For many years it has been agreed that New England Puritans became Yankees. Although scholars have largely confined their studies of this process to Massachusetts, the titles of two recent books on Connecticut indicate that the interpretation fits that colony as well. Puritanism declined in Connecticut as elsewhere in New England. Fitz-John Winthrop, Governor of Connecticut between 1698 and 1707, suffers by comparison with the standards set by his grandfather, Governor John Winthrop of Massachusetts, and by the founders of Connecticut, Hooker, Ludwell, and Haynes. In 1680, Governor William Leete of Connecticut judged Fitz by these standards, and found that he lacked his ‘fathers virtues & cordiality of love to this colony’. The accusation was well-founded, for Fitz and his brother Wait had allied themselves with Governor Edmund Andros of New York in pushing the Duke of York's claim to large parts of Connecticut. That they did so in part to protect their land holdings would not have softened Leete's judgement. The Winthrops come out of the affair the archetypal Yankees: not only provincial, but materialistic as well. Yet on balance, there was in Connecticut little of the intense self-criticism so prevalent in Massachusetts, where the spirit of accommodation with the empire was more widespread and produced considerable political strife and the usual crop of doomladen sermons. Fitz's temporary defection was rare in Connecticut and resulted in little more than Leete's rather gentle remonstrance and a short-lived, if acrimonious, correspondence between Fitz and the General Court. As Richard L. Bushman suggests, Connecticut's isolation from the imperial system and its relative homogeneity gave rise to a Puritan society unique in its autonomy and, one might add, unique in its self-confidence.

It has often been said that the desertion of disproportionately large numbers of Irish and German voters from the Democratic party in 1920 was a major factor in producing the Republican landslide of that year. Warren G. Harding certainly had a German-American father-in-law, had had pro-German sympathies before 1917, and as early as 1916 had been spoken of as a man whom the German-American community could support for the Presidency. The Democratic candidate was undoubtedly identified with Woodrow Wilson, who through his unwillingness to press for self-determination for Ireland could be said to have ‘alienated nearly all of Irish America’. But it is difficult, lacking knowledge as we do of the precise numbers of Irish and German voters who swung away from the Democrats, to feel that a final statement on the matter has been made, while those statements which have been made have not been finally convincing, even where based on statistical evidence.

‘Ours is an era of “cases”,’ Diana Trilling wrote several years ago, ‘starting with the Sacco-Vanzetti case in the 1920s, proceeding through the Hiss and Oppenheimer cases to the Rosenberg case, the Chessman case, the Eichmann case, and [the subject of Mrs Trilling's essay]…culminating…in the Profumo case.’ We could add several since then, of course, and her chronology is misleading – the Rosenbergs having followed Hiss but preceded Oppenheimer – but Mrs Trilling's point, that such cases and others provoked within their society basic ‘confrontation(s) between opposing social principles’, remains valid. The Hiss, Rosenberg and Oppenheimer episodes were American society's most controversial post-World War II security cases. Each in turn dramatized the political and cultural impact of the Cold War for large numbers of Americans. They serve as useful paradigms, when examined together, for studying the process by which complex problems of evidence are reduced to compelling images of an event. Almost from the moment the ‘facts’ emerged in each case they congealed, first into partisan accounts and then into minor mythologies, in which each case became the subject-matter for a simple morality tale. Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Robert Oppenheimer, and the supporting caste in each drama achieved, in their own time, the status of icons in the demonologies and hagiographies of the opposing camps. Looking recently through the dreary record of trials and hearings connected with security problems during the Truman-Eisenhower era, I found certain continuities in the appraisal by intellectuals and politicians of these three otherwise singular episodes.

Although one feels reluctant to increase the volume of commentary on ‘My Kinsman, Major Molineux’, the work is so rich that it insists on being continuously re-interpreted. And there is one aspect of it in particular which seems to me not to have received adequate attention – namely, its relationship to Franklin's account in the Autobiography of his first arrival in Philadelphia. A few years ago Julian Smith pointed out several of the resemblances, and he convincingly demonstrated the likelihood that the one work had an influence on the other. But he did not go any further than this, and really only began to describe the nature of the relationship. For the most important thing about all of the similarities is that they are accompanied by very suggestive differences. And what I want to argue in this essay is that in writing ‘My Kinsman’ Hawthorne not only remembered Franklin's account of his arrival in Philadelphia, but also sought implicitly to criticize the vision of reality which is embodied in the Autobiography.

In 1928 Ezra Pound described William Carlos Williams as an ‘observant foreigner’ who ‘starts where an European would start if an European were about to write of America: sic: America is a subject of interest, one must inspect it, analyse it, and treat it as subject.’ If Pound was right, Williams was a native-born outsider, a life-long resident alien giving America the serious attention of his life's work. The detachment and close attention noted by Pound as originating in Williams's sense of his own ‘foreignness’ (a sense which Williams obliquely admitted by his insertion of a relevant letter of Pound in the ‘Prologue’ to Kora in Hell), are constants in Williams's work. Both the Imagist and Objectivist phases of his career show his determination to capture in words ‘the local fully realized’ – Williams's definition of ‘the classic’. In his trilogy of novels, his exploration of ‘the local’, ‘the only thing that is universal’ is shown both in theme and technique.

Paul Kavanagh's recent article on Robert Lowell's ‘For the Union Dead’ clearly shows the relevance of Colonel Shaw's sacrifice to the poem and usefully emphasizes its Civil War associations. What is perhaps less clear in his investigation is Lowell's debt to the present, and the extent to which that debt ultimately defines the direction of the poem. Early in his study, for example, Kavanagh remarks ‘Two major symbols stand together over the abyss of the underground garage, the Statehouse and a bas-relief of Colonel Shaw’: it may be added that the two structures are physically present on Beacon Hill above Boston Common where the garage was built, and, although contrary to the implication in the poem they were not propped up because of the excavation, they do face each other across Beacon Street in dramatic – or ironic – contrast. Yet there are many such contrasts in the poem, expressed or implied. From the ‘Sahara of snow’ and the boarded windows of the second line, to the ‘savage servility’ of the next to last, the whole city seems locked in an aura of unresolved opposites and stifling contradictions. Chief among these is the opposition between Colonel Shaw and the narrator, neither of whom emerges as either heroic or objectively ‘right’.