by Larry Kramer
Religion is such an icky, sticky thing, full of torturous—well, everything. Why is it so essential for man to be forced, for that is what religion relies on, force, to believe in anything but himself? And this is what John Winthrop should represent for us: the utter disdain he and Puritanism have for the self, for the human, for the human being.
John Winthrop was big on telling everyone what to think. Over and over.
These early settlers in Boston considered themselves the best in everything. Hadn’t John Winthrop told them that they had a special pact with God to create a holy community? They were the most British and the most educated and the most religious and the most pious and the most honest and of course they were none of these things. The best deception and the best hypocrisy, the best deceit and chicanery, first flourished on our developing country’s shores in Boston. The first bank that cheats you. The first law court where the judge is on the take. The first church where the minister fucks the little girls and boys. The first company to issue worthless stock. The first husband to marry a dozen women all at the same time. In other words, Boston was another of our moral sewers. Though quietly. On the QT. Unlike New York. (Many will be surprised when it’s Bostonians who have the guts to dump all that tea in their harbor.) Hawthorne would have known what we are talking about. Nathaniel knew about closets and what it meant to live in one. New York did it all right out in the open. When Alexander Hamilton studied at King’s College (Columbia), as many as five hundred Dutch and English “ladies of pleasure” patrolled the lanes near his living quarters in lower Manhattan. That’s 2 percent of the population (Chernow, Alexander Hamilton). That would never have happened in Boston. You didn’t walk the streets in Boston. Boston did the sex stuff behind closed doors.
And they liked sex, hugely and lasciviously, these Puritans did, because Jesus fucked with them, in a veritable threesome. God comes with the fuck. And if a husband was impotent, women could successfully sue for divorce. They talked almost pornographically to God and Jesus. “Spread thy skirt over us.” “Make us sick with thy love.” “Let us sleep in thine arms and awake in thy kingdom.” “Possess us as thine own.” “My member is thy member.” “Your lips most soft and tender bless our union.”
But beware. John Winthrop would find a way to punish you big-time if you did anything that wasn’t with your spouse. He’d have your nuts cut off for that, or your ears if you just didn’t listen to him about a lesser sin. And God forbid if you were a hushmarked. Then he hanged you. He got laws about hanging hushmarkeds passed everywhere that he could. He had a special hate for homosexuals. Even though one of his sons was one. And he knew it. And he ordered him hanged for it. His own son. And he drove Anne Hutchinson, one of the smartest women of the seventeenth century or any other century, to her death, which tells you how much he liked intelligent women. And today half the buildings and institutions in Boston that are named after Great People are named Winthrop This and Winthrop That.
Yes, he came, he saw, and he told everyone what to do. And he got away with it. Everything is ripe for the plucking. Winthrop sees this immediately, and like the smart man he is, he takes advantage of it. The spirit that made, say, Goldman Sachs and Enron and Bernard Madoff—great recent rippers-off of our economy’s bodice—starts with guys like Winthrop. There is no law, no discipline, no authority to answer to except some religion that a bunch of traveling zealots and bigots lug with them from over there to over here and make up as they go along. That’s right. John Winthrop makes it up as he goes along. HE MAKES IT UP AS HE GOES ALONG. When he arrives, it’s open season on everything—your neighbor, your neighbor’s wife, your neighbor’s land. He senses this fast and stakes immediate claims with the new laws he commences creating daily, making certain they are all fueled by his Big Three: Guilt, Sin, and Hell. Yes, this is what Boston is being created from, and Massachusetts, and soon, America. These early guys are inventing America’s religion. Might as well plop into it everything you need to keep the people in their places. And no one is going to keep them in their places more effectively than John Winthrop and his God.
