America's Prophet

by Bruce Feiler

  I asked Peter Gomes if he was surprised by the level of disappointment in the Pilgrims’ tale.

  “Oh, it’s always there,” he said. “Success is a very dubious enterprise. In a way, the children of God are always meant to be in opposition. They’re outsiders. When they become successful, that’s when the problems begin. It seems to me Bradford captures the ambiguity of ambition and success. He’s very American in that way. Plymouth was as well off as any English village; they established the longest peace treaty with the Indians ever observed in the region. Yet Plymouth wasn’t what Bradford had in mind. It wasn’t a biblical fellowship. So in the end, he was melancholy.

  “And that may be the thing he shared most with Moses,” Gomes continued. “I think Moses, too, can be described as clinically depressed at the end. I’ve done all this, God, and you do this to me! There’s a similar sense of not being rewarded. And yet, you bargain for that. You don’t know God’s will. You really don’t. If there is any lesson to be learned, it is a certain modesty in the face of great opportunity. The biblical mandate is not success, it’s humility. You’re not God. You’re not supposed to be too fat and happy.”

  “But that’s not the lesson most Americans take from the Bible.”

  “No, they take American exceptionalism. But it seems to me that an exceptional people has to be willing to subordinate their own ambitions to God’s ultimate design. And no one’s ever accused Americans of doing that!” He chuckled. “What we’ve done is take God’s design and make it conform to our ambition. But it often doesn’t work out. We have the Revolution, but then slavery. We have the Civil War, but then Jim Crow. It’s similar to the pattern described in the Hebrew Bible. First they’re faithful, then they become successful. Then they become unfaithful, God destroys them, and they become unsuccessful again. Then they repent and the cycle starts over.”

  “I’m beginning to think that cycle of failure is one reason Moses endures through so many generations in America,” I said. “If any one of these Moseses succeeded—Bradford, Washington, Lincoln, King—there would be no need for another one.”

  “Indeed! As the Bible suggests, there is never going to be a moment of extended success. The very roots of destruction are in the achievement of success itself.”

  “That leads me to a question I wanted to ask you,” I said. “Why are you so connected to the Pilgrims?”

  “Yes, I know,” he said drolly. “My ancestors weren’t on the Mayflower.”

  “Yet there’s something powerful about your sitting here, in your rocking chair, overlooking Plymouth Harbor,” I said. “Somehow the sadness has cycled around and become success.”

  “I’ve been connected to the Pilgrims for more than forty years,” Gomes said. “It’s the most important narrative, outside my own family, that I have. In Plymouth, you grow up either loathing the Pilgrims or finding them fascinating. As a little boy, I decided to find out everything that I possibly could about them. And I remember my father saying, ‘Now, that’s not for you.’ And I didn’t understand. The Pilgrims are for everybody, I thought. But he didn’t want me to get hurt. His view of the Pilgrims was exclusive, white, Yankee.” He paused. “But I showed him!”

  “So what do you like about them?”

  “I found in their story my story. They were aliens in a strange land, just as I was. They seized an opportunity to escape discrimination, just as I did. And they had the privilege to watch their dream develop, pass it on to a new generation, and know that the same thing might happen to other people. The Pilgrim story is the most inclusive narrative that I know. And I never dreamed I would someday have the chance to stand before the Pilgrim Society on Forefathers Day and make a toast.”

  “And what was your message?”

  “That the story is true. I’ve lived it—and so have you. In America, unlike any other culture that I know, we choose our heroes. And we choose the Pilgrims, I think, because of their struggles. It’s dealing with adversity that is character-making. The cycle of failure, recovery, struggle, success. It’s very American, and it’s very Mosaic. And it ceases to work if the cycle is interrupted for any prolonged period—too much adversity, too much success. There has to be a moderating balance. That was my message to the Pilgrim Society, and it still rings true today.”

  III

  PROCLAIM LIBERTY THROUGHOUT THE LAND

  THEY WERE TRAPPED. They had broken away from the greatest power on earth but were still far short of independence. They were determined to escape oppression but were deeply afraid they would die for their beliefs. They had declared themselves God’s chosen people but were being pursued by the fiercest army in the world. As the Continental Congress gathered in Philadelphia in 1776, comparisons with the Exodus filled the air. From politicians to preachers, pamphlets to pulpits, many of the rhetorical high points of the year likened the colonists to the Israelites fleeing Egypt. Thomas Paine invoked the analogy in Common Sense, the best-selling book of the year; Samuel Sherwood made it the centerpiece of the year’s second best-selling publication, The Church’s Flight into the Wilderness. And on the afternoon of July 4, after passing the Declaration of Independence, the Continental Congress asked John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin to come up with a public face of the new United States. They chose Moses.

  Decades later, when Americans went looking for a symbol of 1776, they didn’t select the Declaration of Independence, the building where it was signed, or a myriad of other relics from Philadelphia. They chose the 2,080-pound bell that once hung in the belfry of the State House of Pennsylvania. And they did so not because of its shape, its sound, or even its crack. They made the Liberty Bell the icon of America because of the eleven words molded near its crown that were taken from the story of Moses and linked the aspirations of the United States to the ideals formed on the shores of the Red Sea and sung from the mountaintops of Sinai.

