BOSTON — Some folks are saying the man who wants to be the next Democratic president of the United States needs a history lesson.
During his six-day journey from his birthplace in Colorado to the Democratic National Convention in Boston, Sen. John Kerry has proclaimed his Massachusetts hometown to be America’s birthplace — stirring the competitive juices of rivals in Pennsylvania and Virginia who say their states have equal or better claim to that title.
“Boston, although an important venue in our nation’s history, kind of pales in comparison to Philadelphia, the real birthplace of America, where the greatest minds in Colonial America hammered out a Declaration of Independence and Constitution,” said Sen. Rick Santorum, Pennsylvania Republican.
Even members of Mr. Kerry’s own party, supporters who will be speaking at the convention tonight, said they had to break with him on this issue.
“Birthplace of America, cradle of democracy — it depends on how you define it,” Virginia Gov. Mark Warner, a Democrat, said via a spokeswoman. “But we would contend Jamestown’s the answer to that question.”
The spokeswoman noted, though, that Mr. Kerry did stop in Norfolk on Tuesday morning, which placed him in the state’s Tidewater region where Jamestown is located.
“So he can check that off,” she said.
Refereeing the dispute, Timothy J. Shannon, a history professor at Gettysburg College, said, “I would call Boston the place of the pregnancy of America and Philadelphia the site of the actual delivery.”
He said Virginia also can lay claim to being the birthplace of the nation because so many of those Colonial “greatest minds” Mr. Santorum spoke about who had gathered in Philadelphia actually were from the Old Dominion.
“There is a point of pride here between New Englanders on the one hand and especially Virginians on the other, who really created the American nation. The brain power was really on [Virginia’s] side,” Mr. Shannon said.
He did, though, credit New Englanders with being the “instigators — the people who rallied folks in the street” to spark the Revolutionary War.
Pennsylvania Gov. Edward G. Rendell, a Democrat, took the issue straight to the top of the Kerry campaign this weekend.
At a meeting this weekend of the Pennsylvania delegation to the convention, with Pittsburgh resident Teresa Heinz Kerry present, Mr. Rendell said that “the birthplace of America is a little bit south.”
Mrs. Kerry disputed that.
“I hate to correct the governor, but actually John said that [Boston] is the birthplace of freedom,” she said, according to CBS News’ Web site.
Actually, Mr. Kerry did not say freedom.
He visited Philadelphia on Tuesday afternoon, and the press announcement for the visit called Boston “home of this year’s Democratic National Convention and the birthplace of America.”
Also, a press release Monday announcing the beginning of the convention referred to Mr. Kerry’s journey along “America’s Freedom Trail, a trail they are blazing from Kerry’s birthplace of Aurora, Co., to America’s birthplace of Boston.”
And Mr. Kerry, arriving in Boston yesterday, said, “We’re here at the end of a journey that began where I was born — in Colorado — and ends where America was born — in Boston.”
“This is clearly another case of John Kerry trying to rewrite history,” said Sen. George Allen, Virginia Republican, who said he worried for the nation’s impressionable youngsters. “It is hardly helpful to the education of our children.”
In addition to the first permanent English colony at Jamestown, founded in 1607, Virginia also had the first elected legislative body in North America, started in 1619, “a year before the Pilgrims even got to Plymouth Rock,” Mr. Allen said.
Mr. Allen’s claim for Jamestown has some strong backing.
No less an authority than the National Park Service says on its Web page for Jamestown that it should be marketed as “America’s birthplace.”
Virginia and Massachusetts also spar for recognition as the site of the first Thanksgiving, with Virginians battling the Pilgrims’ version with their Thanksgiving that took place at Berkeley Plantation in 1619.
Another former Massachusetts Democrat took the bold step of giving Virginia its due. President Kennedy in 1963 recognized Virginia’s Thanksgiving claim.
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