The American Jeremiad

Preface to the 2012 Edition

xi Preface to the 2012 Edition This new preface comes as a challenge as well as a privilege. The American Jeremiad was in many ways a product of the radical sixties and seventies. Now that the protest has borne fruit—students’ rights in the universities, women’s rights in the workplace, gay rights in society at large, the embrace of ethnic and racial diversity, and, as the culmination of change, the election of an African American president , Barack Obama—now that the results are in, it seems appropriate to reconsider their radical meaning, not just for the past half century , but as part of a long tradition of American dissent. The issues at stake are as urgent today, in this era of greed, as they were then, in that era of hope. So I take this opportunity, gratefully, to clarify my argument and retrace the course of its development. This is the story of a scholar’s adventures in oppositional criticism, from the founding American Studies method through the seventies school of subversion to the current emphasis on diversity and identity politics. The context is American studies then and now; the subject, dissent in America, as “America,” and more broadly, the American ideology. My interest in ideology had unlikely sources. Under the influence of three great scholarly works—Perry Miller’s The Puritan Mind, F. O. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance, and Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land—I undertook a project on the New England Puritan imagination: a study of cultural continuities, linking Puritan rhetoric to frontier literature and the classics of the American Renaissance. In the course of writing what became The Puritan Origins of the American Self (1975), I ventured a separate monograph in 1970, as an instance of the power of Puritan rhetoric.1 The American Jeremiad appeared eight years later as its totally transformed book-length sequel. That transformation marked a basic shift in my approach. What I xii Preface to the 2012 Edition had elaborated as a distinctive symbolic mode appeared to me as the problematic relation between aesthetic creation and social function. The language of the jeremiad was a remarkable achievement in its own right, and I celebrated its imaginative power; but I could hardly overlook the fact that the function of the jeremiad was socialization. From the seventeenth-century election-day sermon to the Jacksonian Fourth of July oration—from colony to revival, Revolution, Civil War, and Reconstruction—it had served as a vehicle of cultural cohesion . And as I traced its influence upon the classics of the American Renaissance, I found a striking parallel there in the literary dynamics between text and context. The complication this entailed brought me into conflict with the critical dictates of the time. In American studies as elsewhere, to describe the aesthetic strategies of Samuel Danforth’s summons to unity in crisis, Errand into the Wilderness (1670), or Samuel Sherwood’s incendiary call to revolution, The Church’s Flight into the Wilderness (1776), was an act of appreciation; whereas to speak of the socioeconomic system as a source of creative inspiration for Walden, The Scarlet Letter, or Leaves of Grass was gross reductionism: it was to miss the transcendent, transcultural (or metacultural) dimensions of art. But the fact was that the strategies of the jeremiad applied to all these works. I realized that what I was describing was a cultural phenomenon , embodying a symbiosis (not a dichotomy)—a fusion of social and literary traditions that opened into an interactive network of art, economy, value system, and public ritual. The New England Puritan jeremiad offered itself as a model of such reciprocities. It marked the colonists’ first literary innovation and their most enduring social legacy. They had inherited the jeremiad as a traditional mode of denunciation. For a thousand years and more, preachers had warned their flocks of their dire plight— “the heart of man is evil, even from his birth” (Gen. 8:21)—so as to terrify them into turning, like John Bunyan’s Pilgrim, from the vanities of this fallen world to the glories of the next. The New England Puritans proceeded to reconfigure this homiletic genre, in a striking reinvention of tradition, as a vehicle of their worldly mission. If anything, they thundered against backsliding more fiercely than did their European counterparts—they raised the stakes of divine punishment to the pitch of doomsday, but their doomsday thunder Preface...