IN SARAH VOWELL’S new book, The Wordy Shipmates, she makes the case—hold onto your hats!—that the Puritans were not a congregation of book burning, sexually uptight, overly moral goody-goodies.Working out some schoolgirl crush on folks with buckled shoes, she gushes over the Puritans as a literary bunch who relentlessly penned letters, sermons, books, even kept day-to-to diaries.
With our national politics in a rightward tilt, evangelists on the march and the printed word in decline,Vowell warns that we are too anti-intellectual and too uptight to call our country a Puritan nation.Vowell, the author of five books and whose clean and squeaky voice can be heard on public radio’s “This American Life,” can be occasionally seen in the produce section at the Whole Foods in Union Square, though we caught up with her over email.
New York Press: In your new book, you argue that since the arrival of the Puritans from England in 1630, we have done a terrific job of misunderstanding them. What is the biggest misconception we have today about them? Sarah Vowell: That they were stupid. I do point out that they did and said and believed a lot of unreasonable things, which kind of goes with the territory of being born before the Age of Reason. But the colonists of Massachusetts Bay were fiercely intellectual, obsessed with knowledge and learning and books and thinkers and thought.They had barely finished nailing together their rickety cabins before they got cracking on building Harvard so their sons—and especially their future ministers—could become fluent in Latin, Greek and Hebrew.
How did we get the Puritans so wrong? I didn’t set out to debunk misconceptions per se. It’s just that most Americans are only exposed to 1620s Plymouth with Thanksgiving or 1690s Salem because of the witch trials hysteria. I focus on the less studied middle bit—Boston and then Rhode Island in the 1630s. I believe John Winthrop’s idea that New England should be “as a city upon a hill,” as well as the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s official seal— an Indian pleading “Come over and help us”—are more crucial in terms of understanding America’s cultural DNA.We inherited from Massachusetts Bay the notion—the sometimes dangerous, sometimes righteous notion—that we are God’s new chosen people who are here to help (whether anyone wants our help or not).
You write plenty about the sermon of John Winthrop, where he preaches about a “City on the Hill,” a place of righteousness that shines brightly for the world to see. Is it foolish to say that America is still that City on the Hill? In that sermon,Winthrop writes, “The eyes of all people are upon us.”To him, this was equally inspiring and disquieting.To him, being a city on a hill meant that the whole world would be scrutinizing New England’s experiment.Therefore, failure would be large scale and well lit.Therefore, he was terrified of messing up. I think the United States thinks of itself as a beacon of hope and edits out Winthrop’s self-doubt and fear of reckoning. I think that always looking on the bright side of our self-image leads to just the sort of large-scale, stared-at mistakes— Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib being the most obvious.
Which of the two presidential candidates best reflects the ideals of the Puritans? Can a candidate come off as being literary and win the hearts and votes of Americans? I suppose Senator Obama shares colonial New England’s bookish bent. But it pains me to spread that around because, to answer your question about being literary: no.
With this book, you shift to more of a role of historian than in your previous books. The tone here is more serious, in that your quirky life is not the centerpiece to the book’s narrative. And any worries that readers will find this book not as personal and funny? I wish! That sure sounds like a very lighthearted thing to be worried about. Maybe after the world financial markets recover, global warming is reversed, the global food crisis is solved and the U.S. government closes the prison at Guantanamo and brings the soldiers home from Iraq, I’ll have it in me to get jittery about whether a book about the roots of American exceptionalism written in the wake of Abu Ghraib isn’t sufficiently chatty.That said, as far as I know, this is actually the breeziest book ever written about the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
