by Sarah Vowell
In private, however, Winthrop will soon tell his fellow colonists the very opposite. “We shall be as a city upon a hill,” he says.
In “God’s Promise to His Plantation,” when John Cotton tells the seafarers before him that their exodus is as natural as a bee ditching a cramped hive, it is an act of kindness, especially to John Winthrop. Not all of Winthrop’s old comrades have been so quick with a bon voyage. When he asked his friend Robert Reyce for advice on whether or not to emigrate, Reyce sent him a churlish warning not to, starting with the fact that, at the age of forty-two, Winthrop was too damn old. “Plantations are for young men,” Reyce wrote, “that can endure all pains and hunger. . . . But for one of your years to undertake so large a task is seldom seen but to miscarry.” He added that the scheme would ruin Winthrop’s family, and that even on the off chance his ship avoids shipwreck, he’ll live across the sea on the dole, forever dependent on England “for supplies.” (It must have taken all of Winthrop’s considerable restraint not to ship Reyce a boat-load of so-there! corn upon Boston’s first harvest.) Finally, Reyce tries to dissuade Winthrop with the wilderness’s shocking lack of reading material, carping, “How hard will it be for one brought up among books and learned men, to live in a barbarous place, where is no learning and less civility?”
Not so hard, it turns out. Winthrop and his shipmates and their children and their children’s children just wrote their own books and pretty much kept their noses in them up until the day God created the Red Sox. One of the Puritans’ descendants, Ralph Waldo Emerson of Concord, embodied the wordy tradition passed down to him when he announced, “The art of writing is the highest of those permitted to man.” As the twentieth-century critic F. O. Mat thiessen would complain of Emerson’s bookish bent, “It can remind you of the bias of provincial New England, whose higher culture had been so exclusively one of books that it had grown incapable even of appraising the worth of other modes of expression.”
The United States is often called a Puritan nation. Well, here is one way in which it emphatically is not: Puritan lives were overwhelmingly, fanatically literary. Their single-minded obsession with one book, the Bible, made words the center of their lives—not land, not money, not power, not fun. I swear on Peter Stuyvesant’s peg leg that the country that became the U.S. bears a closer family resemblance to the devil-may-care merchants of New Amsterdam than it does to Boston’s communitarian English majors.
History is written by the writers. The quill-crazy New Englanders left behind libraries full of statements of purpose in the form of letters, sermons, court transcripts, and diaries. Most of what we know about the history of early New England is lifted straight out of Winthrop’s wonderful journal and William Bradford’s also wonderful Of Plymouth Plantation.
The seventeenth-century Puritans are seen as the ancestors of today’s anti-intellectual Protestant sects—probably because of high school productions of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, a fictionalization of the Salem Witch Trials of 1692, an exercise in stupidity that took place more than forty years after John Winthrop’s death. In fact, today’s evangelicals owe more to the Great Awakening revival movement of the eighteenth century, in which a believer’s passion and feelings came to trump book learning. Subsequent Great Awakening sequels over the next two centuries brought forth recent innovations, including the ecstatic outbursts known as speaking in tongues.
There wasn’t any speaking in tongues going on in Massachusetts Bay, unless you count classical Greek. The Puritans had barely nailed together their rickety cabins when they founded Harvard so their future clergymen could receive proper theological training in Hebrew and other biblical languages.
The magnitude of the Puritan devotion to higher education is on display in a letter Reverend Thomas Shepard, Jr., wrote to his son upon the lad’s admission to Harvard. (The elder Shepard was a graduate of Harvard’s class of 1653.) The father is full of advice on how his son can be a better student—read history for wisdom and poetry for wit, admit when he doesn’t understand something, etc. But Shepard’s note is not so much a letter to his son as a love letter to learning, expressing how he hopes the boy will approach his studies “with an appetite.” He continues, “So I say to you read! Read! Something will stick in the mind, be diligent and good will come of it.” Then he signs the letter “Pater tuus”—“your father,” in Latin.
