Ronald Reagan’s Shining City on a Hill
BY THE END of the 1970s, the transit of “A Model of Christian Charity” from a regional New England text to a foundational document for America itself was already well under way. The Puritans had begun their remarkable movement from one of history’s side theaters into their center-stage role as articulators of the “myth of America.” The “city upon a hill” line, employed now with explicit reference to Winthrop’s Arbella text, had been added to the stock phrases of American presidential rhetoric. But it was Ronald Reagan who gave the Model its modern public life. Reinventing Winthrop’s words for the late twentieth century, he seized on two of its sentences, inserted them into the very “beginnings” of U.S. history, and made them parts of a script that virtually every American would be taught by the end of the century.
The result was an extraordinary act of simplification. Miller’s notion of a people severely tested by the demands of their covenant, like Bercovitch’s sense of a people swallowed whole by a totalizing vision of themselves, was put aside for scholars to worry over. The social ethic at the heart of the Model’s plea for charity was left on the cutting room floor. The Winthrop whom Reagan gave to his listeners—detached from the Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams controversies, detached from Winthrop’s contemporaries’ disputes over the proper bounds of liberty and authority, detached from every historical context except the “tiny” pitching ship carrying him and his small band across the Atlantic—was the founding articulator of the American promise.
The Model came into the Reagan White House through the chains of happenstance, neglect, and reappropriation that, as we have seen, shaped its history from the first. A four-word snippet of it came out of the Reagan White House as patriotic icon: a foundation stone in the American canon. Ronald Reagan accomplished all of this in part by sheer repetition of the elements in Winthrop’s text and story that had caught his imagination. Reagan was a man familiar with scripts and more skilled than any other president of his century in working with them. He knew how to make their cadences into a kind of verbal music. He did not mind the endless loops of repetition by which certain keywords became deeply attached to his political beliefs and persona. From his first ventures into public speaking in the late 1940s through his “Farewell Address” almost half a century later, certain cherished phrases were to echo continuously through his speeches: verbal signatures that he would occupy like comfortable old clothes.
But Reagan did not make an extract from Winthrop’s words and story familiar by repetition only. He and his speechwriters did so through a series of reinventions by which Winthrop’s “city upon a hill” phrase slowly morphed from a call to battle into a line of reassurance for a kind of cinematic nationalism. Those unsettled by Reagan’s transformation from a messenger of Cold War apocalypse to the bland cheerleader of a nation where “it’s a sunrise every day”—where at every new moment “something wonderful can happen to you”—often found the move dismaying.1 But it was a fitting capstone to the Model’s story. Even at the height of its public reputation, its ingredients did not stay stable.
Ronald Reagan liked a good historical tale. As a college student, he was later candid enough to admit, he had not cared much for his classes.2 He had essentially majored in football at small, Disciples of Christ–affiliated Eureka College, not the economics major in which he was officially enrolled. In his middle age, however, he began to read more and more voraciously in history and politics. Eclectic in his choices, he proved an easy mark for the dramatic quotation and fictionalized historical event that circulated through the conservative magazines, speakers’ handbooks, and newspapers clippings he devoured. Blood-thirsty, false quotations from Lenin, more savage than anything Lenin ever actually said, put into circulation by witnesses before the congressional committees on un-American activities, struck a powerful chord with Reagan. One of those false quotations still strikes awe in visitors to the Reagan Museum in Simi Valley, California, though its fabrication was pointed out years ago.3
Reagan loved to retell the story that he thought Jefferson himself had written about the climactic moment at Independence Hall in July 1776. As the members of the Continental Congress were still fretting about the act of signing the Declaration, an old man had risen in the balcony, shaken his bony finger at the delegates, and called out: “Sign that parchment! … Sign, sign if the next moment the noose is around your neck, sign if the hall is ringing with the sound of headman’s axe, for that parchment will be the textbook of freedom, the bible of the rights of man forever.” An invention of the gothic fiction writer George Leppard in 1847, nothing like this ever happened.4 Reagan was equally fond of a pledge that John Adams was said to have made on the same occasion—“sink or swim, live or die, survive or perish, I give my hand and my heart to this vote”—which was also an invention of the nineteenth century.5 He mistook scenes from the World War II movies that he loved for the war’s real events.6
Much later, on Reagan’s entry into the White House, an unidentified staff member assigned to squeeze some of these fabrications out of the new president’s speeches, borrowed a copy of the 1838 Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society from the Library of Congress to check out Reagan’s “city upon a hill” quotation.7 But Reagan’s version of the Arbella story was, except for his shrinking of the ship down to the dimensions of a “tiny” vessel, an accurate rendition of what historians were writing at the time. And the note card extract he made in his own handwriting was accurate virtually word for word: “We shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us, so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken & so cause him to withdraw his present help from us, we shall be made a story & a byword throughout the world.”8
