“I’m always disappointed,” NPR’s Sarah Vowell writes early in her book on America’s first faith-based initiative, “when I see the word ‘Puritan’ tossed around as shorthand for a bunch of generic, boring, stupid, judgmental killjoys. Because to me, they are very specific, fascinating, sometimes brilliant, judgmental killjoys who rarely agreed on anything except that Catholics are going to hell.”
Focusing wholly on the competing colonies of what are now Massachusetts and Rhode Island, The Wordy Shipmates isn’t a rewriting of history — Vowell doesn’t avoid the eventual horrors of Aboriginal genocide and scarlet lettering — but a closer reading of America’s founding mythologists. Escaping the religious wars of Europe, the Puritans had an Exodus-influenced psyche charged to apocalyptic levels with even, one guesses, their children dreaming of flying, fanged Popes at night. No one has ever had new neighbours as interesting as the Puritans.
Vowell marvels at their variety of beliefs and the ability, often within a single pamphlet, to embrace everything from royalty-hating anarchism and Christian socialism to capitalist trade wars and obsessive moral rectitude. Seamlessly, Vowell traces that contradictory nature through the whole of Yankee discourse, examining how the very words of the Puritans (a studious bunch, they documented their mission with run-on-sentence gusto) later crept into voices as disparate as Martin Luther King, Jr. and Ronald Reagan. Contrast this nuanced view against the popular images of the colonists Vowell grew up with. As she points out, The Crucible and the Thanksgiving episodes of The Brady Bunch and Happy Days (“Being a Pilgrim sure is a draggeth,” sayeth Joannie) all missed the subtleties of history.
A breezy interlocutor, Vowell gives a radio-smoothness to her narratives and The Wordy Shipmates is probably the only book on pre-revolutionary America written with what could be described as “sass.” When she writes of liberal (and very wordy) theologian Roger Williams that she “just [feels] sorry for him that he lived in an age before air quotes,” she’s as much an observational comedian as she is an essayist.
Vowell’s tendency to act as excitable as a history teacher trying to blow minds with current references is kept to a minimum, yet her book can’t help but be read in light of last Tuesday’s election. Due to EYE WEEKLY’s production schedule, I’m writing this before final votes are tallied but, as Vowell’s book proves, either candidate could give a victory speech quoting from Puritan texts and not be unseemly in their interpretations.