Perry Miller, a Harvard professor who became the twentieth century’s preeminent Puritan scholar, wrote:
Puritanism was not an anti-intellectual fundamentalism; it was a learned, scholarly movement that required on the part of the leaders, and as much as possible from the followers, not only knowledge but a respect for the cultural heritage. Being good classicists, they read Latin and Greek poetry, and tried their hands at composing verses of their own. The amount they wrote, even amid the labor of settling a wilderness, is astonishing.
One of the Puritans’ descendants, future president John Adams, studied at Harvard under Professor John Winthrop, our Winthrop’s great-great-grandson. Writing the constitution for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in 1778, Adams included a paragraph entitled “ The Encouragement of Literature, Etc.,” which, his recent biographer David McCullough points out, “was like no other declaration to be found in any constitution ever written until then, or since.” It reads:
Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties; and as these depend on spreading the opportunities and advantages of education in various parts of the country, and among the different orders of the people, it shall be the duty of legislators and magistrates in all future periods of this commonwealth to cherish the interests of literature and the sciences, and all seminaries of them, especially the university at Cambridge, public schools, and grammar schools in the towns; to encourage private societies and public institutions, rewards and immunities, for the promotion of agriculture, arts, sciences, commerce, trades, manufactures, and a natural history of the country; to countenance and inculcate the principles of humanity and general benevolence, public and private charity, industry and frugality, honesty and punctuality in their dealings, sincerity, good humor, and all social affections, and generous sentiments among the people.
“It was, in all,” writes McCullough, “a declaration of Adams’s faith in education as the bulwark of the good society, the old abiding faith of his Puritan forebears.” Compare that lovely insight to the typical Puritan spoilsport cartoon.
Like any other American educated in public schools, my youthful encounters with New England colonials focused on Plymouth in 1620 and Salem in 1692. Which is to say that I read The Crucible in eleventh grade and I participated in elementary school Thanksgiving pageants in which children wearing construction-paper Pilgrim hats linked arms with others wearing Indian costumes consisting entirely of gift-shop souvenir Sioux headdresses and sang “God Bless America” and “ This land was made for you and me.”
But really, as a child I learned almost everything I knew about American history in general and British colonials in particular from watching television situation comedies. The first time I realized this, I was attending a wedding in London. A friend of the groom’s, an English novelist, cornered my American friend and me and asked us to name the British general from the Revolutionary War whom Americans hate the most. He needed one of the American characters in the novel he was working on to mention in passing our most loathed Redcoat foe.
“Um, maybe Cornwallis?” I said, adding that we don’t really know the names of any of the British except for the American traitor Benedict Arnold.
When the novelist asked why that was, my friend answered, “Because The Brady Bunch did an episode about him. Peter Brady had to play Benedict Arnold in a school play.”
True, I thought. The Bradys also taught us that the Robin Hood-like Jesse James was actually a serial killer; that the ancient indigenous religious culture of the Hawaiian Islands is not to b
e messed with; and that the Plymouth Pilgrims had a bleak first winter that was almost as treacherous to live through as that time Marcia got bonked in the face with her brothers’ football and her nose swelled up right before a big date.
In fact, the Brady Bunch Puritan episode is an educational twofer. Because its premise involves Greg Brady shooting a movie about the Mayflower Pilgrims using his family as actors, the viewer can learn about the hardships of colonial New England while at the same time learning about the hardships of directing an independent film. Greg’s parents and the housekeeper, Alice, give too many notes on his screenplay. His brothers only want to play Indians, and all three of his bickering sisters demand to play the role of the Puritan girl Priscilla Alden. So Greg lets loose a tirade about artistic vision. He yells, “I want to write my own screenplay, design my own sets, choose my costumes, and pick the actors. Don’t you see it’s my project?”
Greg’s final product is full of factual holes—like the offhand remark alluding to the so-called first Thanksgiving that “the Pilgrims made friends with the Indians and invited them to a feast,” when it was actually the Indians who taught the agriculturally challenged Englishmen how to plant corn in the first place. But there is one interesting exchange that’s a pretty accurate picture of a child coming to terms with American history.