It is a commonplace assumption that someone other than Reagan himself must have injected that passage into Reagan’s speeches. At some point, it is supposed, a speechwriter fed him the text that he was, by force of repetition, to make iconic of himself and America. But that is not at all likely. After leaving his Hollywood acting career in 1954, Reagan had earned his living for the next ten years as a public speaker, writing out his own material in longhand. In 1969–70, when the “city upon a hill” phrase first showed up in his speeches on four tightly clustered occasions, Reagan was in the California governor’s office assisted by a professional speechwriting staff. Its head, Jerry Martin, remembered their collaboration this way: “We would sit down and we would talk.” He would pull something out of his full briefcase; he would say “I want to say this.” Then “I would write it and he would edit it … and [sometimes] put a lot more into it than we had already put in.”9 Pages of these handwritten inserts can still be found in the Reagan archives.10 The apocryphal “speech from the balcony” story was one of Reagan’s own additions, as Martin’s accompanying memo to his 1974 American Conservative Union speech draft noted. Martin did not say who put the Arbella story and its “city upon a hill” lines into that same speech. But they were not in Martin’s first draft. Almost certainly they had come out of Reagan’s briefcase as well.11
By the time Ronald Reagan opened his campaign for the 1980 presidential election, his signature phrases were being more carefully polished by those who knew the arts of public relations. But even then his speechwriting staff did not know the power of the “city on a hill” line as fully as Reagan himself. From 1981 to 1989, Reagan’s principal speechwriter was Anthony Dolan. A former journalist like Martin, Dolan authored Reagan’s famous “Evil Empire” speech excoriating the Soviet Union in 1983, and he helped shape hundreds of others. It was Dolan who appropriated the phrase from Isaiah to promise that the United States would become not only a city on a hill but, like biblical Israel itself, “a light unto the nations.”12 By contrast, John Winthrop was a much vaguer presence in Dolan’s mind. In his first draft of Reagan’s much admired speech at the relighting of the Statue of Liberty torch in 1986, Dolan still did not know the “city upon a hill” quotation by heart.13 In a draft for an earlier speech in 1983, Dolan confused John Winthrop with Joseph Warren, hero of the Battle of Bunker Hill, whose words Reagan also loved to quote, so they came out as quotations from Joseph Warren and “Joseph” Winthrop. Unnoticed by the White House staff, the two Josephs mistake persisted into the final version.14 At another point, as a speech was in rewriting, Dolan made a note to be sure to include “the quote from John Wordsworth about the city upon a hill.”15 Modern speechwriters are almost inconceivably busy people, who cannot be expected to keep everything straight. But “city on a hill” was not Dolan’s invention.
Nor was it the invention of the other speechwriters who during Reagan’s presidency honed the motif with great rhetorical skill. Peggy Noonan, the most gifted of them in this regard, had Reagan confess to the nation in his farewell address in 1989 that just in the past few days “I’ve been at that window upstairs, [and] I’ve thought a bit of the ‘shining city on a hill’ ” and what John Winthrop must have meant in using it “to describe the America he imagined.” From that launching point Noonan’s imagery took flight, from the “little wooden boat,” the Arbella, to the giant aircraft carrier Midway, from the Normandy beaches to the “granite ridge” on which the nation stood.16 But the core story and its extracted phrase was one that Reagan’s principal writers had been given to work with, not one they owned.
In a radio address that Reagan had written out by hand in 1978, he told his listeners that sorting through his bundles of note cards looking for quotations that spoke most powerfully to the current state of the world, he had chosen three that went to the heart of the American promise: Emma Lazarus’s words at the base of the Statue of Liberty, Thomas Jefferson’s commitments to small government and the broadest possible sphere for liberty, and Winthrop’s words from “A Model of Christian Charity.”17
Where had Ronald Reagan found the “city upon a hill” lines? The record gives no clear answer. It was certainly not a borrowing from John Kennedy, as scores of accounts have suggested. In the 1960s Reagan did reach eagerly for Kennedy’s words and political mantle. He had been deeply moved by Kennedy’s pledge that the nation would pay any price for freedom, a phrase Reagan turned back sharply on the Democratic Party’s second thoughts on Kennedy’s war in Vietnam. In the same vein, Reagan attached himself proudly to Franklin Roosevelt’s line from the 1936 Democratic National Convention, that his generation had “a rendezvous with destiny.”18 In 1979 Reagan would put that signature New Deal phrase into his own speech announcing his candidacy for the presidency.19 But in the farewell address that Kennedy had delivered to the Massachusetts legislature in 1961, Sorensen had used only the first of the Winthrop phrases that Reagan would initially make his own. “We must always consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill—the eyes of all people are upon us,” Sorensen had Kennedy say.20 But Sorensen had cut off the quotation before the phrase that initially meant even more to Reagan: “so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken & so cause him to withdraw his present help from us, we shall be made a story & a byword through the world.” Reagan could not have copied that from Kennedy.
