In November 1842, La Roy Sunderland, Orange Scott and Jotham Horton, leading abolitionists and ministers, withdrew from the Methodist Episcopal Church. The first issue of the True Wesleyan, Scott's anti-slavery newspaper, published an announcement of their withdrawal and their reasons for deciding to do so. They could no longer serve a church that condoned slavery and that scarcely permitted delegates to its conferences to raise the issue there. The three dissenters saw what they regarded as the high-handed tactics of the bishops in preventing conferences from considering anti-slavery resolutions as resting upon ‘the assumptions of Rome’! This act of withdrawal and the formation of the wesleyan Methodist Church die following May came after a six years' struggle between the radical abolitionists within the Church and their more conservative brethren, principally the bishops, who had stifled discussion of the slavery issue in order to preserve the Church as a national entity. This Wesleyan schism is a token of the change that is the subject of this essay.

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.

My students at the University of Edinburgh often ask me, why have Americans been so anti-socialist? Some of them perplexedly refer to the rarity of class conflicts, as, say, Clydesiders would define them, in United States history. They remain unconvinced by ‘class’ or ‘economic’ interpretations of the American past. They underline the paradox by recalling the comparative weakness, in the long term, of organized American socialism. Still, they point out, there has been a good deal of anti-socialist, anti-communist rhetoric across the Atlantic. Is mere any explanation for what, on the face of it, seems to be a ranting in the void?

In any catalogue of famous American families, the Adams name takes second place to none. John and John Quincy Adams were first and second generation Presidents, and in the fourth generation Charles Francis Jr., Brooks, and Henry Adams all gained renown as historians and writers. Upon closer study, however, the story of the Adamses presents us with something more significant than an example of sequential biography; rather, it suggests a fascinating historical and literary problem. For what began as a political dynasty endured three generations later as a family literary society, effectively divorced from the exercise of those powers which had once appeared to be a birthright. A dramatic transition from political leadership to literary notoriety had been completed; and this change symbolized the alteration in Adams family fortunes between 1828 and 1920. Even as it was taking place, moreover, this shift in the nature and character of family activities and attainments puzzled and sometimes tortured those members of the third and fourth generations who felt themselves being made the victims of the change. Brooks Adams, for example, shows his anguished response in ‘The Heritage of Henry Adams’ and Law of Civilization and Decay; and Henry Adams registers his own surprise and cool horror when he contemplates the fate of the Adamses in The Education of Henry Adams.

The genteel and incapable Mugwump reformers received yet another battering in 1968 with the publication of John Sproat's ‘The Best Men’: Liberal Reformers in the Gilded Age. They are presented as being consumed by their moral imperatives and their hysterical fear of the lower classes, and sinking amid the social turmoil of the 1890s; their label, ‘liberal’, is but a convention for the benefit of their misguided contemporaries, and as we now know what it really means, they should be rejected as unworthy. Like many people, Sproat apparently sees the 1890s as a self-contained decade overwhelmed by the Pullman Strike and Free Silver, with the Klondike and Cuba as a fortunate tailpiece to avert the pending revolution. But amid the turmoil, one era of reform – the era of the ‘Bolt from Blaine’ and of the Civil Service Act – in fact blended into another – the era of Progressivism. The continuing public career of Seth Low, the type of organizations and men who supported him for office, and the principles of municipal reform announced early in his career are some aspects of this blending process. When one considers the diversity of liberal concerns and the regular infusion of new men and aims, then it is high time we modified those explanations of Progressivism based only on an explosion of material self-interest or cravings for lost status after 1900.

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.

Senator Arthur Vandenberg wrote of Pearl Harbor that ‘Isolationism for any realist ended on that day’. For two decades after Pearl Harbor this judgement was generally accepted both by statesmen and by scholars in America. Pre-World War II isolationism, it was felt, had been a policy of blindness which culminated in disaster. In the post-war period, it was generally agreed, America learned from the mistakes of her pre-war isolationism and helped to keep peace and defend her interests by pursuing an internationalist policy of the containment of Communism.

In May 1932 the Museum of Modern Art opened on 53rd Street in New York in an old mansion. A number of artists associated widi New Masses, the leftist magazine founded in 1925, showed a collection of political murals sharply commenting on die economic imbalance and social cruelty of the times. Hugo Gellert's mural was entided ‘Us fellas gotta stick together’, a phrase drawn from an already notorious conversation between a young member of die wealthy Vanderbilt family, who had obtained a reporting job on a Hearst newspaper, and his equally rich interviewee, Al Capone, then in gaol. Capone, as usual, knew die score and told die young capitalist inheritor: ‘Us fellas gotta stick togedier.‘ Gellert's mural neatly encapsulated the Hearst-gangsterdom axis, since the centre of corruption, then as now, in America was die interlocking of business and crime. Naturally, President Hoover, Henry Ford, J. P. Morgan and J. D. Rockefeller found die exhibition offensive since diey were die ‘fellas’ in die mural with Capone. Another picture, by the great political artist, Ben Shahn, showed figures in the Sacco and Vanzetti case, and one by William Gropper, another fine political artist, showed J. P. Morgan and Andrew Mellon, a couple of notorious millionaires, eating tickertape with two pigs, and protected by militiamen. The Gropper was entitled, with little subdety, but quite accurately, ‘The Writing on the Wall’.

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.

