Colin Ross, "Unser Amerika", Chapter 9

 9.

The Puritan Heritage of America

It is part of my "travel technique," a method of working that has been tried and tested for decades, to grasp the essence of foreign countries and peoples, to attend their worship as regularly as possible. Thus I have been to Methodist and Baptist churches, Presbyterians, Unitarians, Congregationalists and Mormons in America, attended Catholic masses as well as Lutheran Bible studies, and observed both Negro and Indian worship.

Anyone who studies a little of America's religious life will make the discovery that it is still remarkably strong even today. Of course, church attendance has declined in the United States and Canada as well. It is no longer simply a matter of course to go to church on Sundays. One can get social company or bank credit without that. In small towns, however, belonging to a "denomination" of some church, if no longer a social and business necessity, is at least expedient. In any case, the easiest and quickest way to get connected in a foreign city is to join a religious community.

We have often experienced this. After attending church on Sundays, it was not always easy to avoid the priest or the congregation elders, who enthusiastically wanted to welcome us as new members. In America, there is no church tax collected by the state; each congregation has to look after itself, and in these bad times, of course, they are happy about every new member.

In America, too, the old religious foundation is beginning to loosen; it is precisely because of this that one realizes how strong it was, and how largely public and private life rested on it. This foundation is tremendously diverse. There is hardly another country with so many confessions, and yet, apart from Catholics and Jews, they all have something in common. One cannot say they have a common basis, but they do have a certain amount of the same basic coloration in the important questions of life, namely sex and business. The various denominations may differ in matters of dogma, from the strictest orthodoxy to pure freethinking, but the business ethos as well as the position of man and woman in relation to each other are everywhere fundamentally determined in the same way, by Puritan tradition.

The spirit of Puritanism created the United States - maybe I shouldn’t say created it - but nevertheless decisively shaped it. It is still alive today, in spite of all the waves of immigrants of the most diverse races and religions that have passed over America, in spite of the unprecedented change in all living conditions and views since the days of the Pilgrim Fathers. Those who are in America only fleetingly may not notice this, but those who are in the country longer encounter it at every turn. Despite all the flappers, all the "sex talk," all the nude revues, sexual relations today are still decisively determined by Puritan views. If, in spite of the extremely extensive freedom enjoyed by young people of both sexes in the United States, free and trusting intercourse between boys and girls leading to love and marriage is not possible to the same extent as in our country, and if the relationships of young people still all too easily have something hidden, guilty and unhealthy about them, it is the Puritan tradition that is to blame, which sees sin in all "carnality". A professor involved in any divorce affair still gets fired today, even at such a free university as Chicago, and in the country with the highest divorce rate in the world. And if the average American still doesn't know what to do with his life other than earn money for the sake of earning money, that too is a Puritan legacy.

But it would be quite wrong to see the effects of Puritanism only in the particular shaping they gave to sex as well as to business in America. Puritanism has done infinitely more. If the United States has outwardly preserved its Anglo-Saxon character to this day, this too is to the credit or fault of the Puritans. If America has preserved itself almost purely Anglo-Saxon and Protestant in its political, social and cultural leadership stratum, it owes this to the Puritans. Only now, only in our days, is the United States beginning to lose its Anglo-Saxon-Puritan character, or let us rather say the Anglo-Saxon-Protestant self-evidence. The arc has been crossed, and the Puritan idea is running out.

This idea was the strongest weapon of Anglo-Saxonism. Its strength was based on the fact that the Puritans were not only religious fanatics, but also national and, moreover, with all their piety, extraordinarily good, not to say cunning, businessmen. The Germans who immigrated to the United States in the course of the centuries had nothing equal to them in unity or determination, however great their pious zeal and religious devotion.

The story of the Puritans and their creation of an Anglo-Saxon Protestant America is one of the most astonishing, indeed improbable, events that has ever occurred. The Puritans were originally nothing but a sect which, influenced by the Reformation in Germany and Switzerland, disagreed with the forms and nature of the Anglican Church as created by Henry VIII and, after him, Queen Elizabeth.

These Puritans, also called Nonconformists, Independents or Dissenters - depending on the degree of their religious radicalism - were not very popular in higher places. The Stuart kings, who had succeeded Queen Elizabeth on the throne, were basically more inclined to Catholicism; in any case, they saw in the teachings of the Puritans a challenge to their divine grace. James I began by depriving Puritan clergymen of their posts, but soon stronger deterrents were used. One fine morning, Londoners saw a man in the stocks outside the Tower. 

In place of his ears he had two terrible wounds from which blood dripped down his neck and chest to the ground. A sign announced that the criminal, a certain Prynne, had been sentenced to a heavy fine and life imprisonment in addition to the pillory and the cutting off of his ears, because he had written a book condemning dance, theater, and masquerade as works of the devil, all things in which the royal court took pleasure.

The Puritans passed by the unfortunate man in thoughtful silence. They were soon to learn that he did not remain the only one, but that they were all in for it. Condemnations to pillory, mutilation, and imprisonment rained down on the recalcitrant, and James I said of the "nonconformists": "I will make them conform." Otherwise, he threatened to chase them all out of the country. They would not be made conformable, and so they finally had to leave England, at least the most zealous in purity of faith.