  But how did this happen exactly? How did a quote from one of the most frustrating books of the Bible end up as the beloved watchword of American freedom? How did the reluctant leader of Israelite slaves end up as the favorite son of the Founding Fathers? In short, how did Moses become the hero of the Revolution? These questions were on my mind as I stood in front of Independence Hall on a balmy summer morning with nearly impossible-to-get permission and prepared to climb the six flights of stairs and two ladders that lead from the room where the Declaration was signed to the top of the cupola where the bell once hung.

  “To me, the story about the bell’s accidental rise to fame is really its most interesting aspect,” said Karie Diethorn, a historian and chief curator of Independence Hall, who agreed to take me to the top. “We can explain it academically, but you really have to feel it to understand it. Shall we go?”

  BEFORE SETTING OUT on this expedition, I had discovered that nearly everything I thought I knew about the Liberty Bell was wrong. For starters, it wasn’t called the Liberty Bell in 1776. The building where it hung was not called Independence Hall. It was not rung on the Fourth of July. The gap in its side did not come from a crack. And the most famous word inscribed on its face, LIBERTY, is a mistranslation.

  Oh, and it sounded horrible: tinny and meek.

  But it was connected to the intimate relationship among the colonies, the Bible, and freedom. Though it sounds counterintuitive today, colonial life in the early eighteenth century was actually becoming more English, not less. What historians refer to as an Anglicization was under way, the result of greater economic ties among the colonies, tighter political control, and increased prosperity. Religion shared in this English influence. In the early 1700s, churches were largely top-down, hierarchical institutions: God chose whom to bless, ministers enforced ecclesiastical law, and individuals had little role to play in their own salvation.

  But Americans were beginning to chafe under this system and were casting around for new ways of relating to power. The Puritan lament about the loss of piety, so powerful in the late seventeenth century, only accelerated in
the early decades of the eighteenth century with the rise of commercialism, the migration of young people into godless frontiers, and the advent of Newtonian science. Cotton Mather said the faithful needed to “bring religion into the marketplace.” The religious revivals that blossomed in the 1730s, known as the Great Awakening, responded by introducing a new form of worship, one that became the foundation of an emerging American way of God. A new breed of charismatic preachers offered believers the opportunity to read the Bible themselves, hear the good news of salvation in a language that was inviting, and experience a “new birth.”

  Time and again, revivalists used the language of Exodus to encourage individuals to stand up to oppressive institutions, specifically the Anglican Church. Jonathan Edwards, the most intellectually potent of the Great Awakening preachers, preached that finding redemption in God meant coming out of “spiritual bondage” into a “new Canaan of liberty.” George Whitefield, the firebrand populist and cofounder of Methodism, said that Moses experienced a “new birth” at the burning bush and was a Methodist himself. Whitefield was an unlikely messenger for his message. He was short, mousy, histrionic, and cross-eyed. His nickname was “Dr. Squintum.” Beginning in 1739, he made more than a dozen trips up and down the eastern seaboard, speaking in parks, squares, and empty fields to the largest public gatherings North America had ever seen. In New England in 1840, he spoke to eight thousand people a day, every day for a month. In Philadelphia he attracted a crowd of thirty thousand. Historian Mark Noll called him “the single best-known religious leader in America of that century, and the most widely recognized figure of any sort in North America before George Washington.” Fans praised him as “another Moses.”

  Together, these Great Awakening preachers created the first intercolonial movement and a vital precursor to the Revolution. At a time when newspapers were rare and books expensive, the pulpit was still the dominant source of information. As one historian put it, “Ordinary people knew their Whitefield and Edwards better than they knew their Locke and Montesquieu.” The Great Awakening’s chief contribution was to introduce a language of dissent that emboldened people to challenge conventional truths and distant authorities. And what happened first in churches happened next in government. The Revolutionary period, preacher Horace Bushnell said, was marked by “Protestantism in religion producing republicanism in government.”

  This democratic notion of faith especially took hold in Philadelphia, where Benjamin Franklin was Whitefield’s biggest booster as well as his publisher. Between 1739 and 1741, more than half the books Franklin printed were by Whitefield. Pennsylvania had been a refuge for religious outsiders since its founding by William Penn in 1681. Penn nominally gave preferential treatment to Anglicans, but his guarantee of religious freedom attracted Germans, Swedes, Dutch, Mennonites, Amish, and Jews. His original frame of government failed and was replaced in 1701 with the Charter of Privileges, which provided for a resident governor, a small elective council, and a large assembly with limited powers. But the new formulation only made his life worse. “I am a crucified man between Injustice and Ingratitude [in America],” Penn said, “and Extortion and Oppression [in England].”

  By 1729, Pennsylvania had fallen into depression and the assembly voted to print its own paper currency. When the influx of money arrived, the assembly siphoned off a large chunk to erect a new assembly house, which they termed a “State-house” to emphasize their independence from the governor. Their plan called for a massive, Palladian-style building, 107 feet long and 45 feet deep, twice the size of the next-biggest building in Pennsylvania.

