For years, reasoning about our cultural origins seems to have gone this way: We are a capitalist civilization, therefore the influences that formed us must have encouraged capitalism. From which it follows that these influences, to be understood aright, must be seen as protocapitalist. Putting aside the doubtful language, the simplicity of this approach to history is bald and barbarous and tendentious. We begin with our conclusion, then dismiss as aberrant or insignificant whatever does not support it, including, as it happens, those same formative influences, which are often invoked and never quoted, and, coincidentally, do not yield themselves to this kind of reading. I have no conclusion to offer in place of the old one, except that history is very strange and beautiful and instructive in the absence of all conclusion. The reform movement I mention here was centered around people who were theologically conservative even in the terms of their time, many of whom took their theology jot and tittle from Jonathan Edwards. While teaching at Lane, Lyman Beecher was tried for heresy, in part because he taught that Edwards’s was the only theology worthy of attention. Precisely the same energies that produced the revival that swept Mount Holyoke College during Emily Dickinson’s time there produced Mount Holyoke College itself, and the unprejudiced admission of women to Oberlin College, and the unprejudiced admission of blacks to Oberlin College, and the proliferation of schools, especially in the Middle West, meant to promote and to normalize just such reforms.
All this runs contrary to expectation. Yet if one reads Calvin, the New England Primer, and Edwards, as these reformers did, it all seems logical enough. Our historiography is too ridden with expectation, which in its workings is like bias or partisanism, incurious and self-protective. That expectations change or vary a little hardly matters, since they are crude in their nature. I wish it could be as if we knew nothing. Then we would be freer to wonder where those audiences came from whose intelligence and patience and humanity taught and encouraged Abraham Lincoln to speak as he did, and why national leadership — Lincoln, Grant, Sherman, and so many others — emerged from the Middle West during the crisis of the Civil War, and where the Middle West acquired its special tradition of intellectualism and populism, moral seriousness and cultural progressivism.
The McGuffeys undertake to correct the provincialisms of pronunciation of frontier America, and are therefore a sort of compendium of dialect of their period and region — “Do not say geth-uz for gath-ers; un-heerd for un-heard.” The readers in fact seem at least as intent on teaching those who use them to speak as to read. In 1834, Daniel Drake delivered a once famous address at Miami University in Ohio titled “A Discourse on the History, Character and Prospects of the West,” which suggests a relationship between the content of the readers and their great emphasis on spoken language, and with the style and method of the Beechers and others in the reform community. Drake asked, “Ought not the literature of a free people to be declamatory? Should it not exhort and animate? If cold, literal and passionless, how could it act as the handmaid of improvement?… In despotisms, it is of little use to awaken the feelings or warm the imagination of the people — here an excited state of both, is indispensable to those popular movements, by which society is to be advanced. Would you rouse men to voluntary action, on great public objects, you must make their fancy and feelings glow under your presentations; you must not carry forward their reason, but their desires and their will … Whenever the literature of a new country loses its metaphorical and declamatory character, the institutions that depend on public sentiment will languish and decline.” This address was published by W. B. Smith in Cincinnati in 1835, the year before he began the publication of the readers.
We now would no doubt worry over demagogues and mob rule, in the face of so much declaiming. The religious revivals of the time looked to many contemporaries like mass hysteria, dangerous to those caught up in them, and to religion, and to the whole structure of democracy. Yet these passions fueled what was indeed the greatest period of reform in American history. Perhaps reform was effectual, and no doubt it seemed desirable, because people at large could be moved to such extremes of generosity and hope. And what did they hope for? The universalization of literacy and of modest prosperity, to judge from the readers. And the normalization of democratic attitudes and manners, which were a novelty in the world at that time. We have not ourselves achieved these things, nor do we hope for them.
Democracy is profoundly collaborative. It implies a community. It seems to me we have almost stopped using the word in a positive sense, preferring “capitalism,” which by no means implies community, and for which, so far as I have seen, our forebears found no use at all. It is possible to imagine that, in a society where democracy was the thing valued and longed for, there could be a reasonable presumption that people would wish to act toward one another in good faith, to promote, as they used to say, the general welfare. That would no doubt go far toward ensuring the wholesomeness of collective passions. Our new ethic is retrojected into the past, onto poor Reverend McGuffey’s readers, which were themselves a generous, democratizing work, like McGuffey’s other great project, the creation of a public school system. There is no reason to expect the survival of institutions which were the products of an ethos we have effaced and lost. But history is a little forgiving. We need only be ready to put aside what we think we know, and it will start to speak to us again.
PURITANS AND PRIGS
PURITANISM was a highly elaborated moral, religious, intellectual, and political tradition which had its origins in the writing and social experimentation of John Calvin and those he influenced. While it flourished on this continent — it appears to me to have died early in this century — it established great universities and cultural institutions and an enlightened political order. It encouraged simplicity in dress and manner and an aesthetic interest in the functional which became bone and marrow of what we consider modern. Certainly the idea that a distaste for the mannered and elaborated should be taken to indicate joylessness or an indifference to beauty is an artifact of an old polemic. No acquaintance with New England portrait or decorative art encourages the idea that Puritan tastes were somber. Even their famous headstones display a marked equanimity beside headstones in Church of England graveyards in Britain, with their naturalistic skulls with bones in their teeth and so on. Puritan civilization in North America quickly achieved unprecedented levels of literacy, longevity, and mass prosperity, or happiness, as it was called in those days. To isolate its special character we need only compare colonial New England and Pennsylvania — Quakers as well as Congregationalists and Presbyterians were Puritans — with the colonial South.
Or let us compare them with ourselves. When crops failed in Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1743, Jonathan Edwards of course told his congregation that they had their own wickedness to blame for it. They had failed to do justice (his word) to the poor. He said, “Christian people are to give to others not only so as to lift him above extremity but liberally to furnish him.” No one bothers us now with the notion that our own failures in this line might be called sinful, though we fall far short of the standard that in Edwards’s view invited divine wrath. Nor does anyone suggest that punishment might follow such failures, though the case could easily be made that our whole community is punished for them every day. In one respect at least we have rid ourselves entirely of Puritanism.