Edmund Morgan, “The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop” (1958) – I read this book due to two of my less popular interests: Puritanism, and the American Studies/Consensus School scholars. In many respects, my picture of the former is a product of the latter, and they had some important structural elements in common. Both were institution-builders; both have had oversized impacts on the baseline of American thought and cultural life. Both projected a sort of high-mindedness they meant to catch on with a larger mass of non-intellectuals, but were motivated at least in part by the same base motives as everyone else. Neither are particularly cool to talk about these days. With the Puritans, everyone knows who they are (or think they do) and disapprove; the Consensus School of American history and the founders of American Studies are best known as foils to more current trends in their fields, to the extent they’re known at all.

I feel stuck with them, in some strange ways- I guess as a New Englander and a student of American history, culture, and institutions, I feel kinship with them. This, despite belonging to groups that can be seen as the opposite of both: the descendant of Catholic and Jewish immigrants on the one hand, and an engaged leftist scholar who places conflict, not consensus, at the center of American history on the other. What can I say? You don’t pick your ancestors, and the imprint the Puritans left on New England and that the American Studies founders left on their subject are profound, and I think they influence more than just me- I’m just willing to cop to it.

Anyway, Edmund Morgan, one of the great American historians, is a cusp case, as far as the Consensus School/American Studies gestalt is concerned. His flagship book, “American Freedom, American Slavery” broke with the school (in the mid-seventies, when it was in decline anyway) by placing slavery at the center of early American history. But in the fifties, he seems to have resided pretty soundly in the Consensus school of his mentor Perry Miller, if “The Puritan Dilemma” is any evidence. For those unfamiliar (are any still hanging around reading this?) the Consensus school of American history held that, as the name suggests, consensus over liberal values (as understood by midcentury white upper-middle class Americans) defined American history, and specifically not conflict over ideology, power, or anything else. It was a reaction against both the youthful leftism many of its founders dabbled in during the 1930s and a school of thought exemplified by Charles Beard and others who placed a populism-inflected vision of class conflict at the center of American history. This movement reached its peak during and was mutually influenced by and influential on the founding of American Studies as a field, with American Studies’ stated goal of advancing a unitary American civilization to protect against the threat of right- but mostly left-wing extremism. There’s a reason they’re not cool anymore.

Morgan’s “The Puritan Dilemma” hits a lot of the Consensus school buttons. It’s wrong to say that the Consensus historians saw no conflict in American history- just that most of it was over ownership of a few key ideological constants, like what constitutes freedom. So Morgan illustrates numerous conflicts that his subject, first Governor of Puritan Massachusetts John Winthrop, managed during his time. In keeping with the Consensus school, Winthrop, who represents a future for America and the values of its founding, wins most of these conflicts, though makes the occasional tragic mis-step. Another Consensus school flag is the use of biography (another uncool thing in contemporary historiography). The big Consensus school work that’s still read sometimes is Richard Hofstadter’s “The American Political Tradition,” in which a series of pocket biographies of American political figures who either did or would have hated each other’s guts are brought into harmony over the key aspects of liberalism. “The Puritan Dilemma,” written ten years later, projects much the same dynamic backwards into the far colonial past. Winthrop’s foils and opponents in this biography — mainly Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams — represent not so much opposition to Winthrop and Puritanism’s central project but it’s being taken too far in assorted directions. This emphasis on a personal character that prizes practicality and compromise over vision and consistency is very Consensus school.

This can make “The Puritan Dilemma” something of a just-so story, which, if it were less well-executed and consistent, would have ruined the book and might still ruin it for some readers. Winthrop was born into comfortable countryside circumstances in England in the 1580s (he died well before the Salem witch trials- he and Morgan both dodged a reputational bullet there). The dilemma he and the Puritans were constantly faced with was how to make a good society in a world they saw as fundamentally bad. Maybe that’s why I relate to them- unlike a lot of other leftists, I don’t see the world as fundamentally good. I see it as fundamentally indifferent… anyway. Especially given the Puritan fixation on the afterlife — and unlike other Christians, they couldn’t influence which afterlife they got — the quandaries of worldly action presented themselves in stark terms. This was intensified by the degree of education and theological sophistication at work, to say nothing of the blank social slate with which the Puritans found themselves presented.

