Brimstone America

Americans have always defined themselves against some dangerous or evil “other”–but the battle has never really been the party of moralism versus the party of immoralism. Rather, Morone declares, American history is defined by the fight between two moralistic versions of the American story: one group of moralists versus another, each age’s reincarnation of the Puritans versus that age’s reincarnation of the Progressives.

“Hellfire Nation” thus begins, as it must, with the original Puritans and their aspiration to build a City on a Hill. As he moves in later chapters through the history of America, Morone claims that such fights as abolitionism and women’s suffrage can only be understood as clashes between moralistic visions. The same holds for the original “Progressive era,” which he views largely through the temperance campaign and the more lurid aspects of the crusade against “white slavery.” Finally, Morone turns to 1960s turmoil, post-Watergate upheavals, reactions to Clinton’s unfortunate dalliances, and clashes over abortion and the family. He concludes with a lament that modern progressives have lost the battle of moralism–largely, he suggests, because of the way the abortion debate has played itself out.

How well does this work as an overarching explanation of American history? Perhaps the most important insight Morone offers is that there is no clear line separating religious moralism from secular moralism. This isn’t his way of putting it, but it is clearly what he is aiming at. The pro-life side of the abortion debate often casts its arguments in language derived from religious commitment, while anti-smoking forces do not. Yet the anti-smokers are no less engaged upon a crusade when they speak of “public health.” Theirs is merely a version of moralism that does not recognize itself as such.

Unfortunately, insights such as this are lost in “Hellfire Nation” by Morone’s hyperbolic overstatement of the book’s thesis and his tendency to place every accomplishment, aberration, and anomaly on a single plane. Here, for instance, is Morone on the Puritans: “The Puritans wrote covenants that look something like modern constitutions, introduced political rules that roughly anticipate representative democracy, bore holes through Quaker tongues, whipped women for running naked through their villages, hanged the witches they found lurking in their midst, and prepared themselves for the millennial coming of Jesus to His new Israel.”

There are real questions about the excesses he cites. Do we have any idea how many Quaker tongues had holes bored through them? And why were those women running naked through the villages anyway? But “Hellfire Nation” isn’t about such evidence. It’s about upping the rhetorical ante in order to keep the book’s morality play intact.

MORONE’S DISCUSSION of Puritan moralism is important, for it provides the template for the remainder of “Hellfire Nation,” as one moralistic vision after another in American history is driven to what Morone believes is the logical and excessive end entailed in its core beliefs. Although he recognizes that the Puritans have served wags throughout our history as popular whipping boys–declared by H.L. Mencken, for instance, to be spoil-sports dominated by the haunting fear that someone somewhere is happy–Morone contributes to the simplistic stereotype of the Puritans by spending less than three pages on their covenantal tradition and nearly fifty on “Heretic, Heathen, and Witch.”

As it happens, the Puritans’ covenants are a much longer-lasting moral contribution to the American polity, giving us, as they did, a notion of a politics not reducible to narrow self-interest or power advantage. But even beyond that, it would have been enormously helpful had Morone said something about how Puritans lived out their moral vision day by day: how they labored, educated their young, kept diaries charting their spiritual progress, and left behind a legacy of duty and devotion laced through and through with elemental moral imperatives. Instead, “Hellfire Nation” treats us to stories of religious madness, like one about the fellow who, in the midst of “conversion-despair,” slit his own throat while contemplating the possibility of hellfire. This is how to do accurate American history? For every spiritual suicide, there were thousands whose daily record-keeping of spiritual progress helped them to live lives marked by seriousness of purpose and sobriety of deed.

Morone’s treatment of the Puritan conflict with Anne Hutchinson and the Salem witch trials relies on secondary sources and offers little new insight or evidence. But these complex events give him an opportunity to introduce perhaps his central motif: gender. The Salem witch trials involved more women than men–which, given the disproportionate space Morone devotes to the trials, allows “Hellfire Nation” to identify the recurring fight in American history as a battle between the puritanical “orthodox,” who insist on “divinely appointed gender roles and rules,” and their progressive opponents who challenge or spurn such roles and rules.

Anne Hutchinson is thus, in Morone’s telling, the foreshadowing of much that will come later in American history–of much that is happening in our own time, for that matter. Members of today’s version of the orthodox party call for a return to the Biblical family, sound “urgent jeremiad warnings about moral decline,” and focus “both their rhetoric and their rage on monstrous images of dead fetuses” in the abortion debate–with images of fetuses playing the same role now that stories of satanic possession played in Salem. This collapse of a complex seventeenth-century narrative into a contemporary one does justice to neither, any more than does Morone’s declaration that the “perfect stereotype of a witch” in Salem then is what we call a “welfare mother” now, because the first witch accused in Salem “had no fixed residence, she was pregnant, and she dragged her five-year-old daughter around with her.” Whatever purpose Morone believes is served by such polemical excess, it has little to do with historical acumen.