They fled to Holland. There they had what they wanted, peace, freedom and completely undisturbed practice of their religion. But still they were not satisfied; for, as has been said, they were not only religious, but also national. They were Englishmen, and so they did not want to live in Holland in the long run. After a dozen years they saw with horror that their children began to forget their English, to speak Dutch, and to marry into Dutch families. This was as bad as the papist nature in the Anglican Church. So they thought of leaving again. There was one more thing. The Puritans were not only zealots and pious, but also good businessmen, admittedly only for the higher glory of God. Business in Holland, however, was not too brilliant. The Puritan emigrants were living rather poorly on their own labor. So they thought of going to one of the newly discovered countries and negotiated to move to one of the Dutch colonies.

It is extremely exciting to see to what extent world-historical decisions stand on a knife edge, and what insignificant coincidences seem to play a role, so that the historical course takes this and not that way. But basically it seems only in such a way, as in reality the events take their fateful course.

Thus it is rather idle to imagine what would have happened if the Puritans had moved to India instead of America and had applied their faith and business acumen in a Dutch community. They were English nationalists, and even those who drove them from their homeland still saw them as Englishmen. Just as they were negotiating passage to India, an English company approached them with an offer to finance their voyage and settlement in Virginia. At the same time, the king let them know that he would not put any difficulties in the way of the enterprise, and that they would have all freedom in the New World under the English flag. They could even make the trip via England to equip themselves there and unite with like-minded people who wanted to join them.

Here English history begins to branch off clearly from German. In both countries, the Reformation had led to serious internal discord. While in Germany it deepened more and more, until in the Thirty Years' War the antagonisms clashed irremediably and left an unbridgeable gulf, in England the most radical parts left the body of the people without, however, being lost to it. While in Germany the unheard-of energies and spiritual forces which the Reformation unleashed were consumed in senseless mutual struggle, in England they were creating a new world.

I hardly know a more striking example of the all-conquering power of an idea, of the irresistible force of faith, than the story of the Puritans in North America. It is also an example of how little the so-called historical truth matters, but only the legend, the myth, which perhaps contains the truth. It is pretty much all untrue what is reported as historical lore of the first Puritans in America, but nevertheless it forms the granite foundation of American life. It was not the "Mayflower" that brought the first permanent settlers to America, but the "Susan Constant." Alone, how many even know its name. Before the Puritans embarked at Plymouth, a colony had existed in Virginia for thirteen years. This colony already had self-government and a democratic constitution before the Pilgrims drew up in the cabin of the "Mayflower" their famous document, which is said to be the basis of all American democracy. 

The Puritans who came over to the New World were anything but democrats at all. If someone had called them democrats and at the same time told them what democracy actually was, they probably would have crossed themselves and beaten the person to death. They were communists and at the same time autocrats, who fought with extreme intolerance, as it were with fire and sword, every other expression of opinion, indeed only the holding of a different view. This sounds outrageous and completely un-American. But the most monstrous thing about it is that this attitude is not at all un-American, but on the contrary typically American. The Puritans, however, discarded communism after only three years; there was no use for it in the vast empty land with its tremendous possibilities.

The intolerance of the Puritans, however, their rock-solid conviction that they were the people chosen by God, in possession of true grace alone, had an effect on the American people through three centuries and reached the present generation as a Puritan heritage. If Puritanism determined the forms of the intercourse of the sexes as well as of business life, it determined to an even greater extent those of the American faith, and not only the religious faith, but the faith In the broadest sense, of the American idea. Only a Puritan people, utterly convinced of its infallibility, could have had the stomach to launch a "war to end war."

For the 17th century Puritans in the New England states, it was a matter of divine and human justice to hang a Quaker merely because he was a Quaker. Why was he a Quaker and why did he bring his unholy person into the fellowship of Puritans blessed by God's choice of grace! The Puritan heirs in the America of the twentieth century happily believed themselves justified, even obliged, to make war on peoples who had not done them the least harm, with whom they had not had the slightest dispute, and to plunge them into the most terrible misfortune, merely because their form of government did not suit them, "to make the world safe for democracy," to bring democracy to the world; the same democracy which in their own country had led to the distortion of the general welfare.

The ground for all this was laid when the "Mayflower" lay off a barren rock in an inhospitable bay on a foggy and stormy November morning in 1620. The Pilgrim fathers, with their wives and children, had wanted to go to warm, fertile Virginia, where there were already thriving English colonies. Here they had acquired a piece of land. In order to pay this off, like their passage, they had sold themselves, together with their wives and children, for seven years to the London merchants who had financed the enterprise. For this purpose they had also formed a communist fellowship, which was to collect and deliver all the proceeds until they would have worked themselves free.

Now they lay here on this bleak, inhospitable coast, battered by autumn storms, winter at their doorstep, on the rocky shore of a land to which they had no right, unprotected, shut out and yet bound again by contracts and agreements that might keep them in slave chains for life; for how were they to meet their obligations here, how to pay off their debts, in a land that seemed unable to produce even the most basic necessities to save them and their wives and children from doom?

It was a situation in which people either break or force fate. With this resolve to force fate, and with the rock-solid confidence of being personally called and chosen by God, the forty-one adult men of the expedition came together and drew up the document they all invoked. This document, to be sure, was anything but a democratic constitution; it was rather the laws of a bloodhound. The Puritan communities remained aristocratic and autocratic in the future. Today, of course, they are regarded as the archetype and model of democracy, but the true rulers of America have understood to this day - and this is not the least of their greatness - to present as exemplary democracy what is in truth an oligarchy.