At every stage, Morgan shows Winthrop as being faced with a choice between retreat from and engagement with the world. At every stage, Winthrop makes the right choice. This pretty much always means engagement. The one exception was a biggie: his retreat from England to Massachusetts, where he was sorely tempted to stay and fight for Puritan values at home. But this was an out of frying pan, into the fire situation- a retreat to an even more intensive variety of engagement in problems ranging from the immediately practical (food) to the theological.

In Massachusetts, Winthrop depicts Morgan as a bulwark of stolid good sense, a George Washington (as Washington was then conceived) figure, a practical unifier who is surrounded, more than Washington was, by crazed ideologues. Winthrop recognized when to push and when to pull back- he made the Massachusetts covenant considerably more democratic (involving freeman suffrage, that is, suffrage for ordinary church — which was the same as community — members) than he had to according to his orders from the Massachusetts Bay Company, Morgan argues. This is also an ingenious way to explain away what looks a lot like oppression and abuse of power on the part of Winthrop and the power structure he represented. He knew the way to go- others did not. Winthrop giveth, Winthrop taketh away (the sort of remark that’d get my tongue pulled out in 17th century Massachusetts).

“History is written by the winners,” they say, but by the twentieth century the winners in early Massachusetts’s theological-cum-political conflicts, like Winthrop, weren’t that popular, and figures of opposition like Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams had been made over into patron saints of freedom of religion. To support their exile is a bold move, one Morgan makes with aplomb (which isn’t to say I agree with him). He depicts Hutchinson and Williams as fanatics — reasonably persuasively, but fanaticism in Puritan Massachusetts sounds like speeding at the Indianapolis 500 — whose beliefs were dangerous to the commonwealth. Antinomianism, ala Hutchinson, was corrosive to public welfare in its dismissal of all good works and implication that law had no bearing on those imbued with the Holy Spirit. Separatism, ala Roger Williams, threatened the political unity of the commonwealth, threatening to split every congregation from every other, as exemplified by Williams eventually refusing to believe in the grace of anyone other than himself and his wife. There’s a lot to debate here. Separatism did prove a boon to religious liberty, and the collapse predicted didn’t seem to strike Rhode Island. Antinomianism wasn’t threatening the social order so much as Hutchinson’s position as a woman questioning men, and even Morgan grants that Hutchinson ran rings around Winthrop intellectually. But still- Winthrop won, he founded the New England way of reconciling faith and world, and this was all for the best in this best of all possible Americas, Morgan heavily implies.

Needless to say, I don’t agree with much of this. But Morgan wielded a beautiful pen, a real sense for the storytelling behind the subject matter, and the book held my interest the way few have recently. At this point, my review threatens to be longer than the book- this is no hefty life and times biography, this makes its point in fewer than two hundred pages. In all, between my weird interests, Morgan’s capabilities as a writer and a historian, and my determination not to make my rating system an ideological test, I can’t but give this book my highest rating, for holding my attention rapt and making me think a lot. Your mileage may vary- but I still think both the Puritans and the Consensus School might have more to do with you than you might think. *****

Linda Hopkins, “False Self: The Life of Masud Khan” (2006) – Masud Khan was a controversial British psychoanalyst. Born and raised in the British Raj in what would become Pakistan, he came to Britain as a young man and immediately got involved in the postwar psychoanalysis boom. From the beginning of his career to its ignominious end, he was both lauded and condemned for his high profile and unconventional style. Linda Hopkins, a psychoanalyst herself, tries to avoid both in this interesting biography, opting instead for an attempt at a deep, compassionate understanding of a profoundly difficult man.