THE PURITANS and what Morone takes to be their equally moralistic critics are the subject of the first part of “Hellfire Nation,” and they provide the foundation on which Morone builds the remainder of his history. In “The Abolitionist Crusade,” he scores some telling points as he notes the use of prurient images of nubile female slaves being whipped and sexually abused by slavers as standard fare in abolitionist tracts. He goes on to tell us that abolitionists charged slaveholders “with the four great American trespasses: violence, intoxication, laziness, and sexual depravity.” Slave states were labeled “Sodoms” and slave-holding families “brothels.” These progressive forces were unabashedly moralistic. Abolitionists even put out primers for school children–“Abolitionists’ ABCs” designed to mold young minds in the Abolitionist ethos: A is for Abolitionist: / A man who wants to free / The wretched slave–and give to all / An equal Liberty.

DURING AND AFTER the Civil War, the American morality play revolved around not only slavery but religion and immigration as well. In these years, nativism and anti-Catholicism flourished even as abolitionist agitation peaked. Unfortunately, all too many of the leading abolitionists and Suffragists also beat the drums of fear against dangerous and unwashed foreigners. One thinks here of the formidable Elizabeth Cady Stanton, abolitionist, leading suffragist rhetorician and polemicist, and avenger of outraged womanhood–incensed that lowly Irish, Italian, and other male immigrant elements of the lowest sort were enfranchised before women of the “better sort.” Morone might have spent more time on this subject. At least he notes in passing the gender fears lurking in nineteenth-century anti-Catholicism, particularly the hysteria that young girls might be “lured” into convents.

In addition to the national trauma and “moral panic” surrounding slavery, nativism, anti-Catholicism, and worries about women moving into uncharted waters, Morone insists American Indians also served as an “irreducible, satanic other” for the American “us.” Given the mere nine pages he devotes to this matter, Morone would have been well advised to turn to Alexis de Tocqueville’s sober and poignant account of the fate of Native Americans in his masterwork, “Democracy in America.” In sparse and powerful passages on the removal of the Choctaw from one side of the Mississippi to the other, Tocqueville does more than Morone’s abbreviated and lurid account to alert us to the sad displacement of Native Americans.

Morone devotes the third part of “Hellfire Nation” to “The Quest for Victorian Virtue.” Great progressives, including Jane Addams (who rates only a few sentences in Morone’s treatment of the Social Gospel movement), embraced a framework of normative ethics that was dedicated to incorporating immigrants by the tens of thousands into American civic life. Morone’s penchant to reach for the sensationalistic prompts him to downplay much of the framework of ethics–a “certain renascence of Christianity,” Addams called it–that was the stock in trade of Addams and so many others. Campaigns against alcohol and “white slavery” fit better into his framework than teaching English, promoting civics, building playgrounds, fighting child labor, or offering well-baby care and public baths. The image Morone leaves us of the moral reformers has them spending a disproportionate amount of their time prosecuting “dangerous anti-family ideas” and forbidding men “with immoral fancies from crossing state lines” rather than instilling habits of sobriety and work suited to the new conditions of urban industrialization.

By the time Morone completes his look at the Social Gospel movement, Prohibition, the New Deal “call to alms,” and the geopolitical intricacies of the Cold War–all treated as following the same pattern of morality play–it comes as little surprise to the reader that the 1960s fits Morone’s script perfectly. The 1960s have been demonized, he argues, because 1960s activists represented a true progressive fight against “injustice” and “oppression” and that’s what “American Puritanism” cannot stand. Through the 1970s and 1980s, the new Puritans fumed over “drugs, sex, homosexuality, hedonism, feminism”–and today these anti-1960s types are in charge.

Morone’s morality play of “Puritans versus Progressives” thus continues down to the present. His contemporary progressives are celebrants of a free lifestyle. The contemporary Puritans, by contrast, want women in the home and military-style occupation of our urban centers. They even want to pillory people for sexual transgression, as they did to “presidential advisor Robert Morris” (he means Dick Morris).

AS IT HAPPENS, the forces of progressivism have injured themselves, Morone argues, by embracing a constricted vision of privacy rights as the heart of the matter in the abortion debate. This, in turn, invited an overall privatization of progressive morality. Progressives ceded public morality to the repressive and reactionary puritans. Were progressives to rediscover their true moralistic voice, the archetypal American scenario of puritan moralism poised against progressive moralism would fall back into place.

Morone at least recognizes the bad faith in claims from progressives that their opponents traffic in moralism and they do not. But, finally, “Hellfire Nation” is an example of the phenomenon it aims to explore: American history as a morality play. One appreciates Morone’s ambition. Much history nowadays takes the form of the narrow monograph. The great tradition of narrative history has fallen out of favor. When it is done well, it is exhilarating. But “Hellfire Nation” isn’t done well–primarily because Morone sees American history as a tunnel rather than an expansive vista.

Jean Bethke Elshtain is the author of “Just War Against Terror: The Burden of American Power in a Violent World.”