The Samuel Gray Society is an educational foundation dedicated to the preservation of 18th century American history and to the life of Samuel Gray, the great patriot from whom the SGS takes its name. Forged in the crucible of historic events that shaped our nation, the SGS continues in the present day as a sacred fellowship of dedicated men and women who continue to embody the Enlightenment ideals and the traditions on which our nation was founded.
Samuel Gray, our foundational figure, was the first man killed is the Boston Massacre. On March 5, 1770 he was among three men instantly killed by British soldiers during a tense exchange on King Street. Two others died in the following days from their wounds and eleven others suffered injuries. While the British saw this event as the justified suppression of a riot instigated by insurrectionists, the incident sparked the colonial rebellion which ultimately led to the Revolutionary War and subsequent American Independence in 1782. While the massacre was only one of several factors in the colonial rebellion, the victims were considered martyrs to the cause of liberty, inspiring Bostonians such as Samuel Adams and Paul Revere to solicit support for a war for independence. It came six years later.
For such a compelling figure as Gray, little is fully known about him. Numerous reports list him as the first man to be shot during the massacre. All accounts describe his death as instantaneous, having been shot with a musket directly in the skull by the British soldier Matthew Killroy. What is known of the life of Samuel Gray (as opposed to his death) has been gathered almost exclusively from second hand accounts, the most famous of which come from the publication of the newspaper “Boston Gazette and Country Journal” and from the legal papers of John Adams, who was the defense lawyer for the British in the murder trial following the event. To augment these documents, the SGS also holds several handwritten diaries of early members that provide more insight into this American hero.
Gray was employed as a rope maker at John Gray’s Ropewalks in Boston. He had a well-known reputation as a brawler and tavern regular. He was a man who liked ale and fisticuffs, and his hearty reputation as a bare-knuckled fighter drew many pugilists to obtain membership in the SGS. Gray is documented as having had several physical encounters with occupying British forces, including a fight in a bar just days before the shooting. Diary entries believed to be written by friends and co-workers of Gray also describe him as an enthusiastic scrimshander. According to the obituary printed on March 12, 1770 in “The Boston Journal and Country Gazette”, Gray’s burial procession commenced from his brother Benjamin's home. No other surviving family members are documented, and Gray is not believed to have been married or to have had any children.
Having offered this albeit brief background on Samuel Gray, I would now like to discuss the society and its some of its history in relation to the early colonies. The Samuel Gray Society’s origins are difficult to trace, having been founded from a loose fellowship of sailors and post-revolutionary Bostonians who charged themselves with commemorating everyday heroism in the brotherhood of the working class. Most likely in response to popular selective and exclusively fraternal organizations such as the Society of the Cincinnati and the Freemasons, the SGS was originally open to all interested men and women in the greater Boston area. This egalitarian nature, while applauded today, may have forced the society to remain rather inconspicuous at their inception, for fear of being muscled by established paternal groups entrenched in local politics. Early philanthropic support from John Gray’s Ropewalks, where Samuel Gray was employed until his death, allowed the organization to develop an official seal and host open meetings in the evenings at local alehouses.
The SGS remained, at least unofficially, more sympathetic to the anti-federalists than not, but soon also attached itself to matters of local politics and later, to class dispute. The historic seal of the SGS combines a common rope tool, called a wouldring stick, with the two icons of the U.S. Great Seal of 1782, first employed by then Secretary of the Continental Congress Charles Thomson. The seal was first struck in Philadelphia (possibly by engraver Robert Scot) and utilizes the olive branch and arrows to symbolize the power of war and peace. The arrows number 13, the original number of U.S, States. The rope tool is an obvious reference to Samuel Gray, who was employed as a rope maker in Boston. The SGS seal was struck by silversmith Stewart Lincoln, although the original die was later melted down during the Civil War.
