A Lit Guy Does History

Things to watch out for, when doing American Studies

Main Currents in American Thought: An Interpretation of American Literature from the Beginnings to 1920

Vernon Louis Parrington, 1927

“The child of two continents, America can be explained in its significant traits by neither alone.”

Book One: The Colonial Mind

“New England,” said Vernon Parrington, was “a product of old-world custom and institutions, modified by new-world environment.” The key contribution of New England to American development was the emergence of “two classes: yeomanry, gentry; and two ideals: Puritan and Yankee.” This may be the source of problems, if the classes and ideals are taken as overlapping sets. Should people conclude from this that yeomen were Puritans and that the gentry was Yankee? This would locate radicalism exclusively in the cities. The other way around, with all the radicals on the countryside?

Parrington said the English liberalism the colonists brought was “an attempt to create a new social system to replace the feudalism of their ancestors, resulting in the doctrine of natural rights, democracy, and equalitarianism.” These changes, he said, were “the result of changing economics.” Puritanism, he said, was “primarily middle-class.” Separatism was a “left wing of Puritanism.” Calvinism was “reactionary ...established in absolutism,” and focused on the “universality of moral law, determinism, reprobation [and a] denial of natural rights.” But the New England settlers were from a “middle period of the Puritan movement.” This would distinguish them, Parrington seems to suggest, from the Cromwellian regicides they left behind. But many New Englanders returned to England to fight for the Parliamentarians. The New Englanders, he said, were “aristocratic, yet with middle-class ambitions.” Their City upon a Hill was “A Utopian venture.” And yet, they weren’t Cavaliers. Parrington may have been using some of these terms in his own ways.

The Massachusetts Bay theocracy was dominated by John Cotton, who represented “priestly stewardship,” and John Winthrop, who represented “magistracy ennobled by Puritanism.” Both opposed “the drift towards democracy,” Cotton on “scripturist” grounds, Winthrop on the “absolute authority of the law.” But the dominant presbyterianism (rule by the elders) of these men was challenged by Thomas Hooker and Roger Williams, who established commonwealths in Connecticut and Rhode Island.

The “Twilight of the Oligarchy” after 1660 was marked, Parrington said, by the “spread of provincialism” and the inability of later members of the Mather "Dynasty” to live up to their ancestor. The church became mired in “formalism” and “superstition,” exemplified by the “Salem outbreak.” Parrington called Increase Mather an “arch conservative, bred by a conservative environment.” He was bitter, “intolerant...Unread in political theory--dictatorial.” Cotton Mather was an egoist and “Subject for a psychologist.” In contrast, Samuel Sewall was “the first representative of the new order.” Sewall was middle class and if “Uncreative, conservative, [and] conventional,” at least he was “generous, kindly, the first embodiment of village friendliness.”

The colonists who came to New England after 1720 were a “new stock,” according to Parrington. They were Scotch-Irish and German, and they had economic rather than religious motives for immigration. Although “undistinguished, [they] created the individualism that was a source of a new democratic psychology.” Parrington seems to be leaning to heavily on the idea that the “distinguished” men of the earlier era were actually only interested in building a “city upon a hill.” This is a shallow assessment of these men; even John Winthrop, who penned those words, was deeply embedded in commerce and sent two of his sons to develop trade with Barbados. The western Massachusetts frontier becomes relevant in Parrington’s narrative, both in economic terms as well as through Jonathan Edwards and the Great Awakening. Benjamin Franklin, on the other hand, was described as “A Democrat in an aristocratic world.” His Modest Inquiry established “Labor [as] the measure of value,” and Parrington described him as an agrarian, distrustful of industrialism. This depiction would probably have surprised Franklin; Parrington seems to have been taken in by the costume Franklin to impress Europeans.

The American Revolution, for Parrington, corresponded with the “Awakening of the American Mind.” He distinguished “three diverse interests” and attributed the rebellion to the combined “grievances of merchants, planters, yeomanry.” The rise of the middle class and expulsion of (wealthy) loyalists helped form republicanism around John Locke's ideals of natural rights and representation. Parrington gave much attention to the Tories, beginning with Thomas Hutchinson (royal governor of Massachusetts), and Whigs, focusing on John Dickinson of Philadelphia (once again, Virginia was left out!). He then turned to Samuel Adams, whom he called a “Master of political theory...an agitator and a practical politician.”

Between the Revolution and the Constitution, Parrington described a period of “Agrarian defeat,” a “struggle between political realists and humanitarian liberals,” when agrarians retreated to “seventeenth-century republicanism” and an “English middle class” ethic of work and capitalism prevailed. With the levelers and followers of Rousseau safely shoved out of the way, the political field was left to Alexander Hamilton, representing the “necessity of allying the wealthy with government,” and John Adams, who thought “rivalry, the class struggle, natural aristocracy” more credible than “French doctrines of equality and fraternity.” Where are Jefferson and Madison?

