Word: puritanical
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...loves-with some misgivings-the deep American belief in human perfectibility and goodness. Yet an element of this belief is the fact that America lacks an adequate sense of evil. In the Enlightenment tradition, evil is explained away as a curable flaw. But even in the puritan and evangelical tradition, the American sense of evil is curiously shallow and optimistic, more concerned with behavior (sex or drink, for example) than with the deeper states of sin. The devil can be banished, and evil can be fought; evil is seen almost as a mere "problem" to be solved. There is little...
...whole-are becoming increasingly cynical about the honor code and system. Part of the reason is the code's extreme rigidity. Part is the growing feeling among some cadets that their fellow students on the Honor Committee are as sternly self-righteous-and occasionally as sadistic-as a Puritan elder in early Massachusetts. Says a high Pentagon official: "We have to moderate their enthusiasm to be inquisitors...
...prize victim of this plague of sophistication is Farmer Herkimer ("Heck") Brown, Ma's son-in-law, who has taken up with a fast crowd in Middle City. Heck now wears E.E. Cummings T shirts, affects an "inner-city laugh" and argues that both monogamy and the Puritan work ethic are strictly for the crows. When Wife Hattie asks him to dust the crops, Heck quips, "Oh, the maid will dust them...
...return for these wordly advantages, the Puritan ethic dictates the covenant's quid: a sense of mission, "presumably divinely inspired," engendered in each Winthrop as expiation or compensation for his headstart in life. That mission takes many forms. To Governor John Winthrop (1630), the mission entails hounding a religious non-conformist out of the young Massachusetts Bay Colony, in the interest, he believes, of public welfare. To Adam (1902), it means maintaining the standards of Society and the elitism of the Patroon Club by throwing a judicious blackball. Later, John (1967) serves as an advocate for the status quo, hawkishly...
Unfortunately, the author's deep involvement with his novel transforms his work from a historical chronicle of a distinguished New England family to a pointed deposition--sketched on yellow legal paper--on the Puritan ethic. Through all his talk of covenants, missions and Puritan ideals runs an annoying smugness. Novelists John Marquand and John O'Hara also assayed the WASP upper crust in their writings, but rarely presumed to give their characters a moral or aesthetic superiority over the Great Unwashed. Auchincloss, on the other hand, hints that his Winthrops are not only different from you and me, they...