Bobby and Peter, who have agreed to play Pilgrims in some scenes and Indians in others, are dressed up in kitschy Plains Indian-type garb. When Greg asks them if they know what to do, Peter answers, “Yeah, attack the fort.” When Greg and their mother point out that these are friendly Indians, so there won’t be an attack, Bobby asks, “ Then what do you need Indians for?”
“Bobby, the Indians were friendly at first,” says Mr. Brady. “ They didn’t start fighting until their land was taken away.”
Bobby: “You mean the Pilgrims took away all the Indians’ land?”
“ That’s right,” answers Mr. Brady, who immediately looks regretful at this point-blank lapse of patriotic-forefather boosterism and adds, “Uh, well, at first they didn’t take much of it.”
“Then how about not much of an attack?” cracks Peter. And that’s the end of the original sin question. After all, they have bigger logistical headaches at hand, like creating a realistic snowstorm using a box of breakfast cereal operated by one of the decidedly nonunion kid brothers.
From Mr. Ed to The Simpsons, there are actually a surprising number of sitcoms that have done episodes set in seventeenth-century New England. Even though seventeenth-century New England is all situation and no comedy.
I was in third grade when I saw the Happy Days Thanksgiving episode. The whole cast was in Puritan garb. Joanie Cunningham complains that “being a Pilgrim sure is a draggeth.” The Fonz says things like “Greetethamundo.” Here is the moment that inspired the first epiphany I ever had about colonial New England: Joanie leaves the room and her goody-goody brother Richie asks, “Father, are you letting her go out like that? Have you seen her skirt? It’s up to her ankles!” I remember sitting there watching that and realizing, for the first of many times, “Oh. Maybe the people who founded this country were kind of crazy.”
Later in the episode it is revealed that the person who gave us Thanksgiving was not Squanto or Plymouth governor William Bradford but rather the Fonz. All the Pilgrims were afraid of the Indians except Pilgrim Fonzie, who was their friend. Then Joanie gets her foot caught in one of Potsy’s stupid beaver traps. (That Potsy.) Remember that thing Fonzie does with the jukebox? Where he whacks it with his fist and the music plays? Turns out that works on beaver traps, too. They open right up. But he won’t free Joanie until everyone renounces their racism and acts nice to the Indians and invites them to dinner. Fonzie? He’s the Martin Luther King of candied yams.
Mostly, sitcom Puritans are rendered in the tone I like to call the Boy, people used to be so stupid school of history. Bewitched produced not one but two time-travel witch trial episodes—one for each Darrin. They’re both diatribes about tolerance straight out of The Crucible, but with cornier dialogue and magical nose crinkles. The housewife/witch Samantha brings a ballpoint pen with her to seventeenth-century Salem and the townspeople think it’s an instrument of black magic. So they try her for witchcraft and want to hang her.
Check out those barbarian idiots with their cockamamie farce of a legal system, locking people up for fishy reasons and putting their criminals to death. Good thing Americans put an end to all that nonsense long ago.
My point being, the amateur historian’s next stop after Boy, people used to be so stupid is People: still stupid. I could look at that realization as a woeful lack of human progress. But I choose to find it reassuring. Watching Bewitched and The Brady Bunch again, I was flummoxed as to why they made such a big deal about Mayflower voyagers John and Priscilla Alden. Then I figured out that those two once loomed so large in the American mind mostly because schoolchildren used to spend every November reading Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1858 love-triangle poem about the Aldens called “ The Courtship of Miles Standish.” The poem is full of all kinds of hooey, like calling Alden a scholar, even though in real life he was the guy on the Mayflower the Pilgrims hired as their barrel maker. Basically, he was in charge of the beer. And we should expect nothing less from Longfellow, who also poetically pumped up the importance of Paul Revere. There isn’t that much difference between tall tales that start “Listen, my children, and you shall hear” and “Here’s the story of a man named Brady.” In other words, Americans have learned our history from exaggerated popular art for as long as anyone can remember. Revolutionary War soldiers were probably singing fun but inaccurate folk songs about those silly Puritans to warm themselves by the fire at Valley Forge. Right before they defeated that godforsaken General Cornwallis, of course. Man, I hate that guy.