The current nostalgic interest in the 1920s and '30s has brought about more than the revival of period fashion and interior decoration in America. For anyone concerned with die visual arts it has illuminated the most exciting and prolific decade diat country has ever seen. During die Depression the official approach to art and die artist was radically different from anything before or since, and probably from anything in the Western world. That this should have come about is in itself amazing, die more so as it was done through Congressional legislation, supported by the President.

Robert Penn Warren is a writer of extraordinarily diverse talents and interests. He is, among other things, one of the founders of the New Criticism, a poet and a poetic dramatist of national reputation (he won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for his nineteen volumes of verse), and a gifted teacher. Above all, though, he is a writer whose moral and philosophical bias is towards the kind of historical specificity and social density which is perhaps the special preserve of the novel. This more than anything else accounts for the exceptional range and volume of his fictional writing and for the usual association of his name with one book in particular which is, by common consent, his finest achievement: All The King's Men, first published in 1946. Occasionally, a case has been made for the superiority of one of his other novels, and there have been one or two attempts to locate the centre of his work in the poetry. But these have been scattered, infrequent, and in the event, I think, unconvincing. All The King's Men remains his masterwork, and perhaps his most characteristic piece of fiction too, so that any assessment of Warren the imaginative writer has ultimately to focus upon it.

Population growth has been traditionally regarded with some satisfaction in the United States, being associated with economic and social benefits and rising standards of living. Population expansion has, inter alia, provided an increasing labour force, larger and more varied markets and a widening range of opportunity for individuals. By 1967, however, as the U.S. population officially passed the 200 million mark, reactions were becoming decidedly ambivalent. Expressions of pride and pleasure, and the anticipation of further economic growth were somewhat soured by the widely publicized views of conservationists and ‘environmentalists’ (a rather newer breed). The old attitude of mind in fact paid little heed to the problems accompanying large population expansion and rapid changes both in patterns of living and in geographical distribution. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, however, concern about these matters began to grow, and the assumed arrival of the 200 millionth American heralded a sizeable campaign concerned with the threat, so called, of ‘over-population’. Stewart Udall, then Secretary of the Interior, writing a Foreword to his Department's report ‘The Population Challenge’, stated flatly ‘The greatest threat to quality of living in this country is overpopulation’. He spoke of the challenge of a soaring population; the shrinking amount of space per head; the gathering storm of conflict on space allocation, on resource utilization and on the preservation of the quality of environment. The headings of various sections of that report – ‘A Rationed Tomorrow’; ‘So Much and No More’; ‘Planning for the Pinch’ – all reflect urgent concern about the size and rate of growth of U.S. population with its growing pressure on land and other resources.

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.

‘Poor Man's Pudding and Rich Man's Crumbs’ is generally regarded as a lacklustre comparison of poverty in rural America and metropolitan England, with the theme given by the author towards the end of the first episode:

The native American poor never lose their delicacy or pride; hence, though unreduced to the physical degradation of the European pauper, they yet suffer more in mind than the poor of any other people in the world. Those peculiar social sensibilities nourished by our own peculiar political principles, while diey enhance the true dignity of a prosperous American, do but minister to the added wretchedness of the unfortunate; first, by prohibiting their acceptance of what little random relief charity may offer; and, second, by furnishing them with the keenest appreciation of the smarting distinction between their ideal of universal equality and dieir grindstone experience of the practical misery and infamy of poverty – a misery and infamy which is, ever has been, and ever will be, precisely the same in India, England, and America.

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’.

Robert Rossen served a decade's apprenticeship as a writer before he turned director in 1947; and he scripted or co-scripted seven of his own ten films. Yet virtually all this writing was adaptation; the only exceptions were a couple of Warner Bros. gangster movies, Marked Woman (1937) and Racket Busters (1938), based on real events, and the historical epic, Alexander the Great (1956), of which the same might be said. Even the projects he did not carry through – The Treasure of Sierra Madre, Billy Budd, Robert Penn Warren's Night Rider – were also adaptations, except his last, unfinished script, Cocoa Beach, which (excepting early stage plays) would have been his first original. Yet, if inconsistent, his impulse to personal creative expression was strong and at times almost overbearing – his place in Andrew Sarris's category of ‘Strained Seriousness’ seems less surprising than some of his company there (Norman Jewison, for instance). So presumably he was able, more often than not, to find and use literary material which expressed or partly predigested what he wanted to say, as in The Hustler (1961), or else the material somehow helped him to discover this, as with Lilith (1964).

A great deal of criticism has celebrated Henry James's historical imagination or his lack of it; very little criticism has explored with any precision the sophisticated grasp of history that James exhibits in his novels and the various uses to which he puts his sense of history. Henry James himself had a passion for history and he sought it everywhere. Early in his writing career, in his biography of Hawthorne, James pointed out that ‘it takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature’. Much later in his career, in The American Scene, James described his own ‘Hunger for History’ explaining that ‘history is never, in any rich sense, the immediate crudity of “what happens”, but the much finer complexity of what we read into it and think of in connection with it ’. In its underlying form The American is not the kind of novel to compel one to reflect upon the ethos of a civilization or the social history of a culture, certainly not in the ways that Balzac's La Comédie Humaine or Tolstoy's War and Peace does. Nor is it the kind of novel that calls our attention to large historical trends. Yet to grasp the full stringencies of the story one should possess a strong historical awareness; for this novel provides an interesting example of how well James understood the historical implications of his subject.