Reading, Writing And History (June 1957 | Volume: 8, Issue: 4)

Reading, Writing And History

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Authors: Bruce Catton

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June 1957 | Volume 8, Issue 4

Conscience and Midnight

A national conscience can be a very strange thing, especially when the nation involved is America. It is not quite the same as the conscience of an individual human being, the chief difference being that it tends to operate after the event; that is, it functions less to keep society from sin than to bring about a return to first principles after the sin has been committed. It is the embodiment of the nation’s prevailing moral values, the deep essence of the lasting beliefs that give the nation its character; to trace its history is to examine the faith of an entire people and to see how that faith is perennially readjusted under the pressure of a changing environment.

Such a historical study is performed by Roger Burlingame in a brooding, thoughtful book entitled The American Conscience. Its great virtue is that it provides a new viewpoint from which to survey what the American people have done and what they have failed to do, and it leaves one once more with the feeling that the American experience has been deeply and significantly unique.

At the base of the national conscience, says Mr. Burlingame, lies the hard core of Calvinism that goes straight back to New England. But although this core was, and is, uncommonly tough, it has been profoundly wrought upon by three things peculiar to America—by the physical and spiritual isolation of Americans, by the immense influence of the frontier (wide open, steadily retreating, and then finally closing forever), and by the incredible natural wealth which was waiting to be exploited. The result was a strange sea change, not anticipated by the founding fathers. The harsh rigidities of the old Puritan doctrine became transmuted into a warm and intimate faith, broad enough to embrace the ideals of freedom and liberty that could unite an entire people.

Out of all of this, says Mr. Burlingame, we got an unexpected mixture: a strong basic morality which always enables the nation to recover from its worst lapses, overlaid by memories which at times provoke a desperate desire to regain an earlier dream. Isolation is gone and the frontier is gone, and the illimitable endowment of natural wealth has changed beyond recognition; yet a people whose inner faith leads it constantly to look to the future is impelled, periodically, to try to get back to a time when those things had not changed and when life seemed a great deal simpler and more reassuring. So we do odd things; we try to re-establish the old isolation, we try to live again by frontier law and customs, we give lip service to slogans and catch phrases that were born when a virgin continent was only beginning to yield its riches. It never works—and when these foredoomed longings lead us into deplorable excesses (which does happen, now and then) we come to, finally, with a re-examination of our conscience