Puritanism, paternalism, and power.

• Author: Higgs, Robert

"Live and let live" would appear to be a simple, sensible guide to social life, but obviously many Americans reject this creed with a vengeance. They find toleration so unpleasant that they support the imprisonment of hundreds of thousands of individuals whose personal behavior they regard as offensive. Why do so many Americans favor the use of coercive sanctions to enforce repression? The answer lies in our history.

Puritanism

Politicians and other patriotic posturers; like to declare that the Europeans came to America seeking freedom. The claim is at best a half-truth. In the colonial era, most Europeans arrived in North America bound in some form of indentured servitude. Disregarding these servants, one finds that the free colonists sought mainly to improve their economic well-being.

To be sure, some of them, including the early arrivals in Massachusetts, were fleeing religious oppression. But the Pilgrim Fathers had absolutely no intention of establishing a community in which individuals would be free to behave according to the dictates of their own consciences. The Puritans had already seen the light, and by God they intended to use all necessary means to ensure that everybody comply with Puritan standards. Far from free, their "City upon a Hill" was a hardhanded theocracy.

For them, pleasure seemed the devil's snare. Their vision of the good life was austere, and they looked askance on the possibility that others might embrace hedonism. In H. L. Mencken's famous characterization, Puritanism was "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy" (A Mencken Chrestomathy. New York: Vintage Books, 1982, p. 624). Moreover, if the Puritans suspected that someone might be having fun, they had no compunction about using government coercion to knock some sense into the offender. Mencken might have had this proclivity in mind when he observed, "Show me a Puritan and I'll show you a son-of-a-bitch" (p. 625).

In view of the Puritans' dispositions, it is unfortunate that they exerted an immense and lasting influence on American social and political affairs. Puritanism's "central themes recur in the related religious communities of Quakers, Baptists, Presbyterians, Methodists, and a whole range of evangelical Protestants," and Puritanism "established what was arguably the central strand of American cultural fife until the twentieth century" (Andrew Delbanco, "Puritanism," in The Reader's Companion to American History, edited by Eric Foner and John A. Garraty. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991, p. 893). Even today, ghosts of the Pilgrim Fathers haunt the land.

Paternalism

Paternalists are more ambitious than Puritans. Whereas the latter are content to steer people away from sinful behavior, the former go further, seeking also to promote the worldly health, safety, and welfare of their wards, coercively if need be. Of course, paternalists direct their deepest compassion toward saving the children.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when American social life was more rigidly hierarchical and dominated by WASPs, the paternalistic impulse came naturally to those who took themselves to be the respectable class in society. But in...