The most likely source was Daniel Boorstin’s The Americans, whose first volume had been published in 1958. Reagan was then General Electric’s principal goodwill spokesman, making hundreds of speeches a year on behalf of his employer and corporate capitalism generally. Actively on the lookout for usable material, he would copy out a treasured joke and or a quotation that had caught his imagination onto the note cards from which he spoke. On page three of The Americans, where it would have been hard for even a casual reader to miss it, Boorstin had printed the full two-sentence Winthrop quotation that Reagan wrote out on his note card. The passage’s spelling and punctuation were modernized, but the words were virtually intact.21
In Reagan’s early uses of Winthrop’s words, the second sentence—“if we shall deal falsely with our God”—was every bit as essential as the first one. From Reagan’s first recorded use of Winthrop’s story through his election eve television address in 1980, the two tightly linked sentences—the claim of world-historical importance and the warning that the promise might turn, overnight, to ashes—were virtually undetachable from one another in Reagan’s mind. The frame that united them was a deeply Manichaean reading of the Cold War that Reagan, in his turn from New Deal Democrat to Barry Goldwater Republican in the late 1950s and early 1960s, had imbibed from the anti-Communist calls to arms around him.
Reagan’s core theme was the nearness of a tragic misstep from the destiny that Winthrop’s words had laid out for America. Threatened by arms and revolutions abroad and sapped from within by the ever-expansive reach of government, liberty itself was under siege. Reagan embraced every prediction of freedom’s vulnerability with fearful eagerness. “Freedom has never been so fragile, so near to slipping from our grasp, as it is at this moment,” he declared in his celebrated “A Time for Choosing” speech in 1964.22 A fall as catastrophic as the fall of Rome and Athens threatened to overwhelm the nation. The clock of history was running out. Time now stood at “high noon,” the shoot-out hour. “Where shall we be at five minutes after Twelve?”23 Reagan loved to grimly repeat the words of an “Ohio doctor” that rattled through the conservative press: “For one shining glorious moment in history, we had the key and open door and the way was there before us. And men threw off the yoke of centuries and thrust forward along that way with such brilliance that for a little while we were the light and the inspiration of the world. And now the key has been thrown away, the door is closing and we are losing the way.”24
Reagan was in no manner a Calvinist. But a sense of standing at a rendezvous with destiny, at a division point between starkly divergent futures, made Winthrop’s “story and a byword” warning intensely real for him. Betray their mission, Reagan warned his audiences, and their ideals would turn to “ashes.”25 One false choice and the United States might be consigned to a “sterile footnote in history.”26
These forces of stark opposition came home for Reagan in the eruptive political battles of the late 1960s. He had made forceful crackdown on campus protests a centerpiece of his campaign for the California governorship, together with brakes on runaway government spending and mounting welfare budgets. In May 1969 he had sent California Highway Patrol forces into a bloody confrontation with students at the University of California at Berkeley who had tried to turn an occupied piece of university land into an open “People’s Park.” A campaign television ad script written the previous year had already sketched out Reagan’s basic plot. “Speakers … mouths open, impassioned speeches … professor on strike … bearded ‘student leader’ … quick cut of [the Black Panthers’ George] Murray putting down the flag, the Constitution, the American people,” and then a quick cut again to Governor Reagan at his desk, soberly reminding voters that “for one tick of history’s clock we gave the world a shining, golden hope.”27
Reagan’s very first recorded use of the Model’s words came in a speech to a fund-raising dinner for the association of Independent Colleges of Southern California a month after the People’s Park occupation began. He repeated the same speech essentially unchanged on three other college fund-raising occasions over the next year on behalf of the newly founded Eisenhower College in upstate New York, his own Eureka College, and the Churches of Christ–sponsored Pepperdine College in 1970. In each case, Reagan began with the tumult on college campuses. There, he warned his audiences, scenes from the fall of Rome into barbarism were replaying before one’s eyes. Looting, vandalism, arson, drug use, and demonstrations in the streets ran rampant. Students were demanding an immediate peace in Vietnam, a peace that could bring “a thousand years of darkness for generations yet unborn.” Ages of wisdom were being heaved aside. “The jungle seems to be closing in on this plot we’ve been trying to civilize for 6,000 years.”28
But Reagan concluded each of these speeches in the same way. Not all college students had descended into University of California at Berkeley–style anarchy. At places like Eisenhower College, or Pepperdine College, or the independent colleges of Southern California deeper commitments to learning and teaching persisted. Against the chaos whipped up by Black Power advocates and free-speech anarchists, each of these institutions stood, as Winthrop’s “shining dream” had promised, as a “city upon a hill.” Give to their annual appeals, Reagan pleaded, and John Winthrop’s vision might be preserved from turning to “ashes” in our lifetime.
