PARTNERSHIP OF THE HISTORIC BOSTONS

“Essayist and public radio regular Sarah Vowell … revisits America’s Puritan roots in this witty exploration of the ways in which our country’s present predicaments are inextricably tied to its past. . . . Vowell underscores that the seemingly minute differences between the Plymouth Puritans and the Massachusetts Puritans were as meaningful as the current Shia/Sunni Muslim rift. Gracefully interspersing her history lesson with personal anecdotes, Vowell offers reflections that are both amusing (colonial history lesson via The Brady Bunch) and tender (watching New Yorkers patiently waiting in line to donate blood after 9/11).

What set Vowell on a journey back to our Puritan forefathers was when, in the dreadful weeks following the destruction of the World Trade Center, she found comfort in the words of the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Winthrop.  In a sermon entitled “A Model of Christian Charity,” Winthrop had written what Vowell calls “one of the most beautiful sentences in the English language”:

                               We must delight in one another, 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, 
                               our community as members of the same body.

Yet the Puritans’ most enduring bequest to the future United States, Vowell observes in her new book, THE WORDY SHIPMATES, is their unshakable vision of themselves as God’s chosen people, a beacon of righteousness that all others are to admire.  The best-known and most influential example of that mindset is Winthrop’s image of New England as “a city upon a hill,” a phrase famously burnished by Ronald Reagan.  The most ironic and entertaining example of that mindset, Vowell says, is the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s official seal, which pictures an Indian in a loincloth holding a bow in one hand and an arrow in the other.  Emerging from his mouth are the words “COME OVER AND HELP US.”  The worldview behind that motto, of course, is “We’re here to help you whether you want our help or not.”

With sardonic humor, awed respect, and acute insight, Vowell examines the Puritans’ dual legacy of communitarian love and missionary ardor, which continues to shape America nearly four hundred years later.  At the same time, she tells a dramatic story of courage, rivalry, hatred, murder, exile, war, racism, tolerance, and intolerance in a narrative populated by a vibrant cast of historical figures and propelled by her highly distinctive literary voice. 

Drawing on this eminently wordy people’s prolific output of sermons, diaries, pamphlets, essays, court transcripts, and letters, Vowell not only deciphers their thoughts and feelings, but reconstitutes their passions.  She concentrates especially on John Winthrop and Reverend John Cotton, the leading religious and civic figures of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, as well as its two most famous exiles, Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson, who went on to found settlements in Rhode Island.  Williams, deficient in social skills but afraid only of God, was expelled because of his clearly articulated belief in the separation of church and state, 150 years before Thomas Jefferson.  He went on to found the first American colony with complete religious freedom.

Hutchinson, initially guided and then betrayed by John Cotton, openly challenged the religious authority of the Bay Colony’s leaders—which to them was the same thing as challenging their civil authority.  This brilliant “female blabbermouth,” as Vowell calls her, was so difficult and defiant that Winthrop and his allies judged banishment to be the only appropriate remedy for her “dangerous errors.”  As he confided in a letter, Winthrop saw divine retribution at work when Hutchinson ultimately met her demise in an Indian attack outside New York City (she got a river and a busy highway named after her for it).  But as Vowell notes, Hutchinson bequeathed us a particularly American brand of radical individualism that still contends for dominance in our national character with Winthrop’s reverence for communal experience and hierarchical authority.

With her antennae finely tuned for the absurdities and profundities of popular culture, Vowell assesses the myriad ways the media have shaped our views of the Puritans.  From Mr. Ed to Happy Days to The Simpsons, a surprising number of sitcoms have set episodes in seventeenth-century New England, “even though seventeenth-century New England is all situation and no comedy,” Vowell writes. But no pop culture interpretation of Puritan history gave rise to more complicated feelings in Vowell than a film dramatically reenacting the Puritans’ massacre of some seven hundred men, women and children of the Pequot tribe.  Viewed at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum, a stone’s throw from the Foxwoods Casino in Connecticut, the spectacle upset her young nephew’s idealized notions about Puritan-Indian friendship and Thanksgiving.

“Vowell likes to explode myths and reveal hypocrisy wherever she finds it,” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution once noted. “She is somehow simultaneously patriot and rebel, cynic and dreamer, and an aching secularist in search of a higher ground.” In THE WORDY SHIPMATES, Sarah Vowell delves with scholarly acumen, irreverent wit, and provocative insight into America’s intertwined religious and political history, offering startling and powerful relevance for today.