Such men are dangerous
by Andy Worthington
[ bookreviews ]
Historian Frances Hill, the author of several books on the Salem witch trials of 1692, has come up with an interesting thesis: that there are many remarkable similarities between the US under the leadership of George W Bush at the dawn of the 21st century and Massachusetts on the eve of the 17th century, when a handful of Puritan ideologues orchestrated a cruel and venal witch hunt, which flouted established legal provisions - actively involving torture and focusing on the acceptance of “spectral evidence” - and which led to the execution of twenty innocent people and the imprisonment of a further 150 souls unfortunate enough to be poor, of the wrong religious persuasion or critical of the prevailing regime.
It’s worth noting that this is a comparison that has rarely been made in the five years since Bush came to power, although the results are mixed. Hill notes, perceptively, that, “The ideologue sees those who oppose him as trying to destroy him. Of course, he is trying to destroy them, and is projecting his own feelings and thoughts on his enemies”, and is at her best when directly comparing the cruelty and hypocrisy of both sets of ideologies. She mentions, for example, the Massachusetts Puritans’ conviction that the poor were responsible for their own poverty - citing the preacher Cotton Mather’s assertion that “As for your common beggar, ‘tis usually an injury and a dishonour unto the country, for them to be countenanced; as for they that indulge themselves in idleness, the express command of God unto us, is that you should let them starve” - and excoriates American society today for holding similar beliefs, expressed with a “savagery [which] stems from an ethos of self-seeking, without concern for social justice, parading as righteousness”, and which “leads to a view of the underprivileged and minorities as socially and morally inferior, deserving at best minimal assistance, at worst punishment”. From the death penalty to the war on drugs, from the Patriot Act to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Hill lambasts the New Puritans for their self-righteous vindictiveness. Particular outrage is reserved for the treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, where, as Hill notes most acutely, the discovery in 2003 that some of the detainees were children was countered by defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s reality-defying insistence that “They’re not children”.
Even on this topic, however, Hill misses a few tricks, overlooking the origins of Puritanism’s particular intolerance in the combination of Calvinism’s “idealization of personal responsibility” before God with the rise of the new mercantile class that embraced it. In this inverted moral landscape, poverty was “not a misfortune to be pitied and relieved, but a moral failing to be condemned” and, moreover, personal riches were “not an object of suspicion… but the blessing which rewards the triumph of energy and will”. These twin themes were investigated by the historian RH Tawney in Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926), and were cited - in one of the few other works looking at the connections between 17th century Puritanism and the Bush administration - in a recent article by George Monbiot in The Guardian, entitled ‘The Religion of the Rich’.
Where Hill’s thesis really struggles, however, is in her rather laboured attempts to make direct comparisons between the leaders of 1692 and 2004. She attempts to equate Increase and Cotton Mather, the father-and-son preachers who dominated Salem’s religious life, with undersecretary of defence Paul Wolfowitz (“The Intellectuals”); Deputy Governor William Stoughton, one of the most enthusiastic of the witch-hunters, with Donald Rumsfeld and Vice-President Dick Cheney (“The Rulers”); Magistrate John Hathorne, another fanatical witch-hunter, with government advisor Richard Perle (“The Powers Behind The Throne”); Governor William Phips with George W. Bush (“The Top Men”); and Judge Samuel Sewall with Secretary of State Colin Powell (“The Moderates”).
Broadly speaking, these are valid comparisons to make in terms of the positions occupied by these particular people, and Hill manages to tease out some plausible comparisons between certain individuals, especially in the case of Phips and Bush, both of whom had - or have - advantageous family connections, an edgy charisma and an unprincipled lust for power. Hill observes that Phips, like Bush, had “the talent to make people warm to him and trust him, despite, or even because of, an explosive temper and tendency to coarse speech and behaviour”, and compares Phips’ “determination to gain wealth, power and prestige at all costs” in mid-17th century Maine, which was “short on any cultural, civilizing forces”, with Bush’s belief, fostered in the similarly unprincipled East Texas oil frontier of the mid-20th century, that “The only true virtues were the canniness and strength to beat the other guy in getting rich quick. All forms of law and regulation, imposed by and for anything but the power of money, were at best suspect, at worst beneath contempt”. Hill also has some limited success in comparing Sewall and Powell. The actions of both men certainly reveal a tendency to defer to authority, although the qualities specifically attributed to Sewall - that he was “loyal, punctilious [and] unquestioning” - are only partly true when applied to Powell, who has just lost his job to Condoleezza Rice precisely because he has had the nerve to speak out on several occasions.