After the loss of the original die, officers of the SGS established a fund to commission an official emblem for the organization. A sub-committee was created to oversee the project, and after several months of input and debate, a sculptor was chosen to create “an object to unite the common man and to commemorate the life and passion of Samuel Gray in a most direct and accessible way.” Jonathan Doury was selected by the panel to create a wax pattern to be cast in bronze. The emblem, shown here, is a handsomely detailed cast of the artist’s arm. The hand is clenched as a symbol of strength and solidarity, wrapped in hemp rope like a boxer’s fist. The bronze was cast at a foundry in Texas and shipped via railcar to its Boston audience. The finished piece was instantly beloved by members and the public alike. Upon seeing it, one member remarked that “it had power to challenge the grandeur of Philadelphia’s great bell.” While such praise seems hyperbolic, the emblem has remained a powerful representation of the human struggle against tyranny and injustice everywhere.
Late in the 19th century, Immigration Rights became a central component of SGS advocacy. The SGS actively campaigned against the 1882 Immigration Act and later against the Immigration Act of 1917, which barred immigrants over the age of 16 who were deemed to be illiterate, as well as persons judged to be alcoholics, or feeble minded. SGS members believed these policies could also unduly discriminate against manual and service sector laborers, the lion's share of SGS membership. The 1917 act was passed by a congressional override of President Woodrow Wilson’s veto. Wilson’s veto endeared him to the SGS, who endorsed him for a third term, unaware of the full extent his incapacitation due to a massive stroke. After Wilson’s death in 1924, the society elected him an honorary member.
Following the Wilson presidency, the SGS remained active in their local community before re-entering another significant national debate within the Roosevelt administration. Following the winter of 1932-33, the most desperate time of the Great Depression, Roosevelt’s New Deal policies were enacted quickly to provide relief to 16 million unemployed Americans. The passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act in 1933 offered the first protections for the rights of workers to organize. In 1934 Roosevelt then endorsed the Wagner Act, which prevented employers from unfair labor practices aimed at the prevention of unionization. While the AFL had been in existence since 1886, the organization shunned unskilled laborers. However, in 1935 John Lewis founded the Committee for Industrial Organization, which, as a more populist and inclusive brotherhood, immediately caught the ear of the SGS.
SGS members, like many exploited workers yearning for the promise of a better future, quickly joined Lewis’ organization. The SGS promoted a local chapter of the CIO in 1938, and the two organizations soon shared a mutual bond and mutual political philosophy that continues to this day. The SGS’s fiercest support came in the form of extended protests outside the court deliberations regarding Hague v. CIO, which ultimately went to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1939. Many broadsides currently housed in our archives refer to the history of organized labor during this time.
Due to its narrow and specific focus, The SGS today is often classified as a Micro historical association. To that end the SGS has established a visual archive that is digitally accessible on the internet, as well as physically available for exhibitions throughout the United States. Curated with the mission to define the unique character of the revolution and of the American spirit, the archive holds objects and ephemera that are believed to reflect significant aspects of the economic, demotic, religious and maritime traditions of our United States. Divided among the archive's collections are fine examples of Scrimshaw, Ephemera, Material Culture and 18th Century Technology.
I must admit to you all that the first half of this treatise is a bit of a ruse. The Samuel Gray Society has no physical address outside of my office at the University of Texas, and I am the founder, collections manager and sole member of the organization. In fact, I am the maker, or re-maker of every object you have viewed during this talk.
So now that I have outed myself I'd like to tell you why I do what I do.
I am an artist and a professor, and as such, feel privileged to be a part of an intellectual community. In part artists operate as cultural critics, and therefore place themselves in a position to counter assumptions, to scrutinize popular media, customs or traditions--what the ancient Greeks called nomoi-- but more importantly art, or at least much art made since the embrace of the academy, specifically adopts this strategy in the grand, romantic and humanist tradition of the Enlightenment.
