A People Blinded from Birth: American History According to Sacvan Bercovitch

Abstract

For Perry Miller, American Puritanism was a demanding and uncompromising theology. A severe and even terrifying religion, it offered to the eyes of the faithful a dark and searing vision of the fault that lies within. It was a kind of grim poetry, a somber and elegant meditation on the power of blackness. But it was also a redemptive discipline, a way of thinking against ourselves, even of transcending ourselves. And it was an indispensable guide for sojourners in the wilderness, counseling, as it did, perpetual doubt and the good that may come of a broken heart. If it demanded harsh and unrelenting self-interrogation, it also knew the dangerous deceptions of self-reliance; if it reminded us that we are all strangers and pilgrims on the earth, it also made us see those around us as fellow sufferers.1 It provided a necessary corrective to the pleasing pretensions of American culture, and it gave us our best ideas about what we should value and how we should live. Historical fashions come and go, of course. In our more optimistic moments we think of this coming and going as a process of natural growth, a form of intellectual renewal. We forget that like everything else of value, a particular way of thinking can fall under the wheel of time and be lost forever, that even the most richly imaginative forms of historical reflection can wither and die. Some part of Miller's vision may still survive, but it has been driven into exile. It has become the wandering outcast of professional historiography, its wounding power departed, its redemptive possibilities forgotten, its vision of the past reduced to a patchwork quilt of motley remnants and irrelevant fragments. We no longer think about history the way Miller taught us to think about it. A practiced and developed way of thinking about the American past has been emptied of power, drained of meaning, and finally abandoned. What William Carlos Williams once said of American culture might now be said of Miller's history: