The American Jeremiad

Preface to the 1978 Edition

xli Preface to the 1978 Edition xlii Preface to the 1978 Edition to see the impact of Puritan rhetoric upon our culture, we need more than ever to insist upon what Clifford Geertz calls the shaping influence of religious (or quasi-religious) symbols on society.* To this end, I have drawn freely on the rhetorical analysis I offered in my earlier monograph. My additions and revisions amount to a new version of the argument, but the argument itself - concerning the richness, the complexity, and the continuing vitality, for good and ill, of American Puritan rhetoric - remains substantially the same. At the same time, I have sought to establish connections between rhetoric and history. Without trying in any sense to detail the development from colony to nation, I relate the jeremiad to what I consider to be the central fact of that development: the steady (if often violent) growth of middle-class American culture. In doing so, I hope I will not seem to have blurred the stages of growth, from agrarian society through urbanization, the transportation revolution, credit economy, industrialization, corporate enterprise, and expansionist finance. My assumption is that every one of those stages, including the War of Independence, was historically organic - that in effect the culture was committed from the start to what recent social scientists have termed the process of modernization. By organic I do not mean monolithic. Recent demographic work has demonstrated both the diversity of American social patterns and the overlays, even in colonial New England, of various Old World forms. I see no conflict whatever between their conclusions and my own. My argument concerns an ideological consensus - not a quantitatively measured "social reality," but a series of (equally "real") rituals of socialization, and a comprehensive, officially endorsed cultural myth that became entrenched in New England and subsequently spread across the Western territories and the South. Insofar as my argument tends to simplify social and economic conflicts, psychic tensions, and regional disparities, it does so in order to stress *A system of religious symbols, Geertz reminds us, alters the social order "in such a way that the moods and motivations induced by religious practice seem themselves supremely practical, the only sensible ones to adopt given the way things 'really' are." Hence if we concern ourselves with social-structural process at the expense of understanding "the system of meanings embodied in the symbol," we take "for granted what most needs to be elucidated" ("Religion as a Cultural System," in The Interpretation oJCulture [New York, 1973], pp. 122, 125). The cognitive value this suggests for literary studies seems to me particularly relevant to the American Puritan jeremiad. Preface to the 1978 Edition xliii the growth of a certain mode of rhetoric and vision. Insofar as this book supports the notion of American exceptionalism, it does so only in terms of an increasingly pervasive middle-class hegemony. * Technically, of course, the concept of the middle class came into use only after 1812. As a class designation it should perhaps be restricted to the sort of specialized capitalist economy that began to develop in the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century . I use it here for its ideological implications, as a term expressing the norms we have come to associate with the free-enterprise system. In America, the foundations of that system were laid in seventeenthcentury New England. Puritan society was not middle class, of course, not even in the sense that most of its members had "middling" incomes. Then as always in this country (through the nineteenth century to our own times) the majority of people were "lower class." What the Puritans instituted in New England was effectually a new hierarchical order, ranging not from peasantry to aristocracy and crown, but from lower to higher levels of a relatively fluid freeenterprise structure. Not all at once but within the first half century they established the central tenets of what was to become (in Raymond Williams's phrase) our "dominant culture."t And because *I use the term "hegemony" here in the sense used by ;\ntonio Gramsci when he speaks of a "historically organic" ideology, based on genuine cultural leadership and "spontaneous consent," as distinct from ideologies imposed by "state coercive power" (Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey N. Smith [New York, 1971], esp. pp. 12,172,376). Keith Thomas, Robert Mandrou, and others have shown that the...