Perry Miller, “The New England Mind” Vols I and II (1939-1953) – Someone on Perry Miller’s Wikipedia entry dug up a quote from an obscure essay about another topic altogether to claim that “the dark conflicts of the Puritan mind eroded his own mental stability.” Miller drank himself to death in 1963, not yet sixty years old, and the event was hailed as a major loss to American intellectual history. He produced many books but “The New England Mind,” his two volume work on the intellectual world of the Puritan settlers, probably stands as his magnum opus.

Miller’s work here has the thoroughgoingness of the Puritan, and his radicality, in the sense of getting to the root of things. He spends hundreds of pages on foundation work, most notably in the first volume, where he excavates the logical, scholastic framework of the thinking of the first generation of Puritan leaders in New England. We hear a lot about the medieval scholastic tradition, with which the Puritans tinkered but did not dispense with until everyone else did, and a whole lot about Peter Ramus, the French Huguenot logician who sought to displace Aristotle as king shit logician man. As you might be able to tell from my levity, these chapters took some digesting on my part, but the spadework was spectacular.

The picture of the Puritans that emerges from the first volume is that of a deeply dour kind of cosmic optimist. They finagled their way out of the terrible strictures of Calvinism through the establishment of the Covenant of Grace. This was the idea that God, despite being empowered to and justified in arbitrarily damning and saving whoever He pleases, condescends to make a pact with his believers in the same way men of business (as so many Puritans were) make pacts amongst themselves. Faith would bring salvation, not just for individuals but for the community — the new “city upon the hill” of New England — as a whole. The terms of the pact were to be regulated by the (Congregational) church- you couldn’t just go off and make the deal on your own. This way, Miller tells us, the Puritans navigated between the Scylla of Arminianism (the idea that good works could bring about salvation, more or less, a Calvinist no-no) and the Charybdis of Antinomianism, the idea that salvation was entirely interior, an inner light that redeemed the person totally without need of structures.

My image of the Puritan covenant-based social/theological/intellectual order as depicted by Miller is that of a powerful but delicate engine, capable of great feats of world-building but needing constant tinkering to keep from going off kilter. This helps explain why the Puritan fathers came down so hard on antinomians like Anne Hutchinson, who they saw as threatening the colony with spiritual and hence general anarchy (which some scholars of Puritanism, like Edmund Morgan, came to see as essentially correct in a way Miller avoids). Covenant theology ran into a generational problem- what happens when the children of “saints” i.e. full church members don’t have the right kind of conversion experience, the right kind of faith to become full church members themselves? This was tied in to the question of infant baptism, a serious issue in seventeenth century Protestantism.

Miller leads off the second book with the New England solution to this issue, the Half-Way Covenant. This allowed people to baptize their kids as partial members of the church but not recipients of the full communion. As the name implies, this didn’t really satisfy anybody. People either wanted to stick with the old system, babies be damned (literally?) or, as eventually came to pass on the Connecticut Valley frontier, simply let all adults who professed faith and weren’t notorious sinners take communion. Above and beyond the deeply felt theological issues here, there were political issues at work. The church was the center of the New England town (hence those pretty, plain white frame churches around so many New England town greens), everyone paid to maintain it and magistrates enforced its rules, even once the British government twisted the arms of Massachusetts and Connecticut to allow other sects to worship. At first, the likes of John Winthrop, Increase Mather, and other big names in Puritanism were perfectly fine with a minority of “saints” lording it over everyone else in town. Time eroded that system and their confidence.

Miller might have been the origin of the idea of the Half-Way Covenant as the beginning of the decline of Puritanism… and the beginning of New England looking like America, as he conceived it. The rest of Volume II is a long series of defeats for Puritan orthodoxy, but it’s not as simple as that. In many respects, these defeats — ranging from the loss of control over social hierarchies as capitalism developed to introductions of new models of physics — were encouraged by the beliefs of the Puritan fathers themselves, no strangers to deal-making or broad liberal educations that eventually led to acceptance of a recognizably “modern” economics and science. Miller, while protective of the Puritan genius from its many irreverent critics, doesn’t see the declension away from Puritanism as a bad or good thing in and of itself. It’s part of the construction of an American way that would include Puritan ideas in its DNA but would be its own thing.

