Allegories of America
This year we celebrate the 250th anniversary of our nation. As an aid to reflection, I present this memorable photo of our Treasury Secretary introducing the proposed $250 bill featuring the face of our president. This about sums the state of our nation up.
Today’s paper is not one of those that has been percolating in my brain for a long time. Michael approached me after Clergy Conference to see if I would be a last-minute replacement, and feeling guilty about my recent non-attendance I impulsively said “yes”. It then occurred to me that I had nothing really to say. At least at first.
I went through the various options in my head. I could have talked about my nearly-completed term as priest-in-charge at All Saints, Beverly Hills. Because of the rough treatment they had dished out to the previous two priests I was worried that I was entering a hellhole. But it’s actually been quite pleasant. Of course, I’m old, I’m white, and I’m male. Even better, I don’t want the job. So we’ve treated each other pretty well, and I’ve had a good time.
I could have decided to talk about the grim spectacle of our gubernatorial election, but I decided not to do that either. This is the first time in my memory where I and all my close friends are voting for different Democratic candidates, thus splitting the votes on the left. I’m sure Governor Hilton will do a wonderful job.
So after a lot of rumination I decided to talk about a subject I both love and know something about: 19th century American literature. Some of you know that in the 1980’s I went to graduate school at UCLA (while I was also vicar of St. Aidan’s in Malibu) and received a Ph.D. in English, specializing in 19th century American literature. While my subject was Ralph Waldo Emerson, because I ended up teaching American literature at UCLA for several years after getting my degree, I worked up a lot of other 19th century texts in order to teach them.
As I have worked hard this last year to avoid thinking about the current president, I have spent much of my free time rereading the three great American novels, all produced in the nineteenth century: The Scarlet Letter (1850), Moby-Dick (1851), and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). I taught each of these novels many times in the 1980s and 1990s, but my recent rereading of them has opened up new aspects of the novels I had not noticed before: each, in its own way, is an allegory of America. Each book offers not only a coherent fictional narrative but also a critique of a young nation that has gone seriously astray from its initial errand. What might they say to us now?
In approaching these novels—each one, in its own way, entitled to be called the “great American novel”—it is important to put them in their historical context. We all know the 19th century history of America in its broad outlines—the expansion and limitation of slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, the advent of Jim Crow, the reign of the robber barons—but each novel comes at a specific moment of national crisis which the text attempts to address. I won’t go too far down a rabbit hole here, but there are a couple of dates I would like to emphasize: 1850 and 1876.
Those of us who grew up in California should be familiar with the Compromise of 1850, the legislation that admitted California to the Union as a free state and, at the same time, enacted the odious Fugitive Slave Act, by which all Americans were obliged to turn in runaway slaves. While the compromise preserved the free/slave state equilibrium temporarily, it deeply offended northerners who were not even abolitionists. Its passage had a lot to do with solidifying northern opinion against the expansion of slavery in new territories.
The election of 1876 should feel familiar to those of us who endured the 2000 catastrophe. In 1876, Democrat Samuel Tilden received the majority of popular and electoral votes, but not quite enough to clinch the presidency. The Republicans, led by eventual winner Rutherford B. Hayes, agreed to take some electoral votes which belonged to Tilden in exchange for ending Reconstruction in the south. The result, of course, was the beginning of Jim Crow laws and the disempowerment of African Americans in southern states.
Recent events in our own time have reinforced the importance of these two bad deals. The 1850 compromise did not stop agitation to admit new slave states, thus hastening rejection of Lincoln’s 1860 election and the Civil War itself. The 1876 compromise established legal segregation and the withholding of voting rights for southern Blacks, and we are learning all too clearly now how hard it is to reassert rights that have been taken away.
Both The Scarlet Letter and Moby Dick were written around the time of the 1850 compromise. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was published 8 years after the Tilden-Hayes election, but Mark Twain began it around the time of Hayes’s victory and inauguration. My argument in this talk is not very original, but it is one we need to consider in a time when there is so much anxiety, fear, and grief over the depredations of the second Trump Administration. As horrible as the current president is, his hateful ideas and practices are nothing new in American history. Indeed, in 2018, Trump’s first term, the historian Jill Lepore wrote a one volume history of the US called These Truths, and its principal argument rehearsed many of the hateful, racist, nativist, xenophobic moments in American history: there have always been haters in America. Trump is awful because he is, aside from Andrew Jackson, the only president in our history to bring all these hatreds into the White House. But the more you know about the Know Nothings, America First, Father Coughlin, and the German-American Bund, the more you understand that we have always been a divided and confused nation.