Language is very important. My public talks, like this one, typically begin as performances, wherein I use words and phrases very purposefully when referencing my work. By substituting phrases such we believe in replacement of we know, and using verbs such as presume as opposed to determine, I intentionally deny specificity and avoid the rigors of objective verification or any scientific methodology. These phrases have the added value of appearing as honest, ubiquitous and innocent synonyms for more exacting language, a curiosity that all successful politicians have learned in their spin classes. Belief is not a substitute for verity...in fact, to replace either word for the other demeans each equally. But in truth, it happens everyday, and I have learned that one can say a great deal about very little and get by quite well. But as opposed to sustaining this false equivalency, I choose to expose myself in order to expose the game itself.
To quote the historian M.I. Finley in his book Ancient History, “Accuracy and truth are not synonymous...”. He refers to the gaps in our knowledge, and the tenuous nature of truth and scholarship with respect to the past—a past that is both inaccessible and interwoven with various prejudices both conscious and unconscious. I present my work in such a way as to make clear the role of questioning and critically examining information as a method for understanding ourselves and reasoning the world around us.
I am also inspired by an argument thoughtfully made by the philosopher and historian Arthur Danto, who in his most recent book Narration and Knowledge, dissects, among other things, the concern that one cannot know the history of the past any more than one can know the future. His argument centers on meaning--or more appropriately making history meaningful in a human sense, as opposed to one bound by and to general laws. He states "the substantive philosophies of history, insofar as I have correctly characterized them, are clearly concerned with what I shall term prophecy."...and that "to ask for the significance of an event, in the historical sense of the term, is to ask a question which can be answered only in the context of a story." My research exhumes history, but in essence, I am simply a storyteller. And like all good stories, my work operates as a collection of embellished facts.
It is undeniable that we now live in an era increasingly rationalized through relative truths, which are natural and in many ways beneficial by-products of pluralism and post modernism. This is reflected in the reality that today, it is possible for you to have your truth and I to have mine. Just as there is your news source and there is my news source, each cooking their information according to our appetites. And of course, as a result of this, there is your version of history and there is mine. Almost nothing is known about the life of Samuel Gray, which is why I chose him, and like a poet or playwright, or for that matter, a judge, a general, a preacher, or a senator, I intend to insert my narrative where there is an opening. In this way, history is an act of creation--a ripe mixture of certitude and mythology. I will argue that in doing this I am no more different than anyone else....I am just more honest about it. At least I am being so right now.
A renaissance of amateur 18th century American historicism can be clearly evidenced today in the amorphous factions of Tea Party affiliates throughout the country. The sloganeering of these party platforms is intentionally romantic, lofty and vague, and presumes a more distilled noble age of American exceptionalism somehow bound in the era of our founders. It is a more conspicuous example of history as fiction than I could ever conjure, for even as they demand liberty, their nostalgia forsakes among other things the presence of slavery and sexism that would impede the freedom of 60 percent or more of the American population. And herein lies the rub, and the danger--that narratives of historical relativism frequently operate not by rewriting history, as many critics erroneously point out, for that requires too active and too conspicuous a role in the drama. Rather, historical relativism often operates through a selective shopping for facts to support a pre-existing view, leaving contradictions, complications or obstacles that get in the way of tidy conclusions on the shelves to expire like bad milk. Of course the irony in this, is that it is this very openness of history that created the possibility of pluralistic art. What Arthur Danto calls "posthistorical" is the state of contemporary art wherein it answers to no external precedent or qualifications outside of itself. For this to occur history must be malleable and less authoritative than our grade school textbooks would have led us to believe. But it seems to me that we must be also more ethical in our employment of it.
So in the end, it is important to me that I fool you for awhile, and that you suspend disbelief, and that you are captured. But ultimately I must also be exposed, and you must be freed. You may question whether any of this should be the care of an artist to begin with. I would answer that it is my job to ask questions and to create possibilities. It is your job to check the accuracy of my claims. And more important still that you apply the same scrutiny used to dissect the truth from fiction in my work to all facets of life and learning. Or at least admit that we're all making it up as we go.
