Remembering John Winthrop - Hawthorne's suggestion

Perspectives on Political Science

Volumn 36, Issue 1, 2007, Pages 4-14

  Holland, Matthew S ^a  

^a BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

City on a hill; Hawthorne; Liberalism; Puritanism; Winthrop

Indexed keywords

EID: 39549106678     PISSN: 10457097     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.3200/PPSC.36.1.4-14     Document Type: Article

References (97)

1. On the influence of New England Puritanism on American political culture and development, see Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop, trans. and eds. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (Chicago: University Press of Chicago, 2000), 27-44;
2. Perry Miller, The Puritans (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), 1;
3. Stephen Foster, The Long Argument (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 3-4;
4. David Hackett Fischer, Albion's See& Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 13-204;
5. and James Morone, Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003).
6. For Winthrop as Father of New England, see Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana, ed. Kenneth Ballard Murdock and Elizabeth W. Miller (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1977), 213;
7. and James G. Moseley, John Winthrop's World: History as a Story, the Story as History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 126.
8. For Winthrop as a Founding Father of America, see, again, Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 42;
9. Perry Miller, New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (New York: Macmillan Company, 1939), 422;
10. Wilson C. McWilliams, The Idea of Fraternity in America (Berkeley: University of California Press), 133;
11. John H. Schaar, "Liberty/Authority/Community," Political Theory 19 (November 1991): 493-518;
12. Sacvan Bercovitch, Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), ix.
13. "America's Forgotten Founding Father" is from the subtitle of Francis J. Bremer, John Winthrop: America's Forgotten Founding Father (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
14. Because his part is usually a very minor one, Winthrop's dramatic role in Hawthorne's fiction remains a largely ignored topic in the secondary literature. For brief treatments, see Michael Colacurcio, Doctrine and the Difference: Essays in the Literature of New England (New York: Routledge, 1997), 205-27;
15. Charles Ryskamp, "The New England Sources of The Scarlet Letter," American Literature 31 (1959), 257-72;
16. William C. Spengemann, "Review Essay," Early American Literature 16 (1981), 184-85.
17. Biographical information is drawn from Bremer, John Winthrop;
18. Moseley, John Winthrop's World;
19. Edmund S. Morgan, The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop (Boston: Little, Brown, 1958);
20. and Darret Bruce Rutman, John Winthrop's Decision for America, 1629 (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1975).
21. John Winthrop, The Journal of John Winthrop, ed. Richard Dunn and Laetitia Yeandle (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1996);
22. this essay generally cites from the abridged version (which modernizes spelling) - both abridged and unabridged versions were released the same year. Paul Johnson, A History of the American People (New York: Harper Perennial, 1999), 31.
23. The Oxford English Dictionary designates "charity" as "Christian love" and notes that it is often applied as "Man's love of God and his neighbor, commanded as the fulfilling of the law, Matt. xxii. 37, 39." See Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros, trans. Philip S. Watson (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1953).
24. Based on the text as found in Alley Forbes et al., eds. Winthrop Papers, Vol. 2 (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1929), 282-95. Spellings modernized by author.
25. He who "knew them best" is a line from "The Puritan" by noted poet James L. Seay, Open Field, Understory: New and Selected Poems (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997), 47.
26. Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter: An Authoritative Text, Essays in Criticism and Scholarship, ed. Seymour Lee Gross (New York: Norton, 1988), 36. Cited hereafter in text as SL.
27. In chapter 12, Hester and Pearl encounter Reverend Dimmesdale (Hester's illicit lover) making fake confession on the same scaffolding where Hester stood in shame on trial "seven long years" ago (SL, 101), and the narrator informs the reader that the opening of the trial scene takes place "in this month of June" (SL, 35).
28. John Raimo, Biographical Directory of American Colonial and Revolutionary Governors (Westport, CT: Meckler Books, 1980), 117.
29. Ryskamp, "New England Sources," 267.
30. Colacurcio, Doctrine and the Difference, 212.
31. As Hawthorne says of his own art, "when romances do really teach anything, or produce an effective operation, it is usually through a far more subtle process than the ostensible one." See Hawthorne, House of the Seven Gables (New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 1988), xviii.
32. Hawthorne, "Main-Street," in Tales and Sketches (New York: Library of America, 1996), 1040-41. Cited hereafter as TS.
33. See Winthrop, Winthrop Papers, 1: 302-3;
34. Winthrop Papers, 2: 114-22;
35. and related discussion in Rutman, Winthrop's Decision for America, 87-90.
36. See Foster's chapter "Poverty: Affliction, Poor Relief, and Charity" as found in Their Solitary Way;
37. Rutman, Winthrop's Boston, 217-20;
38. Christine Leigh Heyrman, "'A Model of Christian Charity': The Rich and the Poor in New England, 1630-1730" (PhD diss., Yale, 1977);
39. Peter Richard Virgadamo's "Colonial Charity and the American Character: Boston, 1630-1775" (PhD diss., University of Southern California);
40. Lawrence Vale, From the Puritans to the Projects (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), 22;
41. Bremer, Puritan Experiment (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1976), 93.
42. As quoted in Bremer, John Winthrop, 194.
43. Mather, as found in Bercovitch, Puritan Origins, 192.
44. Bremer, John Winthrop, 57;
45. Morgan, Puritan Dilemma, 102-18.
46. Bremer, Puritan Experiment, 199-201.
