in 100 Objects. I’m Roman Mars. And today, Jack Hitt is back with the Otis pamphlet, America’s forgotten Magna Carta and the life of the tragic hero who wrote it.
The story of this pamphlet begins around 15 years before the Revolutionary War, in 1761 in the tiny hamlet of Boston, Massachusetts.
JACK HITT: You know, at the time, Boston is this tiny little port town, population 16,000.
ROMAN MARS: Wow.
JACK HITT: Yeah. So it’s like a large university. You all practically know everybody on campus, right? And certainly the people in power all knew each other.
ROMAN MARS: The city is so small, you could walk from one side of it to the other in under an hour, during which time you might hear boats from Boston Harbor creaking and knocking into the docks. You might encounter pigs loose in the street. And if you weren’t, like, in a church, you were probably in a tavern.
JACK HITT: And just remember, you know, we’re talking about a time when no one is thinking of rebellion. No one’s thinking of independence. These are British citizens in Boston at 1761, a full 15 years before the Declaration of Independence. And at the time, they’re mostly merchants trying to make a living and make something of their new life in America.
ROMAN MARS: But the living the merchants were making wasn’t always strictly legal.
JACK HITT: There’s a good bit of smuggling, and everybody kind of knows it. And a lot of it was about getting cheap French molasses out of the Caribbean and into the rum kegs.
ROMAN MARS: One of the big trades in the New England colonies was making rum. But the cheapest molasses was from the French Caribbean. So to get around heavy tariffs, merchants smuggled it in. And London was tired of it. They wanted those tax dollars or, I suppose, those tax shillings.
JACK HITT: And so to catch these smugglers, London has issued these new kinds of search warrants called “writs of assistance.” And they’re blanket warrants. I mean, you don’t need any evidence. You can come aboard a ship day or night. You can go into a house or a warehouse anytime during the day with the barest of suspicions. And the reason they’re called “writs of assistance” is the other aspect of them that any agent who holds this piece of paper can kind of dragoon anyone into accompanying them on one of these searches. That’s the assistance part. You command it. I mean, if one of these customs agents stops you and says, “You have to help me,” you have to help them. And so you have this, like, little mob practically coming into people’s places and searching and looking for smuggled goods and everything.
ROMAN MARS: And the kicker was that the customs agents also had a financial incentive. They got a cut of whatever they found. So you’ve got agents prowling around town more and more like thugs, and everyone is scared and on edge.
ROMAN MARS: And ostensibly, the owner or the holder of this writ of assistance is an agent of the British government in some way?
JACK HITT: Oh yeah. These writs are executed by authority from London by the court in Massachusetts. So you really have this sort of wonderful tempest in a teapot where the authorities are angry because duties are definitely being avoided, taxes are not being collected, and money is not going into the King’s coffers. So you have that. And then you have the merchants, and they’re also furious about the abuse of these blanket warrants. So everybody’s, like, ready for a courtroom battle. And so the merchants bring a lawsuit and charge that these writs of assistance are illegal. Okay. So, now, it’s February 1761. We’re in the town hall that’s now called The Old State House in Boston. And there were five British judges sitting in wigs and red robes at the front. The public is permitted to come, and so the place is packed.
ROMAN MARS: First, the British government’s lawyer gets up and makes the expected case in favor of the writs. “Parliament authorized the search warrants, and Parliament’s word is law.”
JACK HITT: Standard defense of the writs.
ROMAN MARS: Then it’s the merchants’ turn to try to convince the judges that the writs are illegal. And the first lawyer for the merchants gets up.
JACK HITT: A guy with a fabulous Dickensian name, Oxenbridge Thacher.
ROMAN MARS: Oxenbridge makes an equally predictable case on the opposite side.
JACK HITT: But he makes this very tidy argument about the writs, citing precedent and so on.
ROMAN MARS: Oxenbridge sits down. So far, the packed audience doesn’t seem moved. But the merchants have a second lawyer too, a hotshot, hot-headed man who just joined their team.