Overall, Hill’s strategy fails to convince, despite the frequency with which she spells out the purported comparisons, because the point-by-point similarities are simply not there. Her opinion of the vicious and vindictive magistrate John Hathorne, for example, whose grandson, the author Nathaniel Hawthorne, changed the spelling of his surname to distance himself from his loathed kin, is that he was a man who “behaved as a person who believes himself incapable of error, expects total agreement, is outraged by arguments against him, is a bully and a trickster, and is merciless to anyone who does not buckle under his pressure”. These are character defects which are replicated to a large extent in all of the high-fliers in the Bush regime, but which are probably more particularly applicable to Dick Cheney than to Richard Perle, the Jewish neo-conservative advisor most noted for an obsessive preoccupation with the military might of Israel and a history of business dealings that are rife with conflicts of interest and corruption.
There are also some noticeable oversights; significant individuals who cannot be shoe-horned into Hill’s rigid structure, and who are obliged to surface elsewhere in the text. While Phips, for example, had no mentor whatsoever, the rise to power of George W Bush has been underpinned from the beginning by the machinations of the “twentieth century Machiavelli” Karl Rove, without whom, as Hill herself points out, Bush would not be President. Nor is there a starring role for attorney general John Ashcroft, the most extreme evangelist in Bush’s administration. A consummate modern-day Puritan, Ashcroft draped a shroud over the exposed breast of a female statue in the Justice Department, disapproves of drinking, gambling and even dancing, and has an ignoble history of racism, a recidivist view of women, and an unyielding opposition to abortion, even in the case of rape or incest. He clearly resembles Salem’s Puritan patriarch Increase Mather - described by Hill as “unyielding in matters of the law, self-righteous in his rectitude, and incapable of exercising… Christian charity” - rather more than the slippery figure of Paul Wolfowitz, whose public statements, as quoted by Hill, reveal a man incapable of maintaining a coherent rationale for the invasion of Iraq, letting slip not only that the case for war was spurious, and also that one of its more politically expedient motives was to transfer American military bases from Saudi Arabia to Iraq.
In the end, Such Men Are Dangerous largely tells two half-stories: that of the Salem witch hunts, which Hill is clearly qualified to tell; and that of the Bush administration, which, although she manages to pinpoint many of the greatest failings of its ideologues, is largely taken from only a handful of sources, all of which might be better read in their entirety: My American Journey, Colin Powell’s autobiography (written with Joseph E Persico); Bill Minutaglio’s First Son: George W Bush and the Bush Family Dynasty; James Moore and Wayne Slater’s Bush’s Brain; and Bob Woodward’s Bush At War. It’s noticeable too that Hill’s only sources for information on Paul Wolfowitz are a solitary interview in Vanity Fair and its unedited transcript.
This is not to dispute Hill’s valid intentions, her moral outrage - which is both palpable and often emotionally resonant - and her limited success in nailing apposite comparisons between two sets of fanatical ideologues separated by 300 years of, on occasion, more progressive ideals. Overall, however, this is not quite the book it could have been, and there are other sources - including the three books on Bush cited above - which dissect the fanatical workings of the Bush administration with more detail and more panache. A better bet might have been a straightforward, merciless dissection of the joyless greed, viciousness, hypocrisy and repression that fuelled Puritanism in its early days and that continue - via ‘Manifest Destiny’, Social Darwinism, eugenics, McCarthyism and the rise of right-wing Christian fundamentalism - to fuel it to this day.