When in the mid-1970s Reagan took a version of that formula into the arena of national politics, the structure remained the same. Moral and patriotic feelings were decaying. Inflation was on the rise. Government growth was out of control. Capitalism was being blamed for everything from despoiling the environment to “seducing, if not outright raping, the customer.”29 “Ideological fanaticism” was running hard. Abroad, the “terrifying, enormous blackness” of totalitarianism grew larger every day.30 At home, “ghosts from the riotous, hate-filled ’60s are stalking the land.”31 But there was a saving remnant who knew the stark choices that the nation faced. There were Americans who were not ready to let the vision of a city on a hill go: Americans who knew (as he put it to the Conservative Political Action Conference in 1975) that “if we fail to keep our rendezvous with destiny or, as John Winthrop said in 1630, ‘Deal falsely with our God,’ we shall be made ‘a story and byword throughout the world.’ ”32
As in every act of reappropriation, Reagan altered the meaning of Winthrop’s words in the very act of possessing them. Winthrop never spelled out the scenario of failure with the vividness that Reagan invested in the “byword” line. Winthrop wrote for a company that had already cast its choice; his deepest fear was that under the scrutiny of their detractors the Puritans might not show that they could live up to the tasks of faith, love, and discipline that their covenant demanded. Reagan urged Americans to make a choice, and having made it, stand as a beacon for the world to see. What joined Reagan’s and Winthrop’s cities on a hill across this chasm of difference was their sense of embattlement—their sense of a people living under probation at a profoundly urgent moment in history.
On the strength of his personal charm and alarmist message, abetted by Jimmy Carter’s foreign policy woes and economic failures, Reagan swept into the White House, carrying Winthrop’s words with him. “I know I have told before of the moment when the tiny ship Arabella bearing settlers to the New World lay off the Massachusetts coast,” Reagan reminded the nation in his election eve speech in November 1980.33 He would tell or refer to that story repeatedly thereafter. But already a repackaging of Reagan’s signature extract from the Model was under way.
Perhaps Reagan’s public relations managers sensed that a doomsayer president would not have the same political staying power as an alarm-sounding insurgent candidate. Perhaps they recognized that the widely criticized speech on the crisis of morale haunting the land that Jimmy Carter had delivered just the summer before Reagan announced his candidacy for president had given them an opportunity to reposition him as a figure of strength and confidence.34 Perhaps Reagan’s very election had begun to alter the mood within his speechwriting staff. The fervidly Manichaean tone of Reagan’s “Evil Empire” speech was still to come. But gradually the Winthrop-quoting candidate who entered the White House began to be replaced by a more reassuring, measured, Winthrop-quoting president.
The most striking sign of that transformation was the way in which the “story and a byword” line all but disappeared from Reagan’s version of Winthrop’s words after the election. Reagan used the “byword” sentence in his election eve speech in 1980. In his more than thirty references to the “city on a hill” afterward, however, he used or paraphrased the Model’s “byword” sentence on only two occasions, once in a speech to the conservative Heritage Foundation in 1983 and again in his final radio address to the nation in 1989.35 But that was all. The imminence of potential failure, once so prominent in Reagan’s mind, silently fell away.