JACK HITT: And this is James Otis. Now, I just got to try to describe James Otis to you. He was sort of known as a really hotshot kind of badass lawyer. He defended pirates in Nova Scotia. There was some young guys that went rioting on Guy Fawkes Day. He took their case. And his friends had a nickname for him; he was called “Furio.”
ROMAN MARS: Oh, wow. You have to earn that one.
ROMAN MARS: And just to complicate things for Furio a little more, he had a personal history with the Chief Justice, a man named Thomas Hutchinson.
JACK HITT: Who at the time had just been appointed by the governor. And the man he had passed over for this job–that the governor had passed over and given to Hutchinson–was James Otis’ father.
ROMAN MARS: Oh, I see. Yeah.
JACK HITT: So, it’s no secret that these two don’t like each other.
ROMAN MARS: But they also fundamentally disagree. Otis quit his job to take this case. Until days before the trial, he was working for the government side, meaning he should have been arguing in favor of the writs.
JACK HITT: But he quit the job and dramatically offered to represent the merchants for free. Now, you can say he did this for principal or he did because he’s still steamed about his old man. Whatever. It’s pretty exciting stuff. So Otis takes to the floor and he speaks for five hours. Let me just say something about five hours. I think people forget that way before television and radio, before telegraph, before even magazines, oratory was a whole other kind of public entertainment, really. I always love to remind people that we laud the Stephen Douglas Abraham Lincoln debates.
ROMAN MARS: There were seven Lincoln-Douglas debates, each were three hours long.
JACK HITT: But people had all the time in the world and this was great. So when I say he carried on for five hours, this is a good show.
ROMAN MARS: Totally. They’re binging a Netflix show.
JACK HITT: Right. This is Sopranos Season One.
ROMAN MARS: And you’re just hitting “next episode,” “next episode…”
JACK HITT: Exactly. And we know that he’s Furio, right? He’s a thunderous kind of fellow. So he warns the audience. He says, “I’m going to make this rather dangerous argument,” and even suggests “one that may end up destroying me.” And as we know them, these are the words he said right at the beginning of his talk. He said, “Let the consequences be what they will. I am determined to proceed. The only principles of public conduct that are worthy of a gentleman or a man are to sacrifice his state, ease, health, and applause, and even life itself, to the sacred call of his country.”
ROMAN MARS: Otis is preparing his audience. Whatever he’s about to say about these writs of assistance, these search warrants, might be so crazy that it could threaten everything.
JACK HITT: And in fact, he comes right in and lands it. He says, “This writ appears to me the worst instrument of arbitrary power, the most destructive of English liberty and the fundamental principles of law, that ever was found in an English law book.”
ROMAN MARS: Swinging. What he’s saying is that it’s inherently wrong for thugs to break into your home without due process.
JACK HITT: He says, “Now, one of the most essential branches of English liberty is the freedom of one’s house.” And then he brings out this sort of cherished old metaphor. He says, “A man’s house is his castle. And whilst he is quiet, he is as well guarded as a prince in his castle. This writ, if it should be declared legal, would totally annihilate this privilege.” And then he goes right there. He says, “No acts of Parliament can establish such a writ. No matter how Parliament might word this writ, it would be void.” Well, gulp.
ROMAN MARS: What is so radical about this is the fact that he’s questioning the very validity of Parliament–that there might be some laws that are deeper, more fundamental than the laws of Parliament.
ROMAN MARS: What he’s basically saying here is that the king’s law doesn’t stand up against natural law.
JACK HITT: That’s right. He’s saying Parliament’s law– So, understand at this time, no one has really brought into an American courtroom this idea of natural rights, these notions that haven’t even been written down yet. These five appointed judges totally believe that Parliament was supreme, no exceptions. So remember, in the previous century, a king had lost his head and another his throne in this centuries-long struggle that culminated in this idea that the law of Parliament is supreme. And that’s the word they always used. The law of Parliament is “supreme.” So here he is saying, “This right to privacy and these British rights in general predate parliament or any government. It’s certainly older than any of Parliament’s mealy laws.”
ROMAN MARS: [CHUCKLES] And so how is this panel of judges who represent Parliament’s mealy laws reacting to this?