  “The colony was showing off with this building,” explained Diethorn, a bob-haired expert in colonial daily life. With encyclopedic knowledge of every molding, paint chip, and metallic compound, she could have taught the famously polymath Franklin a few things about being multifaceted. “They didn’t build this building to house the Continental Congress. They built it to rule an English colony. But the mix of grandeur and intimacy ended up aiding the American cause.”

  Inside, a large foyer is flanked by two gray rooms, forty feet square with twenty-foot ceilings, which were originally used for the Pennsylvania Assembly and Supreme Court. The Assembly Room is where the Declaration of Independence was debated and signed, and today the space is decorated with period Windsor chairs gathered around tables covered in green baize. Upstairs is a long, open room that runs the length of the building. When the British captured Philadelphia in 1777, the American officers imprisoned here grew so hungry that they threw down buckets to passing citizens and begged for food. Just off this hall is a locked wooden door that leads to the bell tower.

  In 1751, the Pennsylvania Assembly voted to procure a bell for the State House. With no suitable craftsmen in the colonies, Speaker Isaac Norris wrote the assembly’s representative in London to “get us a good Bell.”

  Let the Bell be cast by the best Workmen and examined carefully before it is Shipped with the following words well shaped in large letters round it viz:

  By order of the Assembly of the Province of Pensylvania for the Statehouse in the City of Philadelphia 1752.

  and Underneath

  Proclaim Liberty thro’ all the Land to all the Inhabitants Thereof Levit. XXV. 10.

  Little is known about Norris, except that he was a Quaker merchant who had studied in England and is said to have known Hebrew, Latin, and French. Even less is known about why he chose this specific inscription, especially considering that the bell would be heard by almost everyone but seen by virtually no one.

  Leviticus is the third of the Five Books of Moses. It is the least read and least loved of the Pentateuch and one of the most maligned of the Hebrew Bible. The English name Leviticus comes from the Latin “of the Levites,” the tribe of Moses’ mother. Levites are priests and much of the book is taken up with regulations that cover priestly habits, many of which haven’t been practiced for two thousand years. My daughters were born on April 15, during the time of the year when Leviticus is read in synagogues. I feared that in thirteen years they would have to read one of its more boring passages at their Bat Mitzvahs. I asked a friend to find out which Torah portion they were born under, and he reported back, Leviticus 14:1 through 15:33. It features regulations on how to handle leprosy, mildew, nocturnal emissions, and menstruation. Now, there’s a way to get a teenager interested in the Bible! But my friend also came with a message: Even the rabbis agreed this was a tedious portion and advised giving sermons based on the imminent arrival of Passover.

  In fairness, Leviticus also includes some of the loftiest values of the Hebrew Bible—specifically the Holiness Code, which outlines the moral responsibilities of the chosen people. These laws forbid harvesting all your fields or picking your vineyard bare, steps intended to leave food for the poor. They mandate against insulting the deaf or putting objects in front of the blind. They insist that people show deference to the aged and tend the infirm. Leviticus 18 contains one of the moral high points of Scripture, the golden rule, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” And Leviticus 19 includes one of the core themes of the Moses narrative: “You shall love the stranger as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

  Leviticus 25 occurs in the middle of the Holiness Code. It discusses how the Israelites should tend their fields. The land, like the people, deserves a Sabbath, God says. Every seventh year the Israelites should let their land lie fallow. After seven sets of seven years, or forty-nine years, the Israelites should mark an additional year of celebration. During that year, called the jubilee, all debts are to be forgiven, all debtors freed, all workers are to return to their ancestral land, and all families split by economic hardship reunited. The message is that the land belongs to God, not humans, and nobody should benefit too greatly or suffer too mightily for their work with God’s bounty.

  The King James Bible, which most Pennsylvanians would have been using, describes the central moment as an act of economic liberation: “Ye shall hallow the fiftie
th year, and proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof: it shall be a jubilee unto you; and ye shall return every man unto his possession, and ye shall return every man unto his family.” But there’s a problem with this translation. The Hebrew word deror, which the King James renders as liberty, is more precisely translated as release. Modern Bibles usually translate Leviticus 25:10 as “You shall proclaim release throughout the land,” stressing that the liberation is a freeing from economic duress, not political servitude. Considering all that would befall Isaac Norris’s bell, the one misfortune that proved most beneficial was preventing America’s treasured icon from being called…the Release Bell.

  What made Norris choose this line? He left no clue. The prevailing theory has been that the inscription marks the fiftieth anniversary of Penn’s 1701 Charter of Privileges, its jubilee year. By adopting Leviticus 25:10, Norris was declaring to the Crown that free men of God should be included in the determination of their economic future. But if that’s the case, why inscribe 1752 on the bell and not 1751? A rival view suggests that Benjamin Franklin proposed the line to Norris. By 1751, Franklin was advocating a union of the colonies and honorable transactions between nations, mirroring a line in Leviticus 25. A third theory suggests that the misspelling of Pennsylvania on the bell (there’s only one n in Penn) was the assembly taking a shot at the founding family, who weren’t paying taxes. Freedom meant independence from them.