by Sarah Vowell
There is no concept a lawyer, especially an English one, cherishes more than that of precedent. And to Winthrop and his shipmates, the tradition of a covenant—a handshake deal between man and God in which man promises obedience and God grants salvation in return—extends, writes Perry Miller, “unbroken from Abraham to Boston.”
“And I will make of thee a great nation,” God had promised Abraham. The price of such greatness, as Cotton’s farewell sermon already reminded the colonists, is a great big headache. Their duties, writes Winthrop, are these: “Now the only way to provide for our posterity, is to follow the counsel of Micah, to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God.” (Micah, an Old Testament prophet, said that God’s words “do good to him that walketh uprightly”; as for God’s promise to the sinners, “ The mountains shall be molten under him, and the valleys shall be cleft, as wax before a fire.”) Failures of justice, mercy, and humility, Winthrop warns, will cause God to “surely break out in wrath against us.”
Winthrop uses a word to describe such a calamity that must have been especially terrifying if he was delivering this sermon at sea: shipwreck.
“ The only way to avoid this shipwreck,” he says, is to be “knit together in this work as one man.”
Winthrop then utters one of the most beautiful sentences in the English language:
We must delight in each other, make other’s conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, our community as members of the same body.
I am a reasonably happy-go-lucky person with a serviceable sense of humor and a nice-enough apartment in New York, the most exciting city in the world. Once I decided to devote years of my life to deciphering the thoughts and feelings of the dreary religious fanatics who founded New England nearly four hundred years ago, I was often asked at parties by my fellow New Yorkers the obvious question, “What are you working on?” When I would tell them a book about Puritans, they would often take a swig of the beer or bourbon in their hands and reply with either a sarcastic “Fun!” or a disdainful “Why?”
At which point, depending on my mood, I would either mumble something about my fondness for sermons as literature or mention taking my nephew to the Mayflower replica waterslide in a hotel pool in Plymouth. I would never answer with the honest truth. Namely, that in the weeks after two planes crashed into two skyscrapers here on the worst day of our lives, I found comfort in the words of Winthrop. When we were mourning together, when we were suffering together, I often thought of what he said and finally understood what he meant.
Perhaps my favorite of the countless times I broke into tears in the days following the attack, I watched citizens happily, patiently standing in a very long line. I marveled, remembering the time years earlier when a former president’s motorcade had blocked Forty-second Street at rush hour and, forced to wait for ten whole minutes to cross to the other side, a businesswoman pointed at her watch and asked me, “Just who does he think he is?” and I answered, “I’m pretty sure he thinks he is the leader of the free world.” But that long line of patient New Yorkers in 2001? They were giving blood.
We were breathing sooty air. The soot was composed of incinerated glass and steel but also, we knew, incinerated human flesh. When the local TV news announced that rescue workers sorting through the rubble in search of survivors were in need of toothpaste, half my block, having heard that there was finally something we could actually do besides worry and grieve, had already cleaned out the most popular name brands at the corner deli by the time I got there, so at the rescue workers’ headquarters I sheepishly dropped off fourteen tubes of Sensodyne, the toothpaste for sensitive teeth.
We were members of the same body, breathing the cremated lungs of the dead and hoping to clean the teeth of the living.
The fact that Winthrop’s words, so remarkable to me, were so apparently unremarkable to him and his people that his sermon did not bear mentioning, that neither he nor they recorded it in their diaries or letters home, makes me fond of him and them. Despite their unruly theology, their sometimes hair-trigger hate, the fact that the image of being members of the same body was so agreed upon to the point of cliché, makes them worth getting to know.
These English had affection for the Old Saxon word weal. It means wealth and riches but it means welfare and well-being, too. In “Christian Charity,” Winthrop tells the colonists they must “partake of each other’s strength and infirmity; joy and sorrow, weal and woe.” Later on, Roger Williams would write, “ There goes many a ship to sea, with many hundred souls in one ship, whose weal and woe is common, and is a true picture of a commonwealth, or a human combination or society.”
This ideal will become so fundamental to the New England psyche that when the time comes for statehood, the citizens of Massachusetts do not become a state, but rather a commonwealth. John Adams put the following in the Commonwealth’s Constitution:
The body politic is formed by a voluntary association of individuals: it is a social compact, by which the whole people covenants with each citizen, and each citizen with the whole people, that all shall be governed by certain laws for the common good.
Let’s pause here amidst all the magic words like “commonwealth” and “common good” and savor what I like to call a snowball moment. There is a scene in the film Reds in which the two main characters, Jack Reed and Louise Bryant, American socialists in Moscow during the Russian Revolution, are caught up in the swirling, stirring romance of revolt. A whole people comes together to stand up for equality and brotherhood. Which sounds so very upstanding. But the genius of the film is that it also captures the giddy fun of that beginning. In a thrilling montage scored with a choral arrangement of the socialist anthem, “ The Internationale,” there is this one little flash, amongst the clips of Lenin at the podium or a workers’ candlelight parade, in which Jack walks outside and Louise, lying in wait, pelts him with a snowball. It is a small snapshot that makes being part of a world historical uprising look like nothing but glee. Because what’s coming has yet to come—the gulags and purges, Stalin and Mao, somewhere between 20 and 100 million dead. But at the snowball’s moment of impact on Jack Reed’s head, there is only happiness and hope.
