The Fall of the Massachusetts Standing Order and the Rise of the Boston Brahmins

Peter S. Field’s book on Massachusetts ministers in the first half century after the American Revolution begins with an epigraph from Dr. Faustus:

“Do you consider love the strongest emotion?” Leverkühn asked.

“Do you know a stronger?”

“Yes, interest.”

Field’s “social history of intellectuals” aims to “demystify the life of the mind,” undermining the notion, held by the intellectuals themselves or by the historians who write about them, that these thinkers and writers were “heroically engaged in the disinterested pursuit of truth” (p. 7). Ideas were important to these clergymen, Field concedes. However, what we need in order to better understand the transformation of New England culture in the early Republic, he contends, is not another study of “theology, ideology, ideas, and mentalité,” but an analysis of a more powerful motive force: the basic self-interests of clergymen as members of a thinking class (p. 3). From this premise Field tells two intertwined stories about religious and intellectual life in Massachusetts between 1780 and 1833. The “crisis of the Standing Order” in his title refers to the bifurcation of Congregationalism, which finally led to its disestablishment in 1833 (Massachusetts was the last of the former colonies to separate church and state). As Unitarian and Trinitarian Congregationalists parted company, clergymen on both sides also reconstituted the “cultural authority” Field mentions in his subtitle. Theologically liberal Unitarians, clustered mostly around Boston, replaced state sanction with the patronage of elite merchants and became genteel apostles of what Field describes as “an indigenous secular high culture” (p. 12). Conservative Calvinists serving poorer congregations reluctantly relinquished tax funding, embraced religious voluntarism, and concentrated on evangelical revivalism and reform.

Field approaches these familiar topics from a perspective informed by the “materialist intellectual history” described by Darren Marcus Staloff in a William and Mary Quarterly article published in 1993. Field tells us that he and Staloff took a history seminar together as sophomores at Columbia, and that Staloff’s “sociohistorical musings about a ‘thinking class’ were the genesis” of Field’s work (p. xi). Staloff, who in turn was drawing from the work of Alvin Gouldner, sketched a “program” that would focus upon the ways intellectuals use high culture to legitimate their wealth, secure their social status, and form allegiances to other groups in order to extend their sociopolitical power. Unlike some Marxist theorists who have portrayed intellectuals as little more than the mouthpieces for the class interests of the bourgeoisie or the proletariat, both Staloff and Field want to see the producers and manipulators of high culture as a distinct social group pursuing its own interests. A materialist intellectual history would explain “the class projects that lay behind such cultural movements” as Puritanism (the subject of Staloff’s 1998 book) or Unitarianism. Despite Staloff’s contention that the work of scholars like Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood remains trapped in “some ethereal realm of the human spirit or mind,” rendering thinkers “sociopolitically invisible,” with “nothing left for them to do save bear their ideology,” Staloff insists that his approach is intended to supplement, not replace, other forms of intellectual and cultural history. Field, too, sees his book alongside other studies as “a dialectical adversary” to idealist history (p. 4). ¹

In The Making of an American Thinking Class: Intellectuals and Intelligentsia in Puritan Massachusetts, Staloff looks at how learned magistrates and ministers created and sustained a “system of cultural domination” from John Winthrop’s invocation of the city on a hill in 1630 to Increase Mather’s efforts to preserve the colonial charter in the mid-1680s. Field’s study, by describing the collapse of the state-supported Congregationalism that the Puritans had erected and examining the re-making of the thinking class in post-Puritan Massachusetts, might be seen as an attempt to continue Staloff’s analysis and tell the rest of the story. There are, however, some difficulties...