The American Jeremiad Twice Revisited

In 1978, Sacvan Bercovitch's The American Jeremiad was published.¹ He proposed that the Puritans coming to North America believed that they were working with a divine promise. Their new society would escape the instability of all previous societies. It would be the end of history. But they did not achieve a timeless space. And they defined their experience with timeful change as a declension from the perfection embodied in the promise. The jeremiad, then, was a warning to stop the corruption associated with the declension into meaningless time and to return to the eternal virtue associated with the original promise. Younger generations of Puritans began, for Bercovitch, to complete the ritual by prophesying the end of the declension and a transcendent return to the promise. For Bercovitch, when the nation was created in 1789, this explicitly religious ritual of Presbyterians and Congregationalists became a secular ritual of a national civil religion. Generation after generation of American citizens defined timeful change as a fall from a timeless promise and prophesied a transcendence of profane time as the sacred eternal promise was restored. I believe these two recent books—Americanism: New Perspectives on the History of an Ideal and Uniting America: Restoring the Vital Center to American Democracy—embody the characteristics of the jeremiad as defined by Bercovitch. The editors of both these collections of essays see the American nation as a fulfillment of a timeless promise. It is the end of history. They then see a declension from that promise, but they too are able to make a prophecy that the declension will end with a triumphant return to the original promise.

The editors of Americanism, Michael Kazin and Joseph McCartin, are historians at Georgetown University. The national promise, for them, is a set of "canonic ideals—self-government, equal opportunity, freedom of speech and association, a belief in progress . . . first proclaimed during the era of the Revolution" (1). All Americans in 1776, however, did not share these ideals, but the number of the faithful increased into the 1960s. The first set of essays in the book, titled "Whose America?" moves chronologically from the Revolution toward the present. The essay by Mae M. Ngai, "The Unlovely Residue of Outworn Prejudice: The Hart-Celler Act and the Politics of Immigration, 1945–1965," seems, however, to challenge the thesis presented by Kazin and McCartin. For them there was a virtuous national identity in the 1960s, liberal nationalism, that began to be confronted by a false American promise, that of conservative nationalism. But, for Ngai, the Hart-Celler Act was not a fulfillment of liberal pluralism, because it continued to express implicit patterns of racism. And in the second group of essays, "Americanism in the World," Alan McPherson seems to question the jeremiad as a usable past in his essay "Americanism Against American Empire." He criticizes the legacy of both black and white anti-imperialists because of their inability to relate their critiques to patterns of anti-imperialism that existed outside the nation's borders.

But, for Kazin and McCartin, declension from liberal nationalism came in the 1960s. The politics of the Vietnam War played a critical role in this change. "In a decisive break with tradition, leading activists in the protest movements of the era took issue not just with government policies but also with the ideals from which those policies were supposedly drawn. Young radicals did not seek to draw attention to the distance between America's promise and its reality as much as to debunk the national creed as inherently reactionary and destructive" (6). As Kazin and McCartin reinvent the jeremiad, "that cynical view" (6), continued today by such important younger scholars as Amy Kaplan and Matthew Frye Jacobson, has allowed conservative nationalists to capture Americanism and give it...