JACK HITT: Well, the judges must have been floored. But the merchants in the room were moved. They thought, “Hey! We were just trying to wiggle out of some smuggling fees, but now we’re practically the Knights of the Round Table in the court of King Arthur.”
ROMAN MARS: The truth is, we don’t know exactly what James Otis said in that room. There isn’t a transcript of his speech. There is no minutes taker for the court. In fact, we only have one set of notes from it.
JACK HITT: There was really only one young guy who frantically scribbled down everything that he could get down on paper before it was all over: 25 year old, freshly minted lawyer, John Adams.
ROMAN MARS: Wow. In the room!
JACK HITT: Yes, that John Adams.
ROMAN MARS: For people who don’t know–that John Adam’s–founding father, second president, and kind of the scholar of the group.
JACK HITT: Well, he’s not only a scholar and the intellectual, but… Adams kept his diaries. He’s kind of the minutes taker of the entire revolution. I mean, we have his commentary on just about everything. And in fact, here, he famously writes a little later, “Otis was a flame of fire. Every man of an immense crowded audience appeared to me to go away as I did, ready to take arms against writs of assistance.”
ROMAN MARS: To be clear, Adams isn’t a merchant. He has no money at stake here. He’s just a young lawyer who was swept up in the brilliance and prescience of James Otis before him.
JACK HITT: Later he swoons a little bit and he says… And this is this very famous line about this little moment. “Then and there, the child independence was born.”
ROMAN MARS: Even the chief judge, Hutchinson, would later marvel at the magnitude of this moment.
JACK HITT: Later, Hutchinson writes his own little memoir and remembers that basically all the troubles in the colonies stem back to this time, and remember that Otis, before this speech, swore to him that he would “set the province in flames.”
ROMAN MARS: His five-hour oration may have radicalized the crowd of merchants and onlookers, but it failed to win the case.
ROMAN MARS: He lost the case, but he kind of won in the battle of ideas, at least in the crowd.
JACK HITT: Absolutely, and won in terms of his reputation.
ROMAN MARS: Otis becomes a politician. He’s elected to the Massachusetts House. And meanwhile, over the next few years, he’s taking this electrifying speech and refining his ideas, turning the argument into something he’ll write down on paper in one of the most popular forms of political commentary of the day, the pamphlet.
JACK HITT: You know, this is three years after the speech, when this pamphlet comes out. So he’s taken this idea of, like, these natural rights, these British liberties, and these inherent rights that predate government, and he’s kind of pulling it all together.
ROMAN MARS: And in 1764 he publishes a little pamphlet with a big title, The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved.
JACK HITT: Otis writes this pamphlet, and it does kind of go viral. In America, it goes through three editions. It’s published in London. So they’re discussing it in Parliament. So, yeah, this is a serious piece of paper, right? And it’s made all the more serious by some of the crazy ideas that are being thrown out from this pamphlet. He says, and I think he believes in his heart, that he’s trying to describe British government. He’s describing what he thinks once existed in England. But in fact, he’s kind of outlining what America is about to become.
ROMAN MARS: Otis goes much further in this pamphlet than he went in his courtroom speech. And he starts to outline a version of a country that was so foreign at the time, it would put his life in jeopardy, which is strange because, to us today, these crazy ideas sound so familiar. They are almost boring. For example, in the pamphlet, he lays out a structure for government. Instead of the supremacy of Parliament, he describes three branches working in tandem.
JACK HITT: Then he even uses the phrase “checks and balances” to describe how they work harmoniously. But of course, understand me, Parliament does not see it that way.
ROMAN MARS: He also takes issue with how the colonists are taxed, even though they don’t have a vote in elections.
JACK HITT: He says, “The very act of taxing exercised over those who are not represented appears to me depriving them of one of their most essential rights as free men.” And you know, this idea is what sort of boils down to the bumper sticker, “taxation without representation is tyranny,” right? One of the central sort of mottos of the revolution–that’s in this pamphlet.
ROMAN MARS: And he evokes this idea in this dramatic moment that our rights aren’t given to us by government, but by God.