So let’s look, briefly, at each of these three great American novels to see how they diagnose our problem, and how we might look to them for some hopeful answers in a dark time.
Nathaniel Hawthorne set The Scarlet Letter in the earliest days of the 17th century Massachusetts Bay Colony. It tells the story of Hester Prynne, who is branded with the scarlet A (for Adultery) after she gives birth to an illegitimate child. She is married, but her husband is known to be in England. So the child is proof of colonial fornication.
We soon learn that the young, personable minister Arthur Dimmesdale is the father of the child and that he does not have the courage to come forward and acknowledge his fatherhood. Hester’s husband, Roger Chillingworth arrives, discovers the secret, and torments Dimmesdale to an untimely death.
There are a million things to say about this wonderful novel which I just reread last month. For our purposes I want to single out two.
First, the novel begins with a fifty-page story called “The Custom House”, which purports to be a narrative of how the author came across the embroidered A deep in the Salem Custom House files. Hawthorne actually worked in the Salem Custom House as a political appointee in the Franklin Pierce administration until he was turned out when the next government came in. In the early part of the essay he gives a visual description of the house itself, one I believe to be allegorically charged:
In my native town of Salem . . . stands a spacious edifice of brick. From the loftiest point of its roof, during precisely three and a half hours of each forenoon, floats or droops, in breeze or calm, the banner of the republic; but with the thirteen stripes turned vertically, instead of horizontally, and thus indicating that a civil, and not a military post of Uncle Sam’s government is here established. Its front is ornamented with a portico of half a dozen wooden pillars, supporting a balcony, beneath which a flight of wide granite steps descends towards the street. Over the entrance hovers an enormous specimen of the American eagle, with outspread wings, a shield before her breast, and, if I recollect aright, a bunch of intermingled thunderbolts and barbed arrows in each claw. With the customary infirmity of temper that characterizes this unhappy fowl, she appears, by the fierceness of her beak and eye, and the general truculency of her attitude, to threaten mischief to the inoffensive community; and especially to warn all citizens, careful of their safety, against intruding on the premises which she overshadows with her wings. Nevertheless, vixenly as she looks, many people are seeking, at this very moment, to shelter themselves under the wing of the federal eagle; imagining, I presume, that her bosom has all the softness and snugness of an eider-down pillow. But she has no great tenderness, even in her best of moods, and, sooner or later,—oftener soon than late,—is apt to fling off her nestlings, with a scratch of her claw, a dab of her beak, or a rankling wound from her barbed arrows.
Note the visual details in this description of the Salem Custom House: the flag flies vertically above the building, on which stands a gigantic American eagle. But the eagle, poised with her arrows, is perched not only to repel invaders; she is ready to turn those weapons on her own people, or as he calls them “nestlings”. The first point Hawthorne makes here involves the fragile nature of life in America. The government is established to protect its people, but it can quickly turn its mighty power against them. Andrew Jackson had his trail of tears. Donald Trump has ICE.
The Massachusetts Bay Puritans turned their government against Hester Prynne. A second observation on The Scarlet Letter involves the way it questions our nation’s earliest founding mythology. I don’t know about you, but when I went to elementary school we called them “The Pilgrims”, and made them sound like a well-meaning bunch of Christians who came here seeking religious freedom. But as Hawthorne knew well, the Puritans were a bunch of theocrats who used Calvinism to impose build a new Geneva in the New World. By applying civil penalties to human sin they not only brought the full force of the state down on their people; they also demonstrated confusion about the relative importance of thought and feeling. As the novel proceeds, we note the great irony: the so-called moral “believers”—the governor and Chillingworth—use their moral high ground in the service of cruelty. The ones labeled “immoral”—Hester, her daughter Pearl, and Dimmesdale—actually act out of kindness and love. There may be a fair dose of early Romantic wishful thinking about the true nature of love here, but it should not blind us to the reality that American power is always ready to use lofty principles in the service of its own power and control. The Scarlet Letter is an allegory of American cruelty. We use the government against ourselves and we punish those who question our values. It is not lost on us that the “adulteress” is the most moral person in the book, while the up-and-coming minister, who finally does the right thing by acknowledging lover and child, is a moral coward and a fraud. He is none the less popular for being so. As a book written in New England around the time of the Fugitive Slave Law, The Scarlet Letter reminds its audience that we are a nation founded on hypocrisy and always ready to make a big mistake.