That is where we are with Winthrop, at the grace note before the downbeat of gloom. Remember, when he delivers “A Model of Christian Charity” he is either by the shore back home or out on the open sea. He’s been chosen governor but he has yet to govern. What’s coming has yet to come. And here is what is coming:
On June 14, 1631, almost a year to the day after the Arbella arrives in Massachusetts, Governor Winthrop presides over the court in Boston. He records in his journal that a servant named Philip Ratcliffe convicted of “most foul, scandalous invectives against our churches and government was censured to be whipped, lose his ears, and be banished the plantation, which was presently executed.”
The Winthrop of “Christian Charity,” yearning that the settlers should think of themselves as members of the same body, orders a man’s ears to be cut off.
It reminds me of that moment in Whittaker Chambers’s book Witness. Chambers describes the way every decent young person in the twentieth century contemplated becoming a Communist because of its ideal of fairness. But he also describes the moment every decent person who became a Communist stopped being one. A woman tells him that her East German father had been a Communist Party loyalist up until “One night—in Moscow—he heard screams.” Yet another person was being hauled off to jail in the dead of night. Chambers writes, “Five annihilating words: one night he heard screams.”
As literature, Winthrop’s “Christian Charity” is a kind of poem of union—arm-in-arm romance, a snowball before the screams. But given Philip Ratcliffe’s hacked-off ears, seemingly innocuous sentiments in the sermon come off as absolutely chilling. Like, “We must not look only on our own things, but also on the things of our brethren.” One way to read th
at line is in keeping with the sermon’s title, as a call for charity, a reminder to donate a few soup cans to the town food drive. But another way to read that line is to see it as a call not only for conformity but also surveillance—to keep watch on one’s neighbors (or servants), to make sure they are not doing or saying anything that contradicts the government or the church. Same thing with Roger Williams’s charming little metaphor about the commonwealth as a ship; it also has a sinister subtext, namely, that a ship has a captain and a captain’s orders are to be obeyed.
Even such statements of Winthrop’s as God “loves His elect because they are like Himself,” and the early Christians “used to love any of their own religion even before they were acquainted with them,” can be read as both a harmless ode to the affection shared by like-minded joiners and as a dangerous manifesto of xenophobia that cuts off the ears of anyone giving lip to those in charge. In that light, the opening sentence of the sermon seems even more ominous—that God made sure “some must be rich, some poor, some high and eminent in power and dignity; others mean and in subjection.”
Here is a useful mantra for maintaining some basic empathy for Winthrop and his English compatriots at their racist, persnickety, Indian-killing, puritanical worst: Harbottle Grimstone. Their contemporary, Grimstone, or Grimston as his name is sometimes spelled, was a Member of Parliament from Colchester, and a relatively reasonable one at that. Still, Harbottle Grimstone. Is there a creakier, more British name? A name up there with ye olde Ralph of Coggeshall or Hereward the Wake? A name that better sums up the world and worldview the Puritans left behind? When I was reading about Massachusetts Bay sending soldiers to burn Pequot women and children alive I would mutter the name “Harbottle Grimstone” under my breath to keep in mind that these are more or less medieval people who are chronologically closer to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales than to The Wire.
It’s worth revisiting New England’s Puritans because they are our medieval people. The most storied way to get from the castle moat of monarchy to the polluted shoreline of this here republic is on their dank little ships. We could have done a lot worse. Perry Miller, thinking of Nathaniel Hawthorne, wrote that having respect for the Puritans “is not the same thing as believing in them.”
As Hawthorne, who added an extra “w” to his last name to distance himself from a forebear who had been a judge in the Salem witch trials, put it, “Let us thank God for having given us such ancestors; and let each successive generation thank Him, not less fervently, for being one step further from them in the march of ages.”
In “Christian Charity,” Winthrop writes that if the colonists hold up their end of the covenant, their deity “will delight to dwell among us as His own people.” They are not, therefore, merely living for God, they will live with Him.
“For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill.” Here, Winthrop has returned to the Sermon on the Mount. In Matthew 5:14, Jesus said to the throng before him, “Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid.” This comes directly after Christ has enumerated the nine blessings called the beatitudes, including, “Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.” And “Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.” And “Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.”
“ The eyes of all people are upon us,” warned Winthrop, “so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken . . . we shall be made a story and a byword through the world.”
The image of a city on a hill will get passed down as an all-American beacon of hope. But it wasn’t only that to Winthrop. To him, the city on the hill was also something else, something worse—a warning. If he and his shipmates reneged on their covenant with God, the city on a hill would be a lighthouse of doom beckoning the wrath of God to Boston Harbor.
Talking about Winthrop’s “A Model of Christian Charity” without discussing Ronald Reagan would be like mentioning Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You” and pretending Whitney Houston doesn’t exist. Whitney and Reagan’s covers were way more famous than the original versions ever were.
