Patriotism and dissent on Lexington’s Battle Green

In the lead up to the 250th Anniversary of the Battle of Lexington, LexObserver spoke with author and activist Bill McKibben about the lessons he internalized from his hometown’s most famous battle. McKibben also talks about a formative event he calls the Second Battle of Lexington — a Vietnam War protest on Lexington’s Battle Green.

LexObserver: You grew up in Lexington, and in your book “The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon,” you mention that your Scout troop got to raise the flag over the Battle Green at the bicentennial celebration in 1975. What else do you remember about that day? How did it make you feel? 

Bill McKibben: It was our Sea Scout troop — very nerve-wracking, what if we raised it upside down? But once we got through that I enjoyed the day immensely: a sea of people, and the sense that we were in an important place that day. 

LexObserver: You also worked as a tour guide on the Battle Green as a teenager. What are some of the lessons that you internalized from the stories you told there? 

McKibben: For me, the main lesson in retrospect was that there is nothing in conflict between patriotism and dissent. These men were patriots, and they were standing up to unchecked power. I think telling those stories over and over had a good deal to do with the fact that I spent my life trying to stand up to unchecked power, in my case of the oil industry.

LexObserver: Later, your family took part in what you refer to as the Second Battle of Lexington, when Vietnam veterans led by John Kerry staged a protest on the symbolic Battle Green. The vets wanted to camp out overnight on the Green, but the Board of Selectmen refused to grant them permission. In an act of civil disobedience, the vets decided to stay anyway, and were joined by supporters from the town. Eventually the police began rounding up the protesters, arresting 410 people, including both vets and locals.

Can you tell us about the impact that day had on you as a 10-year-old? 

McKibben: I was extremely proud of my Dad, who was arrested, and it seemed to me at the time that it was a sign history was pointing in the right direction — that, like the Minutemen, townspeople had stood up and said no to big empire, in this case our own.  

LexObserver: We’re about to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Battle of Lexington. How do you think you would feel if you were raising that flag today? 

McKibben: I’m unsure that I’d want to. I think that our new president has desecrated American ideals in short order — the idea that he wants to take over Canada is just the most preposterous example of his un-American behavior and temperament. And the fact that half the country’s voters looked at him and thought ‘I’d like this’ makes me feel, for the first time in my life, as if I don’t really understand my country. But I would try, if I were raising that flag, to think about what it had meant through history, and to recommit to somehow trying to make it mean that again.

LexObserver: What do you think the Minutemen would think of the vibrant, diverse, civically-engaged present-day Lexington?

McKibben: I imagine they’d be astounded by it all! But they would find Town Meeting a little familiar —that sense of locally engaged democracy is something to hold on to!