Psychology is a subject that has interested me at various points but it’s subtleties typically escape me. I find it hard to concentrate on them. I find it easy to concentrate on history, however, including my own, so I’ll say Masud Khan reminds me of a number of people I’ve met during my long sojourn in alternative education and grad school after that: charismatic rich kids who make big gestures and have a tendency to lie. Khan came from a rich landowning family in Punjab and took British psychoanalytic circles by storm when he came to Britain and took part in the postwar analysis boom. Handsome and quick-witted, he quickly became a big figure, analyst to numerous stars (Hopkins won’t say who but I believe her), dinner party lion, hobknobber with celebrity, holder of important psychoanalytic institutional posts, heir apparent to the great (supposedly, I don’t know much about him) Donald Winnicott.

Hopkins has us exhilarate with the good years and reel with the bad. By the late sixties Khan’s penchant for lies (seemingly pathological ones, at least in that they seemed not to serve a practical purpose, but I’m no psychologist), drink, and other women (despite being married to the prima ballerina of the Royal Ballet) caught up with him. He broke many of the rules of psychoanalysis, most notably socializing with — and sleeping with — patients. He did this for years and no one in British psychoanalysis did anything about it. Hopkins doesn’t make clear why- Khan did have some “lucky” timing, in between it being the sixties and seventies and his getting cancer at a key moment when the authorities were going to censor him. He recovered and went right back at it.

What finally killed his reputation was his last book, where he, among other problematic things, went on extended screeds against the Jews (despite having several of the proverbial good Jewish friends). Hopkins doesn’t quite bracket this off — she presents enough of a balanced picture to be realistic — but does suggest we put this, and his other misbehaviors, in the balance with the good Khan did. This is supplied by numerous interviews with patients who claim he helped them, and his many contributions to psychoanalysis. Hopkins doesn’t go into detail about the latter, and as someone who benefits from having psychological concepts explained to him as though he’s five, this wasn’t a helpful omission for me. As for the interviews, they appear to be roughly even between those who claimed he helped and those who claimed he didn’t, or that he hurt them- maybe there were more of the former but the latter made more of an impression.

Hopkins looks back more in sadness than in anger. This makes for good biography. The impression I was left with of Khan is mixed. On the one hand, I’m not immune from being charmed, including by the vaguely sociopathic when they take an interest in me. On the other, I scorn abuse of power, which is what sleeping with your patients is. Obviously antisemitism is wrong, though Hopkins argues was more of a symptom of his possible bipolar status than a real ideological stance- but charmers like Khan live and die by inconsistency, and I scorn that, too. He was consistent in his hatred of fat people, too, so overall my conclusion is that he could’ve used a swift ass-kicking, as an adult. But that wouldn’t make very good biography, and “False Self” is pretty good biography. ****’

Richard White, “‘It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own:’ A New History of the American West” (1991) –This is a pretty textbook-ish account of the territory between the Missouri River and the Pacific Ocean from European contact to the Reagan administration. White’s main thesis is that the mythology of the West — of self-made men making their own individualistic stamp on the vast landscape — is challenged to the point of irrelevance by the array of federal interventions that made the West what it is. These range from the federal army destroying independent Native American power to distributing land to people and railroads (mostly railroads) to, after the frontier period, investing massive amounts of money into water and power infrastructure in the West, following it up with federal investment in military and commercial ventures in the same area. This is one of those theses that have become common sense in American history, at least in part due to White’s intervention thirty years ago- I don’t know enough about the historiography of the West to say how they’ve diverted from White since, but I imagine it has.

Probably most interesting to me is the repeated clashes between those who dream of the West as a blank canvas on which to paint their designs and the reality of the place, both ecological and human. From private empire-builders like James Wilkinson and magnates like John Sutter to farmers convinced that “rain follows the plough” into plains and deserts to boomtown boosters of various descriptions, White describes a range of dreamers foiled by reality, though not without cost to people, especially Native peoples and the Hispanic populations of the pre-American-rule West. There’s a lot here about the tortured twists and turns of American Native policy, which makes for informative but infuriating reading. He also describes a fair amount of class conflict, though ultimately gives short shrift to radicals ranging from the IWW to the American Indian Movement and the Black Panthers. I guess he’s right in that they didn’t alter the structure of forces in the West, and were less politically successful than the similarly western-concentrated New Right. I guess the material reality they ran against was the brutality of a capitalist state. Is that as inevitable a part of Western reality as aridity and distance? Who knows, let’s hope not. ****