What makes a great man? Why, he himself does. Who else is there to make him so? John Winthrop arrives in New England in 1630 and dies in 1649. He fathers sixteen children. He is elected governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony twelve times. This man came to the New World to be great in every possible way. For starters, he writes his own history. From the moment of his arrival he keeps a journal. He refers to himself throughout as the Governor. It helps posterity when you keep a journal, especially if few others of importance do so. (And if every historian since swallows it whole.) And then you make certain that the newspapers are coerced and controlled by the Fear of God that you are peddling into reporting your every Coming. Yes, John Winthrop is the main actor in his own drama from the moment he gets off the stinking boat that barely crosses the ocean intact. (They were all called vomitoriums, those boats, the Mayflower, his Arbella, the Griffin that brings Thomas Hooker, and all the other craft plying the ocean.) He stands on its deck as it stands in its dock and makes his famous speech about the Lord guiding him to create “my cittie on a hille.” Oh, that City on a Hill speech has legs! He is Mr. Massachusetts from this disembarkation and this declaration. He was wealthy in England, he was accustomed to command. He was disgusted by England’s moral corruption so he comes to America. He dislikes much of what he’d seen there and sees here. The Lorde directs him to get ridde of it. And God damn it, he would and will.
In his obsession to make himself and his people perfect in an imperfect world, he will become America’s first trendsetter, and our first mass murderer, admittedly a harsh judgment but we are fighting fire with fire here (and from now on). The expression “get away with murder” is coined around this time, if not located by some minister in the Bible itself.
There is not much Boston yet, just a bunch of miscellaneous acreage, much of it presently useless, some of it shantytown, and all of it not nearly enough to take care of the needs of Winthrop’s wealthy followers and the coming immigrants. Winthrop stakes his claim to every hither and yon he can. Soon he decides he has enough good land to please his Lord. It is big enough to contain them all and small enough that he can oversee it as both judge and jury. What a perfect situation for a dictator in the making.
Winthrop’s journal reveals him as a belligerent bully with no respect for anyone who differs with him. How have none of his biographers seen this? He is a leader at a time when no one wants to be a leader. He has the field to himself in the middle of the seventeenth century, in this growing center of this growing new world. He is no fool. He sees how dumb everybody else is and how to capitalize on that. No one seems to care how painfully impossible his demands will be. Indeed, it’s as if everyone desires them to be demanding. I ask again, where does obedience like this come from, so fully formed, so ready? It isn’t as if there are police standing by to lock up every miscreant. (That, of course, is on the way.) There is no one to contradict him or resist him.
Like George Washington after him, Winthrop is obsessed with land. There is never enough of it for gentlemen such as he. It is worth more than money, land is. He must live in as lavish a perfection as he can, for his Lord, of course. He does not pay for most of it. He takes it as his due. Even land-greedy George won’t be as smarmy as that.
A mansion comes first, in town. Next will come farms on the North Shore of the harbor, one of them 150 acres, the other more than 200. Then an island in the harbor, a farm of 600 acres on the Mystic River, and 1,260 acres more on the Concord River farther inland. A half interest with Roger Williams in yet another island, farther off in Narragansett Bay. And finally, another 3,000 acres granted to his wife. Some of this land comes from “my grateful town,” some from “my grateful state.” Some thirty of his “families” will receive almost half of the entire town’s remaining land. Latecomers be forewarned: there is nothing available. The Governor and his followers have grabbed it up first. They are all living quite comfo
rtably in his City on a Hill, thank you very much.
If we can look closely, which history is occasionally able to do, we see that all the colony’s land is taken from the Indians. Winthrop’s excuse is that the natives haven’t “subdued” the land and thus had no “civil right” to it. Never mind that he kills them off first before he takes it. He authorizes the smallpox-them-to-death trick, and he brags about it. Starting in 1492, contagions claim nine Indian lives out of ten, many of them from infected blankets laid on them by Puritans as gifts.
But look: slowly, year by year, his people seem to be cutting back on God. Have they got John Winthrop’s number? Are they just exhausted? Was this Roger Williams guy and his campaign of revisionism working? Roger Williams was crisscrossing the Colony, speaking at every pulpit and would-be pulpit he could climb upon, tearing the Puritans to pieces. By 1645, of 421 families, 128 are no longer attending church. And this number of stay-at-homes is increasing. What does the Governor do to keep his colony from slipping away, from falling apart? How do you get these folks back into the saddle of the Lord?