For a long time, many Americans saw the Puritans as father figures. For the “filiopietistic” strand of American historiography in the nineteenth century, this meant enshrining them as demigods of wisdom. For the irreverent writers of the early twentieth century, ranging from progressive historians to H.L. Mencken, the Puritans were bad dads- “abusive” wasn’t the language they would’ve used, but certainly to be looked at with scorn. For Miller and the other American Studies writers in midcentury, they had a complex, conflicted — dare I say psychoanalytic — approach to the Puritans-as-father, an appreciation but also an ironic distance (which makes sense- this was the first generation of American university scholars to involve many Jews and other non-WASPs) that seems distant from our own sensibility… but made for some great scholarship. Thick, dense, at times exhausting along with being exhaustive (it reminded me of Pocock’s “The Machiavellian Moment,” both for good and for I’ll), “The New England Mind,” like the achievements of the Puritans, is an impressive piece of work from a perspective that can only now be approached from outside. *****

Ellen Wu, “The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority” (2014) (narrated by Emily Zeller) – Growing up in very white surroundings in suburban Massachusetts, I got the model minority stereotype of Asian-Americans from both sides: from the right, either resentful of Asian-American success or wondering why black and Hispanic people couldn’t be more like Asians, and from liberals, who cited Asians as exemplars of successful diversity. Of course, minus some of the right’s (seemingly fading?) resentment, the two ideas rest on a lot of the same assumptions. Historian Ellen Wu attempts to get to the historical origin of the stereotype in this work of cultural history.

Wu chose to narrow her focus to Japanese and Chinese Americans, which makes a certain degree of sense on a number of levels. One is contrast- from having been treated quite similarly under the late-nineteenth/early-twentieth century restriction regime, the two groups experienced the sea change of the Second World War drastically differently. Japanese Americans were, of course, rounded up and interned into what we only hesitate to call “concentration camps” because we (imprecisely) call Nazi extermination camps the same thing. Chinese Americans, on the other hand, were all of a sudden white America’s little buddies, allies in the war, and Congress revoked Chinese exclusion in 1943. Both suffered reversals, as Japanese Americans came to be associated with the heroic war record of Nissei combat units and the Chinese American community split over the results of the Chinese Revolution. In both cases and for well after World War II, American foreign relations played a major role in shaping the construction of an Asian American racial identity.

As the Cold War set in, American race relations became a foreign policy issue. The US’s massive race problems, especially their formal legal instantiations, posed a problem for American policymakers attempting to extend leadership in the decolonizing and developing world. This both opened opportunities and imposed limits on the black civil rights struggle, as historians have noted, and Wu points out it did much the same for Asian American efforts at full citizenship. On the one hand, especially when paired with martial patriotism, domestic anticommunism (pro-nationalist elements fairly firmly quashed pro-communist elements in most Chinese American communities), and thoroughgoing respectability politics, Cold War geopolitics opened doors for Asian Americans. The Hawaii statehood debate shows this- objected to for decades on the basis of Hawaii’s Asian population, it was in the late 1950s as concerns over American relations with the Pacific that consensus came around Hawaii’s admittance. On the other hand, this straitjacketed Asian American communities into a particular mold: ultrapatriotic, uncomplaining, devoted to the “American Way” as then understood, and as Wu puts it, “definitively not black.” This is when the comparisons between black and Asian communities by whites began, and not coincidentally, when the Model Minority stereotype really came into its own.