JACK HITT: He says, “Parliament cannot make two and two five.” And he says, “The only person that can make natural law, like two and two is four, is God.” And every founding person would kind of take this idea and make it their own. You know, Adams later talks about rights granted by our maker. And of course, Jefferson famously says, “inalienable rights endowed by our creator.”
ROMAN MARS: But he’s also imagining a version of America that is far more of a utopia than most of the founding fathers would conceive of.
JACK HITT: And he has this one passage. Check this out. He says at one point, “The colonists are by the law of nature freeborn, as indeed all men are, white or Black.”
ROMAN MARS: Whoa!
JACK HITT: Yeah. James Otis, in this pamphlet, goes there because this is the absolute logic of all of these ideas.
ROMAN MARS: Absolutely. Absolutely.
JACK HITT: And he says, “Slavery threatens to reduce Europe and America to the ignorance and barbarity of the Dark Ages.”
ROMAN MARS: Wow. I love that he sees it all.
JACK HITT: Right, it’s all there. And he just carries it forward because he’s hot-headed. He’s Furio. He’s gonna take his argument to the end.
ROMAN MARS: Otis wasn’t trying to start a revolution with this pamphlet. Remember, it’s lovingly, awkwardly called The Rights of British Colonies Asserted and Proved. He wants to reform Britain, not start a new country. But the logic he sets out is like a grenade. Once he asserted that natural law supersedes parliamentary law, that there are rights so fundamental that no government can take them away, the tab had been pulled and grenade thrown.
[AD BREAK]
ROMAN MARS: So once Otis’ pamphlet is published, what happened? Like, how is Otis being perceived?
JACK HITT: Well, at first, of course, Otis is this great hero. And this is a very powerful and strong pamphlet. And here in the States, they think it’s all great. Now, it does get published in London. And like I said, this argument that Parliament is not supreme is not going to sit. I did find this. The eminent jurist of the day was a man named Lord Mansfield, and he did offer this opinion: “It is said the man is mad. The book is full of wildness.”
ROMAN MARS: Meanwhile, in the colonies, counter pamphlets are written and customs officers start bad-mouthing them. So Otis responds, in follow-up pamphlets, hot takes flying back and forth. And the consequences are becoming more and more dramatic.
JACK HITT: People are asking some hard questions like, “What do you mean Parliament isn’t supreme? Isn’t that treason to say that? Don’t you get hung for that?” You know, these are the questions that are floating around.
ROMAN MARS: Yeah, and so how does Otis take that?
JACK HITT: Increasingly, in these newspaper articles that he writes or in these other pamphlets that are sort of the followups, he starts backtracking. He doesn’t want people to think that he’s not a good Brit–that he’s not a loyal British citizen swearing allegiance to the king and recognizing the supremacy of Parliament. He is, after all, a politician in Massachusetts, a British politician. He writes, in one of his subsequent pamphlets, things like, “Of course, Parliament is the supreme sovereign power.” And then he says, Parliament “remains the supreme judge from whose final determination there is no appeal.” So you’re like, “Oh wait, what happened, Otis? What happened? James? What’s going on?” And you get a sense that Otis might be just even a little bit afraid. They are talking about treason, right? The last one is kind of hard to read because it’s so full of this kind of language. Check this out. He’s referring to his previous pamphlets. He says, “If there is anything offensive in either, I am heartily sorry.” And then he refers to himself in the third person and says that “the author of these previous pamphlets has given me authority in his name humbly to ask pardon for the least iota that may have displeased his superiors.”
ROMAN MARS: Wow. What do you make of this? What is your read on him backtracking?
JACK HITT: Well, I think he was afraid. You know, the pushback was fervent. John Adams, once again, always with his diaries and notes, always observing the scene, writes that Otis was called a “reprobate, an apostate, and a traitor in every street in Boston. The indignation of all his political friends against him was universal. So now, Otis is a pariah, the town goat.”
ROMAN MARS: Yeah. You can see why he would begin to acquiesce–why he would begin to capitulate. You know, we lament him backtracking here, but there’s nothing to stop what he’s already started, in a way.
