Perry Miller's Rehabilitation of the Puritans: A Critique

Abstract

In the era between the Civil War and the Depression the mythical character called the “American Mind” was troubled. All was well during the day when prosperity and success faced him at every turn, but at night he would sometimes dream of his childhood and awake feeling strangely uneasy. His analyst explained that this tension was the product of latent guilt feelings and suggested for therapy that he read himself to sleep with recent studies of the oppressive effects of Puritanism on young national minds. Turning to these works, the “American Mind” found that the analyst had been quite right. The source of the guilt feelings, he discovered, was an irrational phase of his development called the Reformation. This phase had been dominant when he lived in New England (he since had moved to the Midwest), but he was assured that the latest scholarship had discovered its influence to be harsh, grotesque, superstitious, narrowminded, illiberal, and worst of all intolerant.1 The problem was, one expert informed him, that this era “was unleavened by the spirit of the Renaissance.” Another observed that the Reformation attitudes were a “subtle poison” flowing thorugh the veins of the entire social organism. Still another implied that the “splendor of the Renaissance” had been delayed three hundred years by Reformation intolerance. Convinced that the open-mindedness of the Renaissance was healthier than the irrational bigotry of the Reformation, the “American Mind” of this era began to feel easier about his past. He resolved to tolerate everyone, except of course his more conservative enemies whom he damned as “Puritan.”

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