Wu emphasizes both Asian participation and opposition to this race-making process. Early chapters take the reader back to the forties, when far from being America’s richest ethnic group and a model of assimilationist success, Japanese American communities were mostly poor, farm or slum dwelling, and Japanese teens joined Mexican and black kids in “zoot suiting,” wearing outlandish clothes and refusing adult respectability. Numerous Japanese Americans, understandably enough, wanted nothing to do with the American war effort after having been interned, and the Japanese American community groups took an authoritarian stance towards their charges in encouraging them to enlist and otherwise conform. Even as the path to Asian assimilation became clearer, many Asians resisted the bargain, insisting on solidarity with the black freedom struggle and on pointing to the social contradictions within their own communities that community leaders covered up with feel-good model minority stories. This is a conflict that goes on to this day, as Wu and some of my Asian comrades would remind us and as both the model minority (especially as a parenting style) and the “Yellow Peril” from a resurgent China gain in cachet.

This is my first time listening to a history book that didn’t have at least one eye on a mass market, like Tim Snyder did with “Black Earth,” though clearly this one had enough crossover appeal to attract Audible’s attention. While I did miss being able to check endnotes, it was still a pretty good experience, testament to solid writing chops on Wu’s part. It’s a little “dissertation-y;” I would have liked to have seen more about what the model minority experience meant once embraced by the national consciousness, especially as, in the epilogue, Wu points to its adaptivity- starting as a product of Cold War liberalism, but adapting to the conservatism of the Reagan years and the War on Terror. But you can see why Wu would want to reign it in and stick to the origins of the stereotype, as promised. ****

Peter Gay, “Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider” (1968) – Peter Gay promoted a psychoanalytic history that I look at with mixed feelings, but he had a good eye for where to deploy his method. He wrote five volumes on the “inner experience” of bourgeois civilization during the Victorian period, which was Freud’s whole thing, and he wrote this book on Weimar Germany, a time and place caught up in psychodrama if ever there was one. He knew better than to try to analyze individual actors- it’s more he applied the ideas to a “spirit of the age,” which sounds gauzy because it is, but works better than one might think (especially given his aforementioned canniness about subjects). In a sense, Gay was the last of the old-school cultural historians ala Burckhardt or Huizinga, interrogating times and places and their “spirits” via their cultural artifacts, before the newer cultural history in its Foucault-inflected sense arose in subsequent decades.

For what it is, “Weimar Culture” is excellent, and I would argue transcends both psychoanalytic history and old-school cultural history to deserve its place as an enduring classic. Gay goes beyond stereotypes of decadence and cabarets (though giving them their due) to play on a few themes as he delineates what was distinct about the culture of those brief Weimar years from the rest of German history. As the subtitle promises, there’s the idea of the “outsider as insider,” the “revolt of the son” in the arts and in politics that challenged prevailing bourgeois norms, and the eventual “revenge of the father,” a return to a spurious version of “order” under the Nazis. Gay incorporates numerous instances of the “Weimar spirit” from the liberals and social democrats who attempted to practice a new (and precarious, and in the end failed) type of German politics, to the Bauhaus and expressionists in painting and film, to the more-than-once-cited legs of Marlene Dietrich (a psychoanalyst might have fun with Gay for that) into his schema in what is a short (fewer than 200 pages) book.

Probably my favorite part of the book is his discussion of the politics of poetics in Weimar, where poets and writers played an uncharacteristically outsized role in the definition of political space and action within it. This is exemplified in all of its glory and ineptitude by the person of Stefan George and his circle. In better times, George would just have been a popular poet surrounded by his groupie dudes and having a good old time. But times being what they were in the Weimar era, the George Circle and its concept of a “Secret Germany,” both beneath and far above the hoi polloi hue and cry of republican politics, became an important feature undermining the stability of democracy. Figures like Thomas Mann, his less-known brother Heinrich, Rainer Maria Rilke, and others take center stage in turn as they attempt to come to grips with the time… as the time soon enough came to grip them. All in all, a historical masterpiece, even if it’s far from a methodology I would pursue. *****