Gimme Shelter Island

by Joe Enright

Max Planck, seemingly the only nuclear pioneer not portrayed in Oppenheimer, once railed against the stubborn orthodoxy of physicists by sagely observing, “Science changes funeral by funeral.” I’m sure Max – whose son was executed by Hitler – would agree that religious oppression changes martyr by martyr.

Take for instance colonial New England. The Pilgrims and Puritans who fled old England to populate Massachusetts in the 17th century were fundamentalist Anglicans who believed that the Church of England needed even further purification from the stain of Roman Catholicism. The monarchy disagreed and passed laws making public advocacy of their heterodoxy sort of life-threatening. And so the Puritans fled to the New World where they hoped to practice their heresy without fear of reprisal.

Enter the Quakers, who took heterodoxy to a whole other level. While the Puritans believed that churches, ministers, oaths and tithes were essential, the “Friends” were ultra-minimalists – just a quiet meeting house where they could congregate and contemplate, free from preachers, penance and collection baskets was all they needed, thank you very much. And so the Quakers fled to the New World where they hoped to practice their heresy ments against these new ultra non-orthodox newcomers. Banishment didn’t stop them, so they cut off an ear when they returned. When ear-slicing didn’t stop them, they hung them. And that’s where Shelter Island comes in.

Indigenous people called Shelter Island “Manhansack aha-quash awamock” – an island sheltered by islands. In 1656, twenty-five years after Europeans arrived, it became a refuge for Quakers persecuted by the Massachusetts Bay Colony because the Anglo-Dutch ing “bitter hate and scorn” for the Quaker, while novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne portrayed him as a man of “uncompromising bigotry, marked by brutal cruelty.” Truly a man of darkness.

But hanging a God-fearing mother of seven in the town square for defying legalized religious persecution would be called by today’s pundits “a bad look.” King Charles II agreed and decreed that the Quaker imprisonments and hangings cease forthwith.

Fifty years ago, a US District family of Sylvesters who ran a plantation there were friendly with George Fox, the founder of Quakerism. The most notable refugee they sheltered was a convert from Puritanism, Mary Dyer, a hard-core recidivist sentenced to death in Boston but spared on the gallows only a minute after two co-religionists standing beside her had just been dispatched to the Hereafter. She was then resentenced to double-secret-ultra banishment. without fear of reprisal.

Well, it there’s one thing heretics can’t stand, it’s new heretics that are more heretical than their own heresy. So the Puritans, emulating the monarchy they fled, passed law after law to purify their settle-

Mary’s time on Shelter Island included excellent contemplation which inspired her to decide, like Tom Petty, “I Won’t Back Down.” She sensed her reprieve on the gallows was just theater, an attempt by the Colonial hierarchy to show the populace how incredibly sensitive they were. So she unsheltered herself, returned to Boston, asking if the punitive laws targeting Quakers were still in effect. They were. She surrendered herself and was promptly executed in 1660, with Colonial Governor John Endecott cheering on his fellow yahoos. Endecott is described by even sedate historians as a hotheaded Puritan who, among his many deep thoughts, insisted that men should wear their hair short. Almost two centuries later, poet John Greenleaf Whittier characterized Endecott as “dark and haughty,” exhibit-

Court judge in Manhattan was so inspired by Mary Dyer’s decision to give up her life to protest unjust laws that he composed an opera to honor her courage. Richard Owen was a World War II vet, a former prosecutor, an opera buff and a lifelong Republican appointed to the bench by Richard Nixon. Prior to his work being performed during the 1976 Bicentennial, he observed: “Mary Dyer was a female liberationist who demanded the penalty for challenging an unjust law. The same was true of blacks demonstrating during the civil rights movement who peacefully demanded to be arrested in order to alert the public to similar injustice.” Famed music critic Alan Rich gushed in New York Magazine: “Supposing I were to tell you that a New York judge had composed an opera on a Bicentennial theme, with a juicy soprano role for his wife. And then, supposing I told you that Mary Dyer turns out to be a work of remarkable merit, and that, at its premiere, Judge Owen’s wife (Met soprano Lynn Owen) sang beautifully. Wouldn’t you be surprised?”

I briefly served as a probation officer in the Southern District during Judge Owen’s forty-two year tenure, which ended with his death in 2015. He oversaw the famous Mafia Commission trial, sentencing the Five Family mob bosses to what were essentially life sentenc- es. But his favorite memory on the bench was questioning ex-Beatle George Harrison. Judge Owen would eventually decide that Harrison had “unconsciously plagiarized” the song “He’s So Fine” by the Chiffons (1963) when he composed “My Sweet Lord” (1970). Years later Owen recalled the trial to an Opera News reporter (Owen would eventually compose the libretto and score for nine operas): “I said, ‘Mr. Harrison, where did you get this theme?’ and sang it to him. He said, ‘Mind if I get my guitar?’ And for about fortyfive minutes, we sang to each other. The transcript is marvelous because it reads, ‘Witness Sings / Judge Sings.’”

The judge’s decision forced Harrison to pay the publisher of “He’s So Fine” for damages, but when Owen learned that Allen B. Klein (forever despised as ”the manager who broke up the Beatles”) had used his company, ABKCO, to buy the rights to the song, knowing that a big settlement loomed, he knee-capped Klein by reducing the initial award from $2.1 million to $587,000.

Paul McCartney (“You Never Give Me Your Money”) and John Lennon (“Steel and Glass”) each wrote disparaging songs about Klein, but an outtake version of a George Harrison tune was the most damning: “Watch out now, take care, beware of soft shoe shufflers, dancing down the sidewalks, pushing you in puddles, in the dead of night, beware of ABKCO.” Unconsciously echoing previous wordsmiths Whittier and Hawthorne, George’s song was called “Beware of Darkness.”