The Samuel Gray Society is an educational foundation dedicated to the preservation of 18th century American history and to the life of Samuel Gray, the great patriot from whom the SGS takes its name. Forged in the crucible of historic events that shaped our nation, the SGS continues in the present day as a sacred fellowship of dedicated men and women who continue to embody the Enlightenment ideals and the traditions on which our nation was founded.
Samuel Gray, our foundational figure, was the first man killed is the Boston Massacre. On March 5, 1770 he was among three men instantly killed by British soldiers during a tense exchange on King Street. Two others died in the following days from their wounds and eleven others suffered injuries. While the British saw this event as the justified suppression of a riot instigated by insurrectionists, the incident sparked the colonial rebellion which ultimately led to the Revolutionary War and subsequent American Independence in 1782. While the massacre was only one of several factors in the colonial rebellion, the victims were considered martyrs to the cause of liberty, inspiring Bostonians such as Samuel Adams and Paul Revere to solicit support for a war for independence. It came six years later.
For such a compelling figure as Gray, little is fully known about him. Numerous reports list him as the first man to be shot during the massacre. All accounts describe his death as instantaneous, having been shot with a musket directly in the skull by the British soldier Matthew Killroy. What is known of the life of Samuel Gray (as opposed to his death) has been gathered almost exclusively from second hand accounts, the most famous of which come from the publication of the newspaper “Boston Gazette and Country Journal” and from the legal papers of John Adams, who was the defense lawyer for the British in the murder trial following the event. To augment these documents, the SGS also holds several handwritten diaries of early members that provide more insight into this American hero.
Gray was employed as a rope maker at John Gray’s Ropewalks in Boston. He had a well-known reputation as a brawler and tavern regular. He was a man who liked ale and fisticuffs, and his hearty reputation as a bare-knuckled fighter drew many pugilists to obtain membership in the SGS. Gray is documented as having had several physical encounters with occupying British forces, including a fight in a bar just days before the shooting. Diary entries believed to be written by friends and co-workers of Gray also describe him as an enthusiastic scrimshander. According to the obituary printed on March 12, 1770 in “The Boston Journal and Country Gazette”, Gray’s burial procession commenced from his brother Benjamin's home. No other surviving family members are documented, and Gray is not believed to have been married or to have had any children.
Having offered this albeit brief background on Samuel Gray, I would now like to discuss the society and its some of its history in relation to the early colonies. The Samuel Gray Society’s origins are difficult to trace, having been founded from a loose fellowship of sailors and post-revolutionary Bostonians who charged themselves with commemorating everyday heroism in the brotherhood of the working class. Most likely in response to popular selective and exclusively fraternal organizations such as the Society of the Cincinnati and the Freemasons, the SGS was originally open to all interested men and women in the greater Boston area. This egalitarian nature, while applauded today, may have forced the society to remain rather inconspicuous at their inception, for fear of being muscled by established paternal groups entrenched in local politics. Early philanthropic support from John Gray’s Ropewalks, where Samuel Gray was employed until his death, allowed the organization to develop an official seal and host open meetings in the evenings at local alehouses.
The SGS remained, at least unofficially, more sympathetic to the anti-federalists than not, but soon also attached itself to matters of local politics and later, to class dispute. The historic seal of the SGS combines a common rope tool, called a wouldring stick, with the two icons of the U.S. Great Seal of 1782, first employed by then Secretary of the Continental Congress Charles Thomson. The seal was first struck in Philadelphia (possibly by engraver Robert Scot) and utilizes the olive branch and arrows to symbolize the power of war and peace. The arrows number 13, the original number of U.S, States. The rope tool is an obvious reference to Samuel Gray, who was employed as a rope maker in Boston. The SGS seal was struck by silversmith Stewart Lincoln, although the original die was later melted down during the Civil War.
