The Bending Road of History

Collective memory runs in different directions

In the 25 or so-mile radius that I think of as home ground, the Hutchinson River Parkway is an important artery. It courses through northeastern Westchester County in New York, changing its name to the Merritt Parkway when it reaches Connecticut, named after Schuyler Merritt, the Republican congressman who represented the southwestern part of the state from 1917 to 1937. Schuyler Merritt: ultimate Yankee name (with a Dutch accent). A reminder, which it’s sometimes easy to forget, that Connecticut is part of New England—but also, like so many places, a borderland.

I’ve been thinking about Anne Hutchinson recently because I’ve been reading and writing about her as part of my current project on women in early Massachusetts. Which points to the oddity of a highway, and the river that runs along it, being named after her in New York. It is true that Hutchinson died there in 1643—she was killed in a raid by Siwanoy people rightly angry about the aggressions of Dutch Governor William Kieft, ignoring warnings from locals that she was in danger. Hutchinson came to Boston in 1634, and undoubtedly would have preferred to spend her life there. But she was a vocal critic of the clerical establishment and was ultimately banished from the colony of Massachusetts. She and her family moved to the place we now know as Rhode Island. There were again ideological conflicts—this is a running theme of Hutchinson’s life—which led her to leave New England entirely after she was widowed and start over again in the New Netherland territory that we now know as Pelham, New York. Despite her unfortunate end, her significant legacy as a dissident also extends a line of heirs that includes Franklin Roosevelt and the two George Bushes.

Hutchinson has been remembered in a number of ways, among them as a pioneer of religious freedom and a founding mother of feminism. But why this highway—among the first in the United States, which was built between 1924 and 1941? I can’t prove it, but I have my suspicions, and they aren’t exactly pretty. In American cultural history, the 1930s were marked by a movement known as the Puritan Revival, which in this part of the world included the construction of lots of Tudor architecture that remains a staple of places like Bronxville. Greater New York was in these years grappling with a massive amount of immigration, much of it from southern and eastern Europe. The tap had been cut off with the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, which reduced the flow of immigrants to near zero. But the pig was already in the python (which included people like my grandfather, a native of Naples, who ended up as a taxi driver based in Queens—that’s Queens as in Queen Henrietta, wife of King Charles II). Amid this high tide of cultural change, one really attractive thing about Anne Hutchinson is that she was a white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant (by this point there was little interest in getting into the grubby details about the whole God thing) who represented The Real America.

Such are the vagaries of historical memory. There have been a bunch of Anne Hutchinsons: take your pick. (One thing I haven’t told you is how she understood herself. That’s a theological story; if you really want to hear it maybe you’ll read my book.) For my money, Anne Hutchinson was a powerful person driven to remake the world—and paid the price for doing so. She’s both an object lesson and an inspiration.