A search through a sampling of American newspapers from the last few weeks for the word “Puritan” yields the following. An article on how much baby boomers are looking forward to retirement because they’ve always rolled their eyes at the “Puritan work ethic” since their turn on/ drop out youths and thus can’t wait to spend their golden years traveling, volunteering, playing golf, and farming—the article really did say farming, which, I hate to break it to the flower children, is a pretty hard job. A financial analyst, speaking of a recent crackdown on mortgage lending, opines, “ The transition from drunken sailor to being a Puritan was awfully fast.” A profile of painter turned filmmaker Julian Schnabel claims “Puritan critics” always looked down on the artist’s charismatic joie de vivre. A sports columnist waxes happily that the national ardor for athletic events holds together our otherwise “fragmented society” in spite of “our Puritan forefathers’ deep distrust of any kind of play.”
I’m always disappointed when I see the word “Puritan” tossed around as shorthand for a bunch of generic, boring, stupid, judgmental killjoys. Because to me, they are very specific, fascinating, sometimes brilliant, judgmental killjoys who rarely agreed on anything except that Catholics are going to hell.
Certainly the Puritans believed and said and did many unreasonable things. That kind of goes with the territory of being born before the Age of Reason. Ponder all the cockamamie notions we moderns have been spared simply by coming into this world after an apple conked Sir Isaac Newton in the head.
The Puritans’ yearning for knowledge, especially their establishment of a college so early on, was self-correcting. In fact, it is Puritan father John Winthrop’s great-great-grandson, the Harvard scientist who taught John Adams, who would be nicknamed the father of seismology. (After an earthquake shook Boston in 1755 and prompted the usual religious flip-outs about the wrath of God, Professor Winthrop delivered an influential lecture at Harvard proposing the earthquake might have been caused by heat and pressure below the surface of the earth. With God’s help, of course, but God comes off as an engineer instead of a hothead vigilante.)
This book is about those Puritans who fall between the cracks of 16
20 Plymouth and 1692 Salem, the ones who settled the Massachusetts Bay Colony and then Rhode Island during what came to be called the Great Migration. (Between 1629, when King Charles I dissolves the Puritan-friendly English Parliament, and 1640, when the English Civil War begins and the Puritans under Oliver Cromwell eventually behead Charles and run the country, more than 20,000 English men, women, and children settled in New England.)
I am concentrating primarily on the words written or spoken during the Great Migration era by the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony (mostly John Winthrop and John Cotton) and those of two exiles, Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson, who went on to found settlements in Rhode Island after Winthrop and his fellow magistrates kicked them out of Massachusetts. Because, despite the gallingly voluminous quantity of their scribblings and the court records of their squabbles, nowadays the founders of New England are more or less mute.
Most college-educated American citizens can cough up a line or two from the Founding Fathers and Abraham Lincoln. However, among my friends who are fortyish or younger, the only direct quote from seventeenth-century Massachusetts I could get was from my friend Daniel. He knows that when Salem’s Giles Corey refused to testify when accused of witchcraft, the magistrates piled rocks on top of his body to try and persuade him, until he was pressed to death. What Corey said to his tormentors—“More weight!”—is Daniel’s name for his computer’s hard drive.
The most important reason I am concentrating on Winthrop and his shipmates in the 1630s is that the country I live in is haunted by the Puritans’ vision of themselves as God’s chosen people, as a beacon of righteousness that all others are to admire. The most obvious and influential example of that mind-set is John Winthrop’s sermon “A Model of Christian Charity,” in which he calls on New England to be “as a city upon a hill.” The most ironic and entertaining example of that mind-set is the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s official seal. The seal, which the Winthrop fleet brought with them from England, pictures an Indian in a loincloth holding a bow in one hand and an arrow in the other. Words are coming out of his mouth. The Indian says, “Come over and help us.”