After the loss of the original die, officers of the SGS established a fund to commission an official emblem for the organization. A sub-committee was created to oversee the project, and after several months of input and debate, a sculptor was chosen to create “an object to unite the common man and to commemorate the life and passion of Samuel Gray in a most direct and accessible way.” Jonathan Doury was selected by the panel to create a wax pattern to be cast in bronze. The emblem, shown here, is a handsomely detailed cast of the artist’s arm. The hand is clenched as a symbol of strength and solidarity, wrapped in hemp rope like a boxer’s fist. The bronze was cast at a foundry in Texas and shipped via railcar to its Boston audience. The finished piece was instantly beloved by members and the public alike. Upon seeing it, one member remarked that “it had power to challenge the grandeur of Philadelphia’s great bell.” While such praise seems hyperbolic, the emblem has remained a powerful representation of the human struggle against tyranny and injustice everywhere.
Late in the 19th century, Immigration Rights became a central component of SGS advocacy. The SGS actively campaigned against the 1882 Immigration Act and later against the Immigration Act of 1917, which barred immigrants over the age of 16 who were deemed to be illiterate, as well as persons judged to be alcoholics, or feeble minded. SGS members believed these policies could also unduly discriminate against manual and service sector laborers, the lion's share of SGS membership. The 1917 act was passed by a congressional override of President Woodrow Wilson’s veto. Wilson’s veto endeared him to the SGS, who endorsed him for a third term, unaware of the full extent his incapacitation due to a massive stroke. After Wilson’s death in 1924, the society elected him an honorary member.
Following the Wilson presidency, the SGS remained active in their local community before re-entering another significant national debate within the Roosevelt administration. Following the winter of 1932-33, the most desperate time of the Great Depression, Roosevelt’s New Deal policies were enacted quickly to provide relief to 16 million unemployed Americans. The passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act in 1933 offered the first protections for the rights of workers to organize. In 1934 Roosevelt then endorsed the Wagner Act, which prevented employers from unfair labor practices aimed at the prevention of unionization. While the AFL had been in existence since 1886, the organization shunned unskilled laborers. However, in 1935 John Lewis founded the Committee for Industrial Organization, which, as a more populist and inclusive brotherhood, immediately caught the ear of the SGS.
SGS members, like many exploited workers yearning for the promise of a better future, quickly joined Lewis’ organization. The SGS promoted a local chapter of the CIO in 1938, and the two organizations soon shared a mutual bond and mutual political philosophy that continues to this day. The SGS’s fiercest support came in the form of extended protests outside the court deliberations regarding Hague v. CIO, which ultimately went to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1939. Many broadsides currently housed in our archives refer to the history of organized labor during this time.
Due to its narrow and specific focus, The SGS today is often classified as a Micro historical association. To that end the SGS has established a visual archive that is digitally accessible on the internet, as well as physically available for exhibitions throughout the United States. Curated with the mission to define the unique character of the revolution and of the American spirit, the archive holds objects and ephemera that are believed to reflect significant aspects of the economic, demotic, religious and maritime traditions of our United States. Divided among the archive's collections are fine examples of Scrimshaw, Ephemera, Material Culture and 18th Century Technology.
I must admit to you all that the first half of this treatise is a bit of a ruse. The Samuel Gray Society has no physical address outside of my office at the University of Texas, and I am the founder, collections manager and sole member of the organization. In fact, I am the maker, or re-maker of every object you have viewed during this talk.
So now that I have outed myself I'd like to tell you why I do what I do.
I am an artist and a professor, and as such, feel privileged to be a part of an intellectual community. In part artists operate as cultural critics, and therefore place themselves in a position to counter assumptions, to scrutinize popular media, customs or traditions--what the ancient Greeks called nomoi-- but more importantly art, or at least much art made since the embrace of the academy, specifically adopts this strategy in the grand, romantic and humanist tradition of the Enlightenment.