Just as striking was the manner in which the “city on a hill” image shifted in his speeches as well. Reagan had been drawn to the word “shining” for a long while. Could the nation stave off the threats it faced at every hand, he had asked a television audience in 1968: “Can we hold open the door to that shining golden tomorrow?”36 In his Independent Colleges of Southern California speech in 1969 he had evoked that “shining dream of John Winthrop’s.” You must take up the task to restore America as a “shining city on a hill”—“a golden hope for all mankind,” he told a college audience in 1973.37 But if “shining” was an old usage, in his White House speechwriters’ hands images of light now burst out everywhere. What flashed through Tony Dolan’s mind at the thought of a “city on a hill” was the scene that caught visitors’ eyes when they glimpsed the floodlights bathing the monuments in Washington, DC. The “city on a hill” was the halls of Congress, the monuments and cemeteries of heroes, and “those lights on the Potomac.” Let us resolve, Dolan wrote for Reagan, that future generations of visitors to that “city on a hill” would still find those Potomac lights burning.38
Dolan was responsible for the addition of another softening line to Reagan’s stock phrases. “This kindly, pleasant, greening land we call America,” he had Reagan say, apparently oblivious to the fact that it was a paraphrase extracted from William Blake’s epic appeal for a new “Jerusalem” to be built “in England’s green and pleasant land,” set to music as Britain’s unofficial national anthem during World War I, and known to the rest of the world as a foundation stone in English rhetorical nationalism.39 Blake’s line, Winthrop’s words, and Isaiah’s “light unto the nations” were all essentially the same for Dolan, sometimes yoked together virtually in the same sentence.
For others, intent on surrounding the city on a hill with auras of adjectives, “hope” became the hinge word. Reagan’s America, they wrote, was “a city of hope,” “a land of wonders,” a “beacon of hope to oppressed peoples everywhere,” a nation whose “future is bright again with collective glow,” a “shining city on a hill where all things are possible.” “How can anyone in the United States of America in the world today, be scared of anything?” Reagan’s speechwriters had him tell the Texas Bar Association in 1984; “we are truly a shining city on a hill.”40
In these variations, any sense of contingency virtually fell away. Let us go to the American people and remind them of “America’s destiny,” he told the Republican National Convention in 1988. Let us help them to see, rising through the “dark but dispersing clouds of twentieth-century tragedy … that shining city we have seen and labored for and loved so long, a city aglow with the light of human freedom, a light that someday will cast its glow on every dark corner of the world and on every age and generation to come.” “Twilight? Twilight?” he told the cheering delegates the next day. “Not in America.… That’s not possible.” “In this springtime of hope,” he promised in 1984, “some lights seem eternal; America’s is.”41
It was left to Reagan’s most cinematic of speechwriters to complete the transformation of the “city on a hill” line from fragile possibility to an enduring fact. “I’ve spoken of the shining city on a hill all my political life,” Peggy Noonan had Reagan say in his farewell address to the nation, “but I don’t know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it.… In my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, windswept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get there. That’s how I saw it, and see it still.”42 But that movie-set city, flooded in light and harmony, was not the way Reagan had seen the “city on a hill” all his political life. It had no resemblance to the “city upon a hill” of Winthrop’s “Model of Christian Charity.” A rhetoric veined with choice and danger when it caught Reagan’s imagination had morphed into a celebration of what already existed.
If in their first instantiation in his rhetoric Reagan had wielded Winthrop’s lines as a sword, in their second, pared of their embarrassing “story” and “byword” lines, they became a rhetoric of reassurance. “U.S.A.!, U.S.A.!, U.S.A.!,” the delegates to the 1984 Republican National Convention chanted.43 “America is back,” Reagan’s campaign ads declared. Threading that theme through all of the American past from the Puritan “Founders” to the present was part of the work the rhetoric did. Hope, Reagan’s public-image makers began to realize, was his best selling point. The Jeremiah holding aloft the ticking clock of history had yielded the stage to a cheerleader. Divesting “A Model of Christian Charity” of its early, more ambivalent lives, Reagan’s 1980s speechwriters remade it as a foundational text for a nation eager for reassurance of its power and greatness.
Nationalism feeds on the continuous invention of timeless-appearing texts. By the end of the 1980s Reagan’s use and reuse had made “a city on a hill” into one of the most widely recognized building blocks in the culture of American nationalism. In a single verbal gesture it stretched the usable history of the nation back three and a half centuries into the mists of nationalist time. “We who are privileged to be Americans have had a rendezvous with destiny since the moment in 1630 when John Winthrop, standing on the deck of the tiny Arbella off the coast of Massachusetts, told the little band of Pilgrims, ‘We shall be a city upon a hill,’ ” Reagan declared at the outset of his 1980 presidential campaign. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution became not dramatic punctuation marks in history but confirmations of a story and a destiny articulated long before.44 And yet, even in constructing Winthrop’s words as timeless, Reagan and his writers had changed them not merely once but twice. The lights and shadows of Cold War Manichaeism were out; contingency was out; the steady glow of hopefulness was in. “We Americans are keepers of the miracles,” Reagan promised in his last radio speech. “May it ever be so.”45