JACK HITT: Right. Right. And in that pamphlet, he floats so many radical ideas. I mean, when he goes off about racial equality, he’s speaking to an audience that almost 100% can’t hear anything he’s saying. But he is in a world of his own making. He’s in an America that wouldn’t exist for… Well, it doesn’t exist yet. But certainly he sees it, right? And I think all of his boldness in the pamphlet–once it hits the buzzsaw of all this criticism–talk of treason, even the gallows, makes him realize, “Well, maybe I did go a little too far.” But he does back up. He does retreat. And it’s kind of horrible to read.
ROMAN MARS: This is where things start to get Shakespearean. Otis knows he’s not going to win the fight against Parliament, so he starts backing off his revolutionary rhetoric. But he’s still mad. He’s still Furio, after all. So he starts fighting any fight that he might be able to win. He starts publicly feuding in the papers with some of the customs agents who disagree with him. They’re always fighting each other in the papers. In one article, he calls them “superlative blockheads.” So one day, Otis learns that one of these superlative blockheads, a customs agent named John Robinson, is coming to Boston. And Otis takes to the newspaper to speak again about the natural rights of man.
JACK HITT: In the Boston Gazette, he writes this line: “I have a natural right if I can get no other satisfaction than to break his head.” Now we’re parodying himself.
ROMAN MARS: Parody or not, Otis tries to make good on his threat.
JACK HITT: Otis prowls the bars one night looking for Robinson and finds him. And he challenges him to a duel then and there. And Robinson just grabs Otis by the nose and drags him around. Now they both have walking sticks, so they just start beating the crap out of each other. But Robinson gets the upper hand and seriously bashes Otis’ skull in with his stick. He is seriously injured–brain injury. A few months afterwards, Adams visits him and sees the healed gash. And as always in his diary, he writes, “You could lay a finger in it.” Yeah, so it’s bad. And then it just gets worse.
ROMAN MARS: The injury proves to be devastating. Otis starts falling apart right there in front of all the townspeople of Boston. Remember, this is like a college campus. And the hotshot, hothead lawyer who took on the government with all the bravado in the world is now being described as a “miserable vagabond rolling in the streets and gutters, a drunkard, a madman shooting guns out of his windows.” And then he does something poetically tragic.
JACK HITT: One night he is in a rage. And one of the merchants in town writes in his diary, “Mr. Otis got into a mad freak tonight and broke a great many windows in the townhouse.” Now remember, that’s where he made his speech. And he goes there one night and smashes out all the windows.
ROMAN MARS: Oh, where he made his first fiery speech. He just goes there at night and just smashes out the window?
JACK HITT: Just throws rocks through all the windows. But then, in 1771, he’s declared a “lunatick.” L-U-N-A-T-I-C-K.
ROMAN MARS: The pre-Webster spelling of “lunatic.”
JACK HITT: That’s right, which is some sort of category of mental state, at the time.
ROMAN MARS: Otis leaves Boston, leaves politics and law and all the arguments about Parliament and the superlative blockheads, retires to a farm to convalesce, stops writing pamphlets and newspaper articles, and stops outlining a version of a country only he can see. But pretty soon, others start to see it, too. Samuel Adams spreads Otis’ argument, now filed into the sharpest slogan of the age, “no taxation without representation.” In 1768, John Hancock’s ship, the Liberty, gets seized while smuggling Madeira wine. Hancock comes out the other side a revolutionary, throwing in with the Sons of Liberty, putting his fortune behind the cause. Some of them turn fast like that. Others, like Jefferson and Washington, come to it slowly, talking themselves into treason one year at a time. But here’s the thing. They came to it together. They had committees and taverns and each other. When Hancock needed a lawyer to defend him, his friend, John Adams, took the case and won. It was a whole crowd of men radicalizing in the same direction at once, but not Otis.
ROMAN MARS: So the whole war happens. He is taking a rest at the farm as to not sort of aggravate his lunacy. And then we win.