Language is very important. My public talks, like this one, typically begin as performances, wherein I use words and phrases very purposefully when referencing my work. By substituting phrases such we believe in replacement of we know, and using verbs such as presume as opposed to determine, I intentionally deny specificity and avoid the rigors of objective verification or any scientific methodology. These phrases have the added value of appearing as honest, ubiquitous and innocent synonyms for more exacting language, a curiosity that all successful politicians have learned in their spin classes. Belief is not a substitute for verity...in fact, to replace either word for the other demeans each equally. But in truth, it happens everyday, and I have learned that one can say a great deal about very little and get by quite well. But as opposed to sustaining this false equivalency, I choose to expose myself in order to expose the game itself.
To quote the historian M.I. Finley in his book Ancient History, “Accuracy and truth are not synonymous...”. He refers to the gaps in our knowledge, and the tenuous nature of truth and scholarship with respect to the past—a past that is both inaccessible and interwoven with various prejudices both conscious and unconscious. I present my work in such a way as to make clear the role of questioning and critically examining information as a method for understanding ourselves and reasoning the world around us.
I am also inspired by an argument thoughtfully made by the philosopher and historian Arthur Danto, who in his most recent book Narration and Knowledge, dissects, among other things, the concern that one cannot know the history of the past any more than one can know the future. His argument centers on meaning--or more appropriately making history meaningful in a human sense, as opposed to one bound by and to general laws. He states "the substantive philosophies of history, insofar as I have correctly characterized them, are clearly concerned with what I shall term prophecy."...and that "to ask for the significance of an event, in the historical sense of the term, is to ask a question which can be answered only in the context of a story." My research exhumes history, but in essence, I am simply a storyteller. And like all good stories, my work operates as a collection of embellished facts.
It is undeniable that we now live in an era increasingly rationalized through relative truths, which are natural and in many ways beneficial by-products of pluralism and post modernism. This is reflected in the reality that today, it is possible for you to have your truth and I to have mine. Just as there is your news source and there is my news source, each cooking their information according to our appetites. And of course, as a result of this, there is your version of history and there is mine. Almost nothing is known about the life of Samuel Gray, which is why I chose him, and like a poet or playwright, or for that matter, a judge, a general, a preacher, or a senator, I intend to insert my narrative where there is an opening. In this way, history is an act of creation--a ripe mixture of certitude and mythology. I will argue that in doing this I am no more different than anyone else....I am just more honest about it. At least I am being so right now.
A renaissance of amateur 18th century American historicism can be clearly evidenced today in the amorphous factions of Tea Party affiliates throughout the country. The sloganeering of these party platforms is intentionally romantic, lofty and vague, and presumes a more distilled noble age of American exceptionalism somehow bound in the era of our founders. It is a more conspicuous example of history as fiction than I could ever conjure, for even as they demand liberty, their nostalgia forsakes among other things the presence of slavery and sexism that would impede the freedom of 60 percent or more of the American population. And herein lies the rub, and the danger--that narratives of historical relativism frequently operate not by rewriting history, as many critics erroneously point out, for that requires too active and too conspicuous a role in the drama. Rather, historical relativism often operates through a selective shopping for facts to support a pre-existing view, leaving contradictions, complications or obstacles that get in the way of tidy conclusions on the shelves to expire like bad milk. Of course the irony in this, is that it is this very openness of history that created the possibility of pluralistic art. What Arthur Danto calls "posthistorical" is the state of contemporary art wherein it answers to no external precedent or qualifications outside of itself. For this to occur history must be malleable and less authoritative than our grade school textbooks would have led us to believe. But it seems to me that we must be also more ethical in our employment of it.
So in the end, it is important to me that I fool you for awhile, and that you suspend disbelief, and that you are captured. But ultimately I must also be exposed, and you must be freed. You may question whether any of this should be the care of an artist to begin with. I would answer that it is my job to ask questions and to create possibilities. It is your job to check the accuracy of my claims. And more important still that you apply the same scrutiny used to dissect the truth from fiction in my work to all facets of life and learning. Or at least admit that we're all making it up as we go.