by Sarah Vowell
So, which Winthrop did Americans elect—the suffering blues singer in mourning or the pop star from the shining city? The only state Mondale won was Minnesota, where he was from. Reagan swept the other forty-nine.
In the U.S.A., we want to sing along with the chorus and ignore the verses, ignore the blues. That is why the “city on a hill” is the image from Winthrop’s speech that stuck and not “members of the same body.” No one is going to hold up a cigarette lighter in a stadium to the tune of “mourn together, suffer together.” City on a hill, though—that has a backbeat we can dance to. And that’s why the citizens of the United States not only elected and reelected Ronald Reagan; that’s why we are Ronald Reagan.
Remember this? In 1987, when President Reagan finally went on national TV to apologize for his underlings’ secret and illegal weapons sales to Iran in exchange for hostages and to purchase weapons for anticommunist Nicaraguan death squads, he said, “A few months ago I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that’s true, but the facts and evidence tell me it is not.”
By the time Reagan delivered his farewell address on January 11, 1989, I was a college radio newscaster at KGLT in Bozeman, Montana, cutting reel-to-reel tape from the AP feed. I’ll never again have a job that cathartic, literally slicing the news with a razor blade. Once sliced and spliced, Reagan’s self-congratulatory benediction went out to the station’s listeners, including students, ranchers, minimum-wage dishwashers, skiers driving up to Bridger Bowl, guys in bands who were trying to decide whether or not to move to Seattle, and members of the community food co-op who would rant with equal fervor against organized religion and refined sugar.
In his speech, Reagan brought up John Winthrop yet again, calling the Puritan governor “an early freedom man” from whom he got his sound bite about the city on a hill. He continued:
I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don’t know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind, it was a tall proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace, a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity, and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That’s how I saw it, and see it still.
And how stands the city on this winter night? More prosperous, more secure, and happier than it was eight years ago. But more than that, after two hundred years, two centuries, she still stands strong and true on the granite ridge, and her glow has held steady no matter what storm.
My heart told me that wasn’t true. The facts and evidence also told me that wasn’t true.
Remember Winthrop’s city? Where “the rich and mighty should not eat up the poor”? Where “if thy brother be in want and thou canst help him . . . if thou lovest God thou must help him”?
President Reagan did not utter the word “AIDS” in public until more than 20,000 people had died from the disease. His appointed officials embezzled funds earmarked for cleaning up toxic waste sites and gave the money to Republican candidates. He cut school lunch programs for needy children. He fired 11,345 striking air traffic controllers, which, according to the Village Voice, led to 253 deaths due to controller errors over the next ten years. He cut the budget for the Department of Housing and Urban Development from $32 billion in 1981 to $7.5 billion in 1988; two million Americans were homeless by 1989. The only federal department whose budget was not cut, but increased, was the Department of Defense; that was because the president’s white whale was the Soviet Union. Being ready and able to bomb the hell out of the evil empire was the nation’s top priority and if that meant thousands of poor kids had to skip lunch or sleep in cars in poisoned neighborhoods, so be it.
The statistics above are alarming enough. But the way Reagan not only ignored the facts—the truth didn’t feel true—but simply said that all was shiny in the city of his mind, was extra galling. As Abraham Lincoln put it in an exasperated letter to his friend Joshua Speed in 1855, complaining about slavery and religious intolerance, he would “prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”
A few weeks after Reagan’s 1989 farewell address aired, a new Elvis Costello album showed up at the radio station and the DJs wore out the grooves on “ Tramp the Dirt Down,” in which the singer hoped he would live long enough to see the death of Reagan’s transatlantic best friend, Margaret Thatcher, so he could jump up and down on her grave. I confess that became my Reagan fantasy, too. Until his ghastly, slow death from Alzheimer’s disease deprived any detractor with half a heart of even that petty, dirt-tramping thrill.
In 2004, I did watch Reagan’s funeral at the National Cathedral on live TV. The ailing Thatcher sent a video eulogy, quoting Arnold Bennett that Reagan personified “the great cause of cheering us all up.”
Former senator John C. Danforth gave the homily, reading from that part of the Gospel of Matthew from which Winthrop himself cribbed the city-on-a-hill image: “You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hid.” Danforth continued:
Winthrop believed that the eyes of the world would be on America because God had given us a special commission, so it was our duty to shine forth. The Winthrop message became the Reagan message. It rang of optimism, and we longed to hear it, especially after the dark years of Vietnam and Watergate. It was a vision with policy implications.
America could not hide its light under a bushel. It could not turn in on itself and hunker down. Isolationism was not an option. Neither was protectionism. We must champion freedom everywhere. We must be the beacon for the world.
Danforth went on to say, “If ever we have known a child of light, it was Ronald Reagan. He was aglow with it. He had no dark side, no scary hidden agenda.”
