Hawthorne

The last story from Twice-told tales in the vintage pb Hawthorne's Short Stories, endicott and the Red Cross , is a bookend to the first story in the collection - a scene or moment in colonial pre-revolutionary history captures as if in a documentary video - in this case the first stirring of revolutionary fervor in the mid 17th century. Endicott is assembling a colonial militia under the British flag - the Red Cross of the title - for military exercises when he receives a message from roger Williams that the king of England will begin cracking down on colonial dissidents and will impose the Church of England on the colonies. Endicott then addresses the troops in a fiery rant stirring them to uprising against British rule - he slashes the cross out of his own banner. So this is the first moment in a sense of American resistance - raised in the cause of religious freedom. What makes the story excellent however is not this central scene but the material that h sketches in around the edges - the people watching the militia one person in the stocks others with brands and deformities imposed because they opposed the Puritan doctrine even a woman wearing a large scarlet letter A on her dress - a foretelling. Also words of warning about religious intolerance for our ri hero Williams and some native Americans observing the whole scene silently. The ideals of our nation were never so pure and universal but were born out of self-interest and even out of hatred and intolerance - freedom for me, not for thee, freedom to practice my religion. Hawthorn gets all this by understatement and innuendo - and there's a message in there for those today who appropriate the revolutionary ideals and symbols for their own forms of hatred and intolerance.

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