Sarah Vowell & Words

In an era of election buzzwords, “mavericks” and Katie Couric interviews, it's strange to remember there was once a time when highly literate speeches were all the rage.

Tragically, that was almost four centuries ago.

As the bestselling New York writer Sarah Vowell notes in her new book The Wordy Shipmates, there is a lot of carry-over rhetoric from the earliest English-American settlers to the present day. The original sermons uttered by Puritans washing ashore in the New World not only defined what was to become the American belief of a chosen land for a chosen people, their words still echo in today's stump speeches.

But oh, how those original words have been maligned, says Vowell.

The author of the 2005 bestseller Assassination Vacation and contributor to Public Radio International's This American Life specializes in the quirks of Americana and what she sees as a duplicity between the ideals of the United States and its actual deeds. For a long time, she has wanted to write about early American Puritans, specifically about the words of the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Winthrop, which she feels have been co-opted by conservatives.

One of his most famous sermons, A Model of Christian Charity, holds particularly strong appeal for her with its message of community and caring within a unified body of people. The sermons, with their biblical promised land imagery, have also been popular with Republicans, most notably former U.S. president Ronald Reagan, and now, vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

But the phrases aren't simply Reagan's legacy, Vowell notes. They are in fact messages that have wafted through American culture for centuries. Most famously, Reagan used Winthrop's notion of “a city upon a hill,” which in turn was borrowed from the biblical Sermon on the Mount. (So Winthrop admirers today can't complain that the colonial governor's words were cribbed by Reagan and Palin. As it turns out, Jesus holds the copyright.) Still, it's Winthrop who first applied the imagery to a nascent America.

On-board the sailing ship Arbella in 1630, Winthrop uttered “a city upon a hill” in his Model of Christian Charity sermon, aimed at preparing these God-fearing Puritans to build a new society in an unknown environment. (Or maybe he delivered the sermon before the ship actually departed England. Historians are not 100 per cent sure.) Imagine the flock listening to the speech – stern-faced and stalwart. They were Puritans after all, although less rigidly anti-England than the Mayflower bunch who arrived a decade earlier. Nevertheless, they must also have been anxious, to say the least. In leaving England, they faced such joys as possible shipwreck in the Atlantic or death in the cold of the New World. So, strong words for them gave reason for their fateful, if possibly fatal decision.

And words, along with education and general learnedness, continued to be held in high esteem once they settled in Massachusetts. “They just loved words and writing and reading … not just the volume of it, but the quality as well. I'm just continually amazed by how much writing they did considering they were in a lot of ways regular old pioneers,” Vowell says over the phone during her current book tour.

There is one line from Winthrop that especially captivates her. She calls it one of the most beautiful sentences in the English language: “We must delight in each other, make other's conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labour and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, our community as members of the same body.”

After the destruction of the World Trade Center, Vowell says that, as a New Yorker, she felt the strong relevance of those words as the city around her pulled together. And Winthrop's message easily slides into a speech given by any presidential hopeful in recent memory: One electoral body. One nation under God, indivisible. It's all codified in Winthrop's utterances.

But while the rhetoric continues, it's clearly not the reality. Not then, and not today, Vowell suggests.

“I really got cracking on the book after Ronald Reagan's funeral [in 2004] for two reasons. The day Sandra Day O'Connor [then a Supreme Court justice] read Winthrop's sermon as part of the funeral service at the National Cathedral is the day when, it seems to me, Reagan's saintification was more or less complete. And it always bothered me that he used the ‘city on a hill' as his catchphrase, when it's a sermon about charity and generosity,” Vowell says.

“To me, [Reagan's] agenda and legacy and administration were about the opposite of charity and generosity,” she says, citing cuts in housing and lunch programs, and lack of attention to people with AIDS during his term in office.

In addition, O'Connor included Winthrop's phrase that “the eyes of all people are upon us.” What Winthrop meant was that the rest of the world was watching and expected the colony to fail. So, in other words, we need to put on even sterner faces and stiffer upper lips, and work even harder together to make this colony work. But when O'Connor read Winthrop's words centuries later, it was at the same time that the horrific images of the torture and humiliation of prisoners at Iraq's Abu Ghraib jail by American forces were everywhere in the news.

“That part of Winthrop's sermon seemed like a prophesy fulfilled. The eyes of all people were upon us, and what did they see?” Vowell says.

The sermon now has increasingly become a sound bite, she argues. But if read more fully and analyzed more carefully, Winthrop's A Model of Christian Charity describes, as Vowell writes in her book, “an America that might have been, an America fervently devoted to the quaint goals of working together and getting along. Of course, this America does exist. It's called Canada.”

So what has “city upon a hill” become? Another phrase to heap onto all the other phrases spoken at campaign stops, without much real meaning actually communicated? That's what New York writer and veteran magazine editor Glenn O'Brien thinks, calling it in his blog an element in “a new kind of language in which conventional structure is replaced by blocks and stacks of code and buzzwords, pre-digested button-pushing ideograms that simulate speech but are in fact its opposite.” He says this in a commentary highly critical of Palin.

But no matter how distant the language of Winthrop may now seem from its original context, some of the underlying sentiments still linger. For example, it's the view held by some – George W. Bush's administration, for one – that America is “always right and good, inherently best and better than everyone else in the rest of the world. I don't think [Bush] needs a catchphrase. To him, probably the word ‘America' is enough,” Vowell says. (When Vowell tells a joke or is disparaging, she speaks utterly matter-of-factly. It's safe to infer here that she's not complimenting Bush.) This belief in America “the right and good” has then served at times as self-justification for unilateral, bloody action. And yet it's also a sentiment that those who grew up in America, Vowell included, can't help feeling innately. As she writes in her book, “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 as she adds on the phone, “The United States has these grand ideals and these beautiful founding documents that are all about liberty and equality. So there's that: There's what we say.

“And then there's what we do.”