Maybe some of the people there pictured the late president’s winning smile and smiled themselves. I just sat there frowning on my couch, picturing secret crates of weapons being unloaded from a cargo plane in Iran to pay for secret crates of weapons being unloaded from a cargo plane in Nicaragua.
Sandra Day O’Connor read an excerpt from Winthrop’s “A Model of Christian Charity.” She reminded the congregation, “The city on the hill passage was referenced by President Reagan in several notable speeches.” Appointed by Reagan, O’Connor was the first woman to serve on the Supreme Court, and thus an obvious choice to speak at his memorial service.
John Winthrop, however, must have been rolling over in his grave, wondering when did women become magistrates and how come one of them is reading his sermon, considering he was the man who barked at female heretic Anne Hutchinson, “We are your judges and not you ours.”
O’Connor read slowly, her voice small and grave. She sounded like an old woman whose friend has died. She will pause slightly when she gets to the word “mourn.” The text was edited beforehand. This is everything she read:
Now, the only way to provide for posterity is to follow the counsel of Micah: to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God.
We must delight in each other, make others’ conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work as members of the same body.
The Lord will be our God and delight to dwell among us as his own people.
For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword through the world.
At that moment, there was one story known through the world, a byword on everyone’s lips: Abu Ghraib. A couple of weeks before O’Connor said that last line, I went to New York University to hear a speech give
n by one of the people sitting there in the National Cathedral—former vice president Al Gore—demanding that another person sitting there—Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld—resign because of the revelation that American Military Police officers had tortured, raped, and killed Iraqi prisoners at Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib penitentiary.
Everyone in the cathedral, everyone watching on television, hearing O’Connor’s voice, had seen the appalling photos—naked prisoners made to pile themselves into a human pyramid as their American captors stood behind them, smiling at the camera and making the “thumbs-up” sign; prisoners made to line up for snapshots of their genitalia; prisoners bleeding because they had been bitten by dogs.
In his NYU speech, Gore asked of Rumsfeld and the president he serves (who would of course also be there amongst them at Reagan’s funeral), “How dare they drag the good name of the United States of America through the mud of Saddam Hussein’s torture prison?”
Like Winthrop, like Reagan, like Danforth at Reagan’s funeral, Gore cited the Sermon on the Mount. “In my religious tradition,” he remarked, “I have been taught that . . . ‘a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit. . . . Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.’ ”
Gore even implied that these crimes against Iraqi prisoners of war were an offense not just to us, right now, but to our Puritan forebears:
What a terrible irony that our country, which was founded by refugees seeking religious freedom—coming to America to escape domineering leaders who tried to get them to renounce their religion—would now be responsible for this kind of abuse.
Ameen Saeed al-Sheikh told the Washington Post that he was tortured and ordered to denounce Islam. And after his leg was broken one of his torturers started hitting it while ordering him to curse Islam and then, “They ordered me to thank Jesus that I’m alive.”
Gore used the argument of American exceptionalism (first set forth by John Cotton and John Winthrop and their comrades) to bemoan this betrayal of American exceptionalism—how we as a people “consistently choose good over evil in our collective aspirations more than the people of any other nation,” how Lincoln, early on in the Civil War, called for saving the Union because it was the “last best hope of earth.”
That was the speech in which Lincoln pointed out “we cannot escape history.” Well, we can’t. I can’t really fault Gore for saying that what happened at Abu Ghraib is sickening, not only because it’s just plain sickening but because America is supposed to be better than that. No: best. I hate to admit it, but I still believe that, too. Because even though my head tells me that the idea that America was chosen by God as His righteous city on a hill is ridiculous, my heart still buys into it. And I don’t even believe in God! And I have heard the screams! Why is America the last best hope of Earth? What if it’s Liechtenstein? Or, worse, Canada?
The thing that appeals to me about Winthrop’s “Christian Charity” and Cotton’s “God’s Promise to His Plantation” from this end of history is that at least the arrogant ballyhoo that New England is special and chosen by God is tempered by the self-loathing Puritans’ sense of reckoning. The same wakefulness the individual Calvinist was to use to keep watch over his own sins Winthrop and Cotton called for also in the group at large. This humility, this fear, was what kept their delusions of grandeur in check. That’s what subsequent generations lost. From New England’s Puritans we inherited the idea that America is blessed and ordained by God above all nations, but lost the fear of wrath and retribution.
The eyes of all people are upon us. And all they see is a mash-up of naked prisoners and an American girl in fatigues standing there giving a thumbs-up. As I write this, the United States of America is still a city on a hill; and it’s still shining—because we never turn off the lights in our torture prisons. That’s how we carry out the sleep deprivation.
At the Massachusetts State Archives in Boston, Assistant Archivist Michael Comeau shows me the most important item John Winthrop packed in his luggage on the Arbella—the Charter of the Massachusetts Bay Company granted by King Charles I. Comeau points to the “bug-eyed” portrait of Charles lording over the upper-left-hand corner of the first page.