But the French influence just wouldn’t end. Parrington called “Tom” Paine an “internationalist,” but a “social inefficient.” It is pretty well known that Paine hated being called “Tom”, so Parrington’s choice was a sign of denigration. Jefferson finally made an appearance and Parrington said that like Paine, he believed in a “social compact, the res publica, the diminished state...decentralization [and] the excellence of an agrarian economy.” Did Parrington once again confuse rhetoric with reality -- or was the reality largely irrelevant for his purposes?

Book Two: The Romantic Revolution in America

Parrington’s thesis in this section was that the “humanitarian philosophy of the French Enlightenment” did battle with the “English philosophy of laissez faire” for the soul of America, but “practical politics” intervened in the form of “the explosive Jacksonian revolution.” The outcome was a Democratic rhetoric based on “political equalitarianism,” and a Whiggery devoted to “converting the democratic state into the servant of property interests.”

Parrington finally arrived in the South, which he said was dominated by two traditions based out of Virginia and South Carolina. Parrington traced the Virginian tradition to Jefferson, whom he continued to identify with “Physiocratic agrarianism, natural rights” and the “terminable nature of compact” which was the origin of nullification and the states rights argument; John Taylor, whom he called an “Agrarian Economist;” and John Marshall, an “arch conservative” who stood for “sovereignty of the federal state; sanctity of private property...sovereignty of judiciary; irrevocable nature of contract.”

Three streams of thought met in the South, Parrington said: Virginia humanitarianism, western individualism, and Carolina imperialism. Carolina won. John C. Calhoun “destroyed Jeffersonianism for the South.” Parrington explored the “contrast between wage-slavery and black slavery,” and acknowledged “certain advantages of the latter” in the eyes of Southern apologists. He said the South cultivated “the Dream of a Greek Democracy.” Classical Athens, of course, was a slave society.

In the West, Parrington called Henry Clay the “embodiment of Whiggery” and then moved on to a comparison of the “two spokesmen of the West”: Andrew Jackson, who he called an “Agrarian Liberal” and “our first great popular leader”, and Abraham Lincoln, a “Free Soil Liberal” whose character embodied the war of “good will versus coercive sovereignty.” He compared romantic and realistic depictions of the frontier, and the popularity of Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett, whose legend Parrington called a “Whig attempt to catch the coonskin vote.”

In the Middle-Atlantic region, Parrington said both Philadelphia and New York suffered from “lack of intellectual backgrounds.” New York developed a literary tradition only after it became the financial capital. He called Washington Irving an “incipient liberal” who drifted toward the middle class. James Fenimore Cooper was a more complex character: “a barometer of his generation. Troubled by the transition from an aristocratic to a capitalistic order [he] lingered between worlds.” Horace Greeley, on the other hand, was a “Yankee Radical” whose thought evolved over his career toward idealism.

Parrington called the “New England renaissance the last expression in America of eighteenth-century revolutionary thought.” Delayed (and ultimately influenced?) by Federalists like Fisher Ames, whom Parrington called “a repository of aristocratic prejudice,” New England developed a Whig perspective that saw the “danger of agrarianism [and] particularism.” Parrington didn’t seem to consider the rising fortunes of industrialists like the Appletons and Lowells relevant to the rise of the Whigs. He said Daniel Webster shifted from laissez faire to protectionism “due to changing economics of his constituents,” but who were those constituents? The move to liberalism, when it finally came, was “ethical rather than economic; German rather than French.”

“The growth of rationalism” led to “Unitarianism -- a recovery of the principle of primitive Congregationalism.” But where the “Puritan conscience” had been “individual rather than social,” Unitarianism awakened “a sense of social responsibility” leading to both reform and transcendentalism -- and ultimately abolitionism. Parrington described William Lloyd Garrison as “a flinty character” and “a primitive Hebraist.” Harriet Beecher Stowe was “a daughter of Puritanism,” and a “sympathetic student of New England psychology” and Calvinism.

Parrington devoted two sections to Transcendentalists and other Bostonians. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s transcendental individualism was summed up in The American Scholar, Parrington said, and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden was the “extremest expression of eighteenth-century individualism.” Nathaniel Hawthorne was a “skeptic...neither transcendental nor Unitarian in philosophy, but curious concerning evil.” Oliver Wendell Holmes was a “rationalist...a Brahmin rebel defending free thought.”

Book Three: The Beginnings of Critical Realism in America

Parrington’s thesis here was that “Changing patterns of thought: from the frontier came the doctrine of preemption, exploitation, progress; from the impact of science came the dissipation of the Enlightenment and a spirit of realism; from European proletarian philosophies came a new social theory.” This book was unfinished, but it looked like the most interesting of the three. So I’m going to order a copy, and reread it more closely.