Winthrop’s sermon, as a supposed early model for the idea of America, became a blank screen onto which Americans in general and Reagan in particular projected their own ideas about the country we ended up with. For a ten-year stretch, the 1980s, Winthrop’s city on a hill became the national metaphor. And looking into the ways the sermon, or at least that one phrase in it, was used, throws open the American divide between action and words, between what we say we believe versus what we actually do.
Like a hostess dusting off her gravy boat come Thanksgiving, Ronald Reagan would trot out Winthrop’s image of a city on a hill on special occasions throughout his political career. The night before winning the 1980 presidential election he proclaimed, “Let us resolve they will say of our day and our generation, we did keep the faith with our God, that we did act worthy of ourselves, that we did protect and pass on lovingly that shining city on a hill.”
Reagan always brightened Winthrop’s sound bite with the adjective “shining.” The man was host of TV’s General Electric Theater for eight years, so it stands to reason he knew from luminosity. (He never shook off his old show-business sparkle, once referring to military uniforms as “wardrobe.”)
In his reelection acceptance speech at the 1984 Republican National Convention, Reagan talked up his accomplishments of the preceding four years this way: “We raised a banner of bold colors—no pale pastels.” (He is clearly ignoring all the pink slips flapping in the wind in his first term, what with 11.5 million Americans unemployed.)
He pressed on, “We proclaimed a dream of an America that would be a shining city on a hill.” (As for real-life American cities, he told Good Morning America that year that homeless people who slept on grates were “homeless, you might say, by choice.” He couldn’t be more right—I have this fantasy that someday I’ll throw off the shackles of my clean sheets and pillow-top mattress and curl up on a subway vent in the rain.)
Once, radio interviewer Terry Gross asked Bruce Springsteen about his hit song “Born in the U.S.A.” and the ’84 campaign, when President Reagan, during a stop in the singer’s home state, said that America’s future “rests in the message of hope in songs of a man so many young Americans admire, New Jersey’s Bruce Springsteen.”
Since “Born in the U.S.A.” is about a Vietnam veteran who’s been home from the war for ten years, remembering his dead comrades and complaining about not being able to get a job, Gross asked Springsteen if he thought his songs have “a message of hope.”
“My songs are filled with hope,” he answered. And in “Born in the U.S.A.,” he explained, “The pride was in the chorus. . . . In my songs . . . the hope part is in the choruses. The blues . . . your daily realities . . . are in the verses.” Even the famously forgetful Reagan could remember the chorus; it consists of the line “Born in the U.S.A.” repeated four times. The verses have lines that speak to what actually living in the U.S.A. can be like, such as “You end up like a dog that’s been beat too much,” or “Down in the shadow of the penitentiary.”
Born in the U.S.A. was the number one album on the Billboard chart on July 16, 1984, when Mario Cuomo gave the keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco titled “A Tale of Two Cities.” Cuomo, then governor of New York, scrutinized President Reagan’s favorite metaphor.
“A shining city is perhaps all the president sees from the portico of the White House and the veranda of his ranch, where everyone seems to be doing well,” Cuomo supposed. “But there’s another city; there’s another part to the shining city.” He spoke directly to Reagan:
Maybe, maybe, Mr. President, if you visited some more places; maybe if you went to Appalachia, where some people still live in sheds; maybe if you went to Lacka wanna, where thousands of unemployed steelworkers wonder why we subsidized foreign steel. Maybe—Maybe, Mr. President, if you stopped in at a sh
elter in Chicago and spoke to the homeless there; maybe, Mr. President, if you asked a woman who had been denied the help she needed to feed her children because you said you needed the money for a tax break for a millionaire or for a missile we couldn’t afford to use.
Cuomo, obviously, sings the blues. He points out that the country is in “the worst recession since 1932,” and that the two-hundred-billion-dollar federal budget deficit is the “largest in the history of the universe.” He blurts, “We give money to Latin American governments that murder nuns, and then we lie about it.” He channels Winthrop and defines a proper government as “the sharing of benefits and burdens for the good of all, feeling one another’s pain, sharing one another’s blessings.”
Then, addressing his fellow Democrats before him, he proclaims:
We must get the American public to look past the glitter, beyond the showmanship to the reality, the hard substance of things. And we’ll do it not so much with speeches that sound good as with speeches that are good and sound; not so much with speeches that will bring people to their feet as with speeches that will bring people to their senses. We must make—We must make the American people hear our “ Tale of Two Cities.” We must convince them that we don’t have to settle for two cities, that we can have one city, indivisible, shining for all of its people.
The party’s mild-mannered presidential nominee, Walter Mondale, echoed Cuomo later in the campaign, again trying to wrestle Winthrop from Reagan, calling for the country to end the “selfishness” and “greed” of the previous four years. “Winthrop said,” remarked Mondale, that “to be a shining city on the hill, we must strengthen, defend, preserve and comfort one another. We must rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together. We must be knit together by a bond of love.”