There is a little hole above Charles’s head, but otherwise the document is in terrific shape. I ask Comeau if that has anything to do with the New Englanders’ sense of historic self-importance. “Oh my god,” he answers, “these people killed themselves to make sure there was a paper trail.” In fact, not only did they take excellent care of the Charter itself, they saved the original beeswax seal. He opens a box containing some brown globs he admits “look like a cow pie. At the time it would have been a vibrant red. Now it looks like dirt.”
The beginning of the Charter alludes to the evolution of the Massachusetts Bay Company, how King James, Charles’s father, gave patents for land in New England dating back to 1607 to the Virginia Company of Plymouth, which turned into the Council of New England, which turned into the Massachusetts Bay Company. I’m guessing part of the point of this is to reassure Charles that he is not condoning some newfangled religious experiment but rather continuing to support a practical, moneymaking venture approved by his father. The Charter butters up Charles by referring to his dad as “our most dear and royal father, King James, of blessed memory.”
The Charter authorized the Massachusetts Bay Company to colonize all the land between three miles north of the Merrimack River and three miles south of the Charles River, stretching “from sea to sea” (i.e., all the way to the Pacific), including “soils, grounds, havens, ports, rivers, waters, fishing, mines, any minerals, as well royal mines of gold and silver, as other mines and minerals, precious stones, quarries, and all and singular other commodities” therein. Just so long as the company’s executives make no laws “contrary or repugnant to the laws and statutes” of England.
At this point in the story of the founding of Massachusetts Bay, many accounts have a lot of folksy fun with a yarn about how sneaky it was of the Massachusetts Bay Company to “forget” to put into the Charter that the document remain in England, and that the company’s administrative meetings must also be held in England as previous charters had. This allows the company to take the Charter with them abroad, making self-government in Massachusetts possible with little royal oversight. In that scenario, says Michael the archivist, “Winthrop steals the Charter in the dark of night.” So the founding of Massachusetts becomes a Bugs Bunny cartoon—King Charles, in hunting cap, is outsmarted by the wascally Winthrop.
Our folksy fun, however, is ruined by annoying scholars whose painstaking hard work has uncovered the murkier, less dramatic truth, requiring footnotes about the Third Charter of Virginia of 1612 or the East India Company’s royal charter of 1600 allowing its officers to meet “in such convenient place” they “shall think fit.” Librarian Ronald Dale Karr writes, “The omission of a designated meeting place in the Massachusetts Bay Charter of 1629 was thus neither unprecedented nor unusual.” This debunks, says Michael, the myth of “the deviousness of Winthrop.”
If the potential for colonial self-government wasn’t exactly new, Winthrop and Co. still exploited this loophole like none before them had dared.
One innovation in the Charter does afford Americans front-row seats at the birth of the national pastime—regularly scheduled voting. The Charter states that the Massachusetts governor, deputy governor, and the representatives known as “assistants” are to be voted in or out every spring. Historian Samuel Eliot Morison opined, “ The particular feature of this charter which proved so successful and enduring as to become an American institution was the principle of stated elections.” This is, he continues, “in contrast to the English or parliamentary system.”
This is still true. As an American, I am entirely flummoxed by the willy-nilly process by which the Brits acquire a new prime minister. It seems like one afternoon after tea they decide to get rid of the old one, then the majority party in the House of Commons picks the person they most want to yell at on C-
SPAN’s Prime Minister’s Questions, then the new prime minister goes to Buckingham Palace and for two minutes the whole country politely pretends he was the queen’s idea.
U.S. citizens can thank the Massachusetts Bay colonists for breaking with that tradition. While Americans choose a new president in a process that is as insane as the way the United Kingdom ends up with a new prime minister—given the fact that the Electoral College makes sure our president is chosen by three counties in Florida and Ohio (or nine Supreme Court justices)—at least we can print “Election Day” in our calendars ahead of time. And looking forward to that date circled in November can get a citizen through a lot of cold nights. As Morison noted, the Massachusetts Bay’s “corporate mode of election put an almost continuous check on both executive officers and representatives. It became an essential principle of every state constitution and the federal constitution.”
The Massachusetts Bay Colony becomes, under this Charter, a sort of republic—the most severely limited, totalitarian, closed-minded, vindictive, hard-ass republic possible. But the democratic impulse is a mutating virus that adapts and changes, quickens and grows; it is contagious, and the Charter is one important sneeze.
At first, the General Court in 1630 consisted of eight people—the governor, the deputy governor, and six other magistrates called assistants. But within a year, a hundred others, church members all, known as “freemen,” are sworn in to court; they are granted the power to elect the assistants, who in turn elect the governor. But by 1632, the freemen raise a stink and are allowed to elect the governor directly. They are, however, required to take an oath that they will be “obedient” to the governor and assistants. They also pledge to rat out their neighbors by alerting the governor and assistants “of any sedition, violence, treachery, or other hurt or evil which I shall know, hear, or vehemently suspect to be plotted or intended against the said commonwealth, or the said government established.”
