Ronald Reagan The Movie: And Other Episodes in Political Demonology

6. Nature as Politics and Nature as Romance in America

C H A P T E R VI Nature as Politics and Nature as Romance in America Since the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay, organized in covenants as a joint stock company, imagined themselves a mystic brotherhood reborn in the body of Christ, American history has progressed under the sway of two conflicting vocabularies. One, the language of exterior, marketplace relations, takes the contract as its master symbol. The other, the language of interior religious and psychological experience, centers around regeneration. The first vocabulary is economic, the second is familial. At first both vocabularies defended the Puritan community against an alien wilderness. In time, however, American identity shifted from the Puritan God and his European interests to New World nature and her products. The search for visible signs of God's grace, combined with the material reality of nature, turned the Puritans toward economic acquisition and the American landscape. The original religious communities disintegrated in the process. What happened to the two vocabularies of American self-image, and what role does nature play in their development? Political science is the child of the marketplace metaphor and finds the religious language of inner division and rebirth an alien one. I want This paper was first prepared for delivery at the 1.976 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, The Palmer House, Chicago, Illinois, 2—5 September 1976. Two Berkeley colleagues, Richard I lutson and Norman Jacobson, helped suggest the perspective adopted in the essay. 1am in their debt. 169 170 Ronald Reagan,the Movie first to suggest that the contractual vocabularycame to define the American political self-image, while rebirth in nature came.to define its identity in literature. But restrictive understandings of American politics are too narrow. The romance of nature, I will argue, plays a powerful role in the political tradition itself. I will introduce this idea via certain modern social scientists; then turn, via Ben Franklin, to the unifying significance of nature at the nation's founding;and then shift, via Marx, from the split in American culture between politics and literature to the one that divides nature itself, as the source of both bourgeois commodities and civic virtues. Finally, I will examine the two dominant images of natural virtue in the history of American politics—pastoral harmony and wilderness regeneration. I Contractual relations in society have formed the classics of American politics, rebirth in nature the classics of American literature. The political tradition that comes down to us from Benjamin Franklin and James Madison to such moderns as Daniel Boorstin and Robert Dahl pictures an America of individual and group conflicts, rational bargaining, and the struggle for concrete, material interests. This tradition ties the special destiny of America to politics, but politics of a peculiarly narrow sort. Derived from economic categories, it is characterized by economic and ethnic conflict and racial, sexual, and philosophic uniformity. The literary tradition evolves from Charles Brockden Brown through Cooper, Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, and Twain to such moderns as William Faulkner and Norman Mailer. Here the major actions take place not in society but in nature, and racial division and emotional intensity replace social interdependence. Here the asocial innocent, searching for a lost pastoral idyll, encounters despair, nightmare, and wilderness apocalypse. Here America's special destiny is fulfilled in nature. Richard Hofstadter's American Political Tradition is the best description of the one America; D. H. Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature is the seminal exposure of the other.1 The two books seem to describe entirely different countries. Lawrence and Hofstadter both contrasted America with a feudally based, class-conscious Europe, but the comparison took them in opposite directions. Hofstadter and the social scientists who followed him distinguished ideological European politics from "the traditional problem-solving pragmatism of American politics."2 Lawrence and the Nature as Politics and Nature as Romance 171 literary critics like Leslie Fiedler and Richard Chase who followed him, contrasted the European feel for social reality with the American predilection for psychological fantasy. Chase distinguished the European novel, where deeply rooted social relations, pervasive class distinctions, and powerful familial traditions formed and limited character, from the American romance, where the individual freed from society and alone in nature encountered his racial double and where "close involvement with real life" was abandoned for the melodramatic "underside of consciousness.'" Each tradition identifies different foundings, one in politics, the other in nature. Social scientists derive their...