For we are setting out upon a voyage in no less hazardous than that undertaken by the Arbella in We are committing ourselves to tasks of statecraft no less awesome than that of governing the Massachusetts Bay Colony, beset as it was then by terror without and disorder within.
In describing the Puritan experience we will see how this sense of destiny came into being. Winthrop statue at its original site in Scollay Square. Photo from BPS archives. The truth, as Rodgers clarifies, is less dramatic: There was no grand sense of destiny among the first Puritans to settle Boston. They carried no ambitions to build a New Jerusalem.
They did not name their new home Zion, or Canaan, the promised land of milk and honey. They only sought a place to uphold their covenant with God, free from outside interference. Thirdly, that every man might have need of others, and from hence they might be all knit more nearly together in the bonds of brotherly affection. From hence it appears plainly that no man is made more honorable than another or more wealthy etc.
Therefore God still reserves the property of these gifts to Himself as Ezek. The same as before, but with more enlargement towards others and less respect towards ourselves and our own right. Hence it was that in the primitive Church they sold all, had all things in common, neither did any man say that which he possessed was his own.
Likewise in their return out of the captivity, because the work was great for the restoring of the church and the danger of enemies was common to all, Nehemiah directs the Jews to liberality and readiness in remitting their debts to their brethren, and disposing liberally to such as wanted, and stand not upon their own dues which they might have demanded of them.
Thus did some of our forefathers in times of persecution in England, and so did many of the faithful of other churches, whereof we keep an honorable remembrance of them; and it is to be observed that both in Scriptures and latter stories of the churches that such as have been most bountiful to the poor saints, especially in those extraordinary times and occasions, God hath left them highly commended to posterity….
Thus stands the cause between God and us. We are entered into covenant with Him for this work. But over the centuries, a cult of social and ethnic superiority had accreted about them. The Jamestown story fared even worse. At least the Pilgrims of Plymouth were impelled by spiritual beliefs.
The settlers at Jamestown had come for easy wealth, and they rapidly turned to the enslavement of others to gain it. Jamestown seemed to prove the communists right. Born in , Miller rebelled against what he perceived as the materialistic society of the s. In his own life, Miller was a fierce anti-Puritan who ultimately drank himself to death before his 60th birthday. Yet he found in the legacy of Puritanism a source for the idealism that he believed American society needed.
Adam Serwer: The crisis of American democracy is not over. The murder of one of those prophet-leaders, John F. Kennedy, seems to have propelled Miller into his final, lethal drinking binge. Through the mid-twentieth century, American literary history had no place in it for this sermon.
Almost in a flash, it became the foundation of American literature. Miller was a liberal, not a conservative; a domestic reformer, not a Cold Warrior. That nation regarded itself both as the center of events and as a society profoundly vulnerable to external shocks.
The city on a hill could fail. Ronald Reagan seems never to have appreciated his debt to Miller, which was only fair, because Miller probably would have had little good to say about Reagan. The destiny of the city on a hill was uncertain. But if the city was already shining, then its destiny had been achieved. Hopes had been fulfilled, the dream had been realized, and now the task shifted from creation to preservation, or possibly restoration—to scrub off any grime that dimmed the shine.
The city on a hill does not seem very shiny in the year Pandemic, economic crisis, and an incumbent president attempting to overthrow the democratic election he undoubtedly lost by a large margin: If the eyes of all people are upon America now, they are not witnessing an edifying spectacle. For Miller, history was fundamentally ironic. The way Miller made such claims set him apart from other scholars.
He lived intensely, self-destructively even. When the shouting died down, he knocked and entered, only to discover that Miller was alone. The argument had been with himself. This compilation would serve as a capstone to all his efforts, the culmination to over three decades of dedicated study.
All he had achieved, Miller once claimed, was just a preface to the real project— this project, the last. When Miller began The Life of the Mind in America , he sought financial support from whatever foundations he could find.
Not many existed during his day, and few came forward to help. One supplied him with enough money to hire a graduate student named Alan Heimert, who would soon replace him as the Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature at Harvard. Still, Miller was not granted much assistance. He reported his frustrations to a good friend named Samuel R. Rosenthal, an eminent Chicago lawyer, and Rosenthal responded by funding Miller himself.
Three years later, Miller wrote to Rosenthal to explain his lack of progress. Receiving the letter, Rosenthal simply offered more money. Miller refused. He claimed in that he had plenty of material, plenty of notes. All he had to do was write it up. The book would be finished soon. Instead, Miller pushed his friend off, promising Rosenthal that the book was almost done.
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