The Lord Of Misrule

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NPR

Society & Culture, History, Documentary

4.6 • 16.4K Ratings

🗓️ 7 December 2023

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On November 18, 1633, a book went to press in London. Its author, Thomas Morton, had been exiled from the Puritan colonies in Massachusetts for the crimes of drinking, carousing, and – crucially – building social and economic ties with Native people. Back in England, Morton wrote down his vision for what America could become. A very different vision than that of the Puritans.

But the book wouldn't be published that day. It wouldn't be published for years. Because agents for the Puritan colonists stormed the press and destroyed every copy.

Today on the show, the story of what's widely considered America's first banned book, the radical vision it conjured, and the man who outlined that vision: Thomas Morton, the Lord of Misrule.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, it's Jasmine Garst from NPR's The Last Cop.
0:04.1	I'm one of thousands of NPR network voices coming to you from over 200 local newsrooms
0:10.2	across the country.
0:11.5	We bring all Americans closer together through free and across the and PR network. What you hear changes everything. I'm going to a-cke-C-C-C-T. The- In the year since the incarnation of Christ 1622 it was my chance to be landed in the
1:07.9	parts of New England where I found two sorts of people, the one Christians, the other infidels. These I found most full of humanity.
1:19.8	It's the 1630s and a man named Thomas Morton sits down to write a book, a book that almost
1:28.0	changed America's origin story.
1:32.3	If this land be not rich, then is the whole world poor?
1:36.0	Morton journeyed across the Atlantic Ocean to New Plymouth, Massachusetts.
1:41.0	The more I looked, the more I liked it.
1:44.8	Except the Pilgrims had gotten there first
1:47.6	and had already set up one of North America's
1:49.9	first European colonies.
1:52.3	And Morton, by the time he writes his book, had already
1:55.4	been kicked out of New England twice. The separatists envying the prosperity and hope of
2:01.0	the plantation at Merrimount conspired together against and party against him and mustered up what aid they could, the book went to the press in London.
2:40.3	The title of that book was New English Canaan. As it's being printed, full of lies and slanders,
2:44.0	and fraught with profane columnies
2:46.0	against their names and persons,
2:49.0	and ye ways of God.
2:51.0	The agents of the New England people go to the press.
2:54.0	Wickedness scandal.
	...

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