When most people read, one of the last thing they expect is to find commentary on the nature of the federal government. Thus, it was with great surprise that I read the following paragraph in “The Common House,” the introductory piece to The Scarlet Letter.
Over the entrance [of Salem’s Custom House] hovers an enormous specimen of the American eagle, with outspread wings, a shield before her breast, and, if I recall aright, a bunch of intermingled thunderbolts and barbed arrows in each claw. With the customary infirmity of temper that characterizes this unhappy fowl, she appears, by the fierceness of her beak and eye, and the general truculency of her attitude, to threaten mischief to the inoffensive community; and especially to warn all citizens, careful of their safety, against intruding on the premises which she overshadows with her wings. Nevertheless, vixenly she looks, many people are seeking, at this very moment, to shelter themselves under the wing of the federal eagle; imagining, I presume, that her bosom has all the softness and snugness of an eiderdown pillow. But she has no great tenderness, even in her best of moods, and, sooner or later … is apt to fling off her nestling, with a scratch of her claw, a dab of her beak, or a rankling wound from her barbed arrows.
This was written by Nathaniel Hawthorne over one hundred years ago, and we’d probably be doing well to bear this truth in mind today.
(Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (New York: Pocket Books, Inc., NKD), 3, emphasis mine.)