47. Also see Winthrop, Journal - Abridged, 37-42;
48. and Moseley, John Winthrop's World, 52.
49. Bremer, Puritan Experiment, 205-6;
50. Winthrop, Journal - Abridged, 184.
51. Winthrop, Journal - Unabridged, 569;
52. Bremer, John Winthrop, 310-11;
53. Samuel Eliot Morison, The Intellectual Life of Colonial New England (New York: New York University Press, 1956), 82-85;
54. Massachusetts Department of Education, "MFLC Community Profiles," Boston: 2002.
55. See also Hugh Armory and David Hall, The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 117-51.
56. Edmund Morgan, Roger Williams: The Church and the State (New York: Norton, 1967), 63.
57. Morgan, Roger Williams 62-85;
58. Bremer, Puritan Experiment, 89-94, 102;
59. Daniel Dreisbach, Thomas Jefferson and the Wall of Separation of Church and State (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 71, 76-79.
60. In terms of the Church, the famous "New England Way" was that each congregation claimed that all members collectively held the authority to make decisions on all aspects of Church government. Although the minister and elders were generally looked to with much reverence and respect, it was finally the vote of the congregation that decided who could be admitted, who could be expelled, and the finer points of contested theology, and the congregation hired and could fire all sacerdotal officers. See David D. Hall, ed., Puritans in the New World: A Critical Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 5-6;
61. Bremer, Puritan Experiment, 97-105.
62. The ensuing discussion draws liberally from Morgan, Puritan Dilemma, 7-82;
63. Bremer, John Winthrop, 196, 209, 214-15, 218, 241;
64. and Foster, Their Solitary Way, 67-98.
65. Winthrop, Journal - Abridged, 81.
66. Massachusetts, Colonial Laws of Massachusetts (Littleton, CO: F. B. Rothman, 1995), 29-68.
67. For the most democratic reading of Winthrop's state, see Joshua Miller, Rise and Fall of Democracy in Early America, 1630-1789 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991), 21-49.
68. For a contrasting focus, see Foster, Their Solitary Way: The Puritan Social Ethic in the First Century of Settlement in New England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), 67-98.
69. Michael Zuckert, Natural Rights Republic (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996), 141-42.
70. Foster, Their Solitary Way, 83;
71. Perry, Puritanism and Democracy, 191-92.
72. This is not to try to revive the thesis of a "strong continuity" between our Puritan and liberal foundings that Michael Zuckert effectively attacks, Natural Rights, 133-47. The whole of this essay is an affirmation of Puritanism's rejection of liberal premises, even as it recognizes, among other things, some affinities between early Puritan and later liberal ideas and practices.
73. John Adams, Papers of John Adams, ed. Robert J. Taylor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977). 1:192, 2:382-83, 9:62.
74. George Bancroft, History of the United States of America (New York: D. Appleton, 1890), 1: 233-34.
75. Brooks Adams, The Emancipation of Massachusetts: The Dream and Reality (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962);
76. Charles Francis Adams, Three Episodes of Massachusetts History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1892).
77. Henry Louis Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953), 624;
78. Van Wyck Brooks, Van Wyck Brooks: The Early Years, ed. Claire Sprague (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1993), 194;
79. Morgan, Puritan Dilemma, xi.
80. Bremer, "Remembering - and Forgetting - John Winthrop and the Puritan Founders," The Massachusetts Historical Review (accessed March 1, 2006).
81. Anya Seton, The Winthrop Woman (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958), 30.
82. Louis Auchincloss, The Winthrop Covenant (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976) 7-10, 244, 211.
83. Winthrop, Winthrop Papers, 2:295.
84. Winthrop, Journal - Abridged, 247, 345.
85. Winthrop, Journal - Abridged, 142;
86. Moseley, John Winthrop's World, 86.
87. John F. Kennedy, Let the Word Go Forth: The Speeches, Statements, and Writings of John F. Kennedy, ed. Theodore Sorenson, (New York: Delacorte, 1988), 57.
88. Speech delivered on June 7, 1961. John F. Kennedy, Public Papers of the President of the United States (Washington, DC: GPO, 1961), 819.
89. Speech delivered on October 27, 1964. Lyndon B. Johnson, Public Papers of the President of the United States (Washington, DC: GPO, 1963-64), 1673-74.
90. William Safire, "On Language: Rack up that City on a Hill," New York Times, April 24, 1988.
91. Speech delivered on January 11, 1989. Ronald Reagan, Public Papers of the President of the United States (Washington, DC: GPO, 1988-89), 1762-63.
92. In his keynote address, Democratic National Convention, San Francisco, July 16, 1984, Mario Cuomo references the "city on the hill," but not so much to take it back as to attack Reagan's use of it. Walter Mondale, Campaign Speech, Cleveland, October 25, 1984, see report by Paul Taylor, "Mondale Rises to Peak Form," Washington Post, October 25, 1984.
93. Michael Dukakis, Acceptance Speech to the Democratic National Convention, Atlanta, July 21, 1988, as based on transcript in New York Times, July 22, 1988.
94. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Routledge, 1992).
95. George H. W. Bush (Thanksgiving Day Proclamation, November 26, 1992); Bill Clinton (Commencement Address at Portland State University, Portland, OR, June 13, 1998, also Commencement Address at the United States Coast Guard Academy, New London, CT, May 17, 2000); Trent Lott (Republican Response to the President's Speech, January 6, 2001); Rudolph W. Guiliani (Opening Remarks to the United Nations General Assembly Special Session on Terrorism, October 1, 2001); Arnold Schwarzenegger (Swearing-in Remarks, November 17, 2003); Howard Dean (Announces Candidacy for President of the United States, June 23, 2003).
96. Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance (New York: Penguin Books, 1983), 229-34.
97. Also see Catherine Zuckert, Natural Right and the American Political Imagination: Political Philosophy in Novel Form (Savage, MD: Rownian and Littlefield, 1990), 71-83.