You get meaner, that’s what you do. You make harsher laws and you punish the disobedient and you imprison them and you cut off their ears and you place them in stocks and you banish them and you hang them too. There are lots of things you can do when God is whispering them into your ear. And you encourage everyone to rat on their neighbors to alert Winthrop and his fellow preachers, or teachers as he calls them, of anything “bad” seen or heard or suspected. It was early blacklisting, that’s what it was. It appears that we have been very good at this from our beginning.
For “Disrespect of the Lorde’s Day” and “Absence on the Lorde’s Day” some two thousand fines are collected. This works out to a fine on more than half of the households. “I have lette matters slippe too much. Never againe.”
There will be more than one thousand harsher convictions credited to Winthrop during his nineteen years in Boston.
Two hundred cases of adultery are punished annually. In at least two-thirds of them it is the woman who is put in the stocks. In at least a dozen cases the woman is hanged for not being sexually available to her husband on demand, although, thank the Lord, “thus free-ing up the husband to marry again and return to the bosom of the Lorde.” Many couples are punished jointly for not accepting each other under God. This is where his nut-lopping comes in. “If you are not to love each other and not to part, in order to try elsewhere, what use to you of these but as a remembrance of what the Lord had wished?”
One-fifth to one-quarter of all offenses in the records of the Massachusetts Bay Colony are for homosexual acts. As indicated, hanging is the punishment for sodomy. Each and every year at least thirty-five men are hanged. At least fifty are put in the stocks. At least a dozen are banished. Why the difference in the severity of the punishments is not noted is perhaps because of payments to Winthrop. Yes, Winthrop has “a special hate for the sodomites.” Yes, one of his sons comes before him for this crime. His own father orders him hanged, and never knows that the young man is set free by his mother and allowed to run away.
A man named Philip Morgan comes to live near Boston. He and his younger lover, Paul Morton, find themselves happy here. They acquire land far away from staring eyes and they farm sufficient to their needs. Yes, life is hard; storms, wolves, starvation, and diseases are rampant. “But we have each other and we are safe,” each tells the other all the time.
The Boston Latin School has opened. Philip is engaged to teach. He tells the boys, of whom there are no more than half a dozen, about “the great Greek philosopher Socrates, and Alexander the Great himself.” He wants to tell the boys what he knows in his heart about both these men. He does not, but he is discharged for telling them what little he did. Ancient Greece already has a bad reputation for “licentious behavior.”
What he had written down to tell them was more complete. “In ancient Greece, a man might be attracted to a woman not his wife. He might be attracted to other men. When the Greek army defeated a Persian army ten times its size, the power of love among comrades could be seen to be the heroic power it was. The great philosopher Socrates taught that physical beauty and moral excellence went hand in hand. The greatest warrior of all time, Alexander the Great, was such a man beloved by all men, including the one he bedded with each night.” These words were found on a sheet of paper beneath their bed.
Although hushmarked behavior was illegal and sodomy punishable by death, this is one of the first recorded instances in the history of The American People in which a private house is entered so brutally and the sleep of the inhabitants interfered with so vigorously:
“It is with sad occasion that ’twas necessary to invade the household built by said Mr. Morgan in the Roxbury Woods, and here it was discovered that he lived not alone but with the young man Paul Morton, some years his junior. And here they slept in one narrow bed together, and here were the sheets investigated and found to contain stains of a male nature. When caught unexpectedly together they were found to be naked of clothing and in each other’s embrace, involved in that act which is so repugnant to God in Heaven and which is condemned in the Scriptures of Our Lorde.”
