Protestant Voice in American Pluralism

1. WHEN PROTESTANTS RAN THE SHOW: When Homogeneity Ruled, 1607 to 1955

------ c h a p t e r 1 -----When Protestants R an the Show When Homogeneity Ruled, 1607 to 1955 Protestants of various sorts “ran the show” in the colonies that became the United States of America and in the nation after its formation.What “running the show” means is something I define a bit later. First I begin with a note of sympathy for readers, one that expresses the hope that I can be forgiven for an offense that surely accompanies this chapter. Rationale for the Approach That Follows The sympathy is for anyone who has to run along at the brisk pace I have to set.From 1607 to 1955 is 348 years.(I once wrote an exactly 500-page book on exactly 500 years of American history, Pilgrims in Their Own Land, and found enough wellconditioned readers who evidently kept the pace.) Now I am to 1 cover those years, well over one-third of a millennium, in just fifty pages. My sympathy goes out because I have had experience with rapidly paced efforts to impart knowledge. I attended a pretheological school during World War II. We were being hurried through on an accelerated program because there was a ministerial shortage and the military needed chaplains. During the acceleration we were in a single course on the whole Hebrew Scriptures, the Old Testament. The professor spent a good deal of time on Genesis and Exodus, and book by book, he had to hasten the pace. Toward the end we got only snapshots of prophets. A classmate dropped a pencil, and he claimed that while he picked it up, he missed Nahum, Habakkuk , and Zephaniah. Forgiveness? I need that from readers and fellow historians who are more used to close-ups,slices of history pictured from vantages where we can check up on each other. The span and scope of this chapter commit me to painting with such a broad brush that most detail gets left behind. Still, such an endeavor is not completely disadvantageous. A reconnaissance plane flying over a territory can discern things that do not fall into perspective by people on the ground. A satellite thirty thousand miles up can be of use to weather bureaus as they track the movement of a hurricane. What its cameras show as a result is not the only kind of scene and does not provide the only kind of knowledge that people in the path of the hurricane need. But that distinctive distant vision has its place. The effort social historians make to cover a subject in great 2 chapter one detail and up close can in fact work against attempts to present fuller pictures. Historian Page Smith once told some of us about a historian at the University of Wisconsin in Madison who received a full-length dissertation on a subject like“Dairy Farming in Southwest Monroe County, 1875–1878.” He fired it back to the student with a simple comment: “You covered the subject teat by teat.” He was ready to follow up, however, with critical comments of other sorts and with questions that demanded answering. Who owned the cows? The answer was Swiss Americans. Why did they come to America, to Wisconsin , to Monroe County? Where did their move fit into European -American history? What were they thinking and saying as they embarked on their ventures in a new land? A three-lecture-long or book-length study of the Protestant involvement against New York governor Al Smith in his 1928 presidential campaign could be of immense use. In its story we could get some grasp of anti-Catholicism, for Smith was a Catholic, or of Protestant political action, because so often Protestants said they were not in politics. But if we have only such studies, we will not learn backgrounds, contexts, and consequences. So I ask for forgiveness from those who find the generalizations too huge and hope that the perspective provided here will relate positively to more minute inquiries by other historians, or by me, on other assignments. Chronological Framing of the Theme I begin with 1607 because that is the date of the first permanent settlement in what became the thirteen colonies. The 3 When Protestants Ran the Show 4 chapter one Virginia settlers at Jamestown were by no means the first Protestants to set foot on these shores, but they are the first who stayed. They were members...