JACK HITT: Right. Yorktown. The British surrender. And it’s 1783. And we’re en route to signing the Treaty of Paris and become a country. So, somewhere in that year, John Hancock decides to have a big party. You know, he is John Hancock. And he invites everybody. It’s a big party. And somebody, I think it’s Hancock, comes up with the idea that “we should invite James Otis because he was there at the beginning, right?” This is right at the time when people realize books are going to be written about them now. Statues are going to be carved. They won. We’re starting a new country. And so they invite Otis out of respect. And he comes.
ROMAN MARS: There’s not much written about this party, but you can imagine it. In the Hancock Manor, the finest home in all of Massachusetts Bay, they must have been drinking Madeira wine, John Hancock’s famous smuggled good, or the rum punch that was the preferred drink of the revolutionary elite. And the toasts–there must have been toasts! A war had been fought and won, lives had been lost, and an unlikely colony had beaten the most powerful empire on earth. And all the while, James Otis is there, old friends, familiar faces, celebrating the victory of a battle he’d surrendered. He could probably imagine the statues and the plaques, the parades and the holidays to come.
What was this like for Otis? Most of what we know comes from what a nephew of his recorded.
JACK HITT: And so the nephew escorts him, out of the party, out of Boston, and back to the farm. And we just have this one sort of bleak note that, immediately after this dinner, his nephew tells us that he just kind of breaks down. The way the nephew describes it is: “There was a visible oscillation of his intellect. He was overwhelmed by the recollection of past days, impressed probably with greater force by the presence of Hancock and others, of the convives, and by the scene altogether.” You know, it’s hard to imagine what Otis was thinking when he was at that party. But very few of us ever get to see the road not taken. We take our road. The significance of the Frost poem, of course, is that we all take the roads we take, and then we make up lies about how we made the right decision. That’s what that poem’s actually about because most of us never get to see the other path. But Otis did. He goes to that dinner and there it is, the other path. They’re all sitting around him. I can’t imagine just the gravity of that revelation. Certainly that alone would have made a man insane.
ROMAN MARS: He was alone when he was a revolutionary, and he was alone when he wasn’t a revolutionary. He was a man always out of step. But it took him taking that first step. The revolution he missed required a singular voice to crack through the status quo and electrify the people who came after him.
JACK HITT: He’s taken back to the country, back to the farm. And a few months later, it was just a lovely May, spring afternoon. A nice shower had started. He steps out onto the porch of the Osgood Farm in Andover, and a single bolt of lightning came out of the sky and killed him.
ROMAN MARS: Get out of here!
JACK HITT: Yeah. That’s how he died.
ROMAN MARS: Oh my god. It’s, like, mythical. It’s not even Shakespearean. It is, like, Greek and Roman and Shakespearean and biblical, all in one.
JACK HITT: I think it’s sort of fitting that he is taken out like a god. You know, I think that’s the final sort of compliment for Otis. Zeus will take you down.
ROMAN MARS: What an amazing story, Jack. It’s so much fun. Thanks for letting us all know about the tragedy of James Otis. It’s really something else.
JACK HITT: It’s the glory and the tragedy. I mean, there’s so many great things that come from Otis. And just, God, wow, the price of that kind of enthusiasm, that kind of daring, and that kind of ambition–that’s James Otis.
ROMAN MARS: Jack Hitt is an author and contributing editor of Harper’s, the New York Times Magazine and This American Life.
A History of the United States in 100 Objects is a production of 99% Invisible and BBC studios. It’s hosted and curated by me, Roman Mars.
Our series producers are Priscilla Alabi, Brenna Daldorph, and Ellie Lightfoot. Our Associate Producer is Isaac Fisher.
The series was edited by Annie Brown and Courtney Harrell.
Mixing by Charlie Brandon-King. Fact checking by Amy Bracken. Our theme song is by Swan Real.
From 99% Invisible, our executive producer is Kathy Tu.
From BBC Studios, our executive producers are Annie Brown and Courtney Harrell. Our Production coordinator is Shan Pill-ay and production manager is Mabel Finnegan-Wright.
Artwork by Stefan Lawrence.
99% Invisible is part of the SiriusXM podcast family, headquartered in beautiful… Uptown… Oakland, California. And BBC Studios is headquartered in beautiful… White City… West London.
If you want to get in touch or have an object for us to consider, email us at [email protected].
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