The case is open and shut. Philip Morgan is hanged on two charges of “indecent morality both in his teachings and in his ungodly desires.” Paul Morton could not be found. “The young lad managed somehow to disappear afore arrest was sent to fetch him to the gallows.” (Above from Additional Annals of the Massachusetts Bay Community, 1630–1649, vol. VII, pp. 245–53. Massachusetts Historical Society Annex, Duxbury.) John Winthrop personally signed Morgan’s death warrant.
Also found under the bed was a letter Philip had written to Paul: “We all want desperately to believe we come from and are a part of the best that ever was.” He went on to give Paul directions about how to get himself to a safe place many weeks away due south, “where it is warm and safer. Go, with my everlasting love.” Did Paul know about this letter and its contents?
It is the commandment “Honor Thy Father and Thy Mother” that John Winthrop uses to rid himself of the biggest trial of his governorship. “If we should change from a mixed aristocracy to mere democracy,” he wrote, “first we should have no warrant in scripture for it: for there was no such government in Israel. A democracy is, amongst civil nations, accounted the meanest and worst of all forms of government. [To allow it would be] a manifest breach of the 5th Commandment.”
A woman, a housewife named Anne Hutchinson, begins preaching in the Massachusetts Bay Colony against the basic principles of the Puritan religion. She aids new mothers, helping her best friend, Mary Dyer, with the midwifing, and she starts leading the women in regular Bible study in her big house, which is just across the street from Winthrop’s. She believes that no one else is responsible for her salvation, no church, no preacher, no teacher, not even the Bible. Her relationship with God is hers and hers alone. This is blasphemy to the Puritans. She is accused of luring and then harboring people into secret “conventicles.” Anyone can be saved when one feels saved is her feeling and she will be exiled for it. She is nearer to our Protestantism, which would be anathema then as well: a dangerous disregard for so-called expertise, for authority. It is all quite petty, these differences, and utterly cruel. Anne was challenging the Bible, she was questioning it. She knew what she was doing. She was crying out against enslavement, of women, even of the Indians themselves. She challenged the concept of original sin because it blames women.
Winthrop also has to contend with Roger Williams, that other preacher from hell, as he would call him. Williams is also obsessed with God and his own determination is to completely separate church and state. He is single-minded in his attempt to point out to Winthrop and his followers that a civil state should allow all kinds of religions and should not have jurisdiction over the soul. Let us not kill each other; this ending will come soon enough.
It is interesting to note that John Cotton (Cotton Mather will be his grandson), and
Thomas Hooker himself, have arrived. Each will be called by Winthrop to judge both Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams. Each will condemn them both. The great Thomas Hooker describes Williams as “from whence the infection would easily spread into these churches.” Cotton says of Anne, his former dearest friend, “You are a woman not fit for our society.”
Roger in his single-minded zeal has never stopped hammering at Winthop’s God. “It is a false peace” when the state inflicts punishments on people who question it. Such talk is considered a contempt for authority, and if he doesn’t recant Williams will be punished.
In 1637, Winthrop has a court order issued “to keep out all such persons as might be dangerous to the commonwealth.” Once again one shudders to see Christians setting in stone powers that permit them to persecute other Christians who disagree with them. “We are your judges, not you ours,” Winthrop says to Anne Hutchinson at her trial.
For Hutchinson and her followers are accused as not only enemies of Christ but of society, of everyone, of the entire population of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and are to be imprisoned until Winthrop decides where to send her.
An earlier sin had been discovered that was the clincher. In her midwife days Anne had delivered the stillborn baby of her friend Mary Dyer and, with John Cotton’s blessings, secretly buried its fetus, claiming, when later queried, that it was “a monster.” Winthrop has it exhumed and indeed it was so misshapen a monster that Winthrop blames this consequence on the mother’s friendship with Anne. Cotton denies his participation in the cover-up. Mary Dyer and the Hutchinsons (her husband has just died and Anne is pregnant for a fifteenth time) escape before the sentence is delivered and head for Rhode Island to join Roger Williams. Rhode Island allows them, along with Jews and Baptists and Quakers, outcasts elsewhere.