Herman Melville’s great novel, Moby Dick, was written around the same time as The Scarlet Letter, though it had such a poor reception that it wasn’t actually rediscovered until the 1920s. It has had much more influence on 20th century American culture than it had on that of the 19th.
There is so much going on in Moby Dick—it’s a treatise on whaling, a meditation on good and evil, a discourse on 19th century philosophy—that I will not do it any kind of justice at all. I reread it earlier this year. I had read it twice previously—in college in the 1960s and in graduate school in the 1980s, and I have to confess that I was daunted by it both times and skipped all the “Cetology” chapters about the business of whales and whaling. This time for some reason I found it easy going, cetology chapters and all.
There is much Melville says about America over the course of the novel. He critiques racism in the character of Queequeg, the south sea islander who befriends the narrator Ishmael and is, like Hester in The Scarlet Letter or Jim in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn the best person in the book. There is also the description of whaling and the implication that the 19th century world Industrial Revolution is powered by the rape of nature—coal, of course in England, and whale oil in America. You can’t read this book without realizing that our entire economy depends on the destruction of irreplaceable natural resources.
But it is in the character of Ahab, captain of the Pequod, that we see the tendency of American culture to grant power to narcissistic psychopaths. You may remember that Ahab was a standard-issue whaling captain until the white whale, Moby Dick, bit off his leg. Since that event, Ahab has been on what we today might call a “revenge tour”, chasing around the world to settle scores with the whale who done him wrong.
Remembering that Moby Dick was written in 1850/51, we should notice two things appropriate to that historical moment.
First, the novel looks backward, I think, to the presidency of Andrew Jackson, a hateful demagogue and populist who decimated the Native American population by the Trail of Tears. He was also an economic populist who promised greater prosperity but basically enriched only himself. There is a memorable scene in which Ahab nails a gold doubloon to the mast and promises it to the first sailor who sights Moby Dick. Very late in the novel, he awards the doubloon to himself.
If you are thinking of Donald Trump at this point, you shouldn’t be alone. Ahab, like Trump, is not only narcissistic and psychopathic; he is solipsistic, a man who is entirely engaged only with himself. He takes the Pequod and its crew on a revenge tour around the world, undertaking an errand that eventually leads to the ship’s destruction and everyone’s death. Melville had been a sailor himself, and he knew self-serving autocracy on board ship when he saw it. He also, I believe, was aware of the danger faced by a nation under the sway of a demagogic, narcissistic leader.
So there is the solipsistic captain/president. But, second, there is also the nation itself. As you listen to this excerpt from the last chapter of the book, please remember the metaphor in common use in the 19th century, the “Ship of State”:
“Great God, where is the ship?” Soon they through dim, bewildering mediums saw her sidelong fading phantom, as in the gaseous Fata Morgana; only the uppermost masts out of water; while fixed by infatuation, or fidelity, or fate, to their once lofty perches, the pagan harpooneers still maintained their sinking lookouts on the sea. And now, concentric circles seized the lone boat itself, and all its crew, and each floating oar, and every lance-pole, and spinning, animate and inanimate, all round and round in one vortex, carried the smallest chip of the Pequod out of sight.
But as the last whelmings intermixingly poured themselves over the sunken head of the Indian at the mainmast, leaving a few inches of the erect spar yet visible, together with long streaming yards of the flag, which calmly undulated, with ironical coincidings, over the destroying billows they almost touched;—at that instant, a red arm and a hammer hovered backwardly uplifted in the open air, in the act of nailing the flag faster and yet faster to the subsiding spar. A sky-hawk that tauntingly had followed the main-truck downwards from its natural home among the stars, pecking at the flag, and incommoding Tashtego there; this bird now chanced to intercept its broad fluttering wing between the hammer and the wood; and simultaneously feeling that etherial thrill, the submerged savage beneath, in his death-gasp, kept his hammer frozen there; and so the bird of heaven, with archangelic shrieks, and his imperial beak thrust upwards, and his whole captive form folded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his ship, which, like Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part of heaven along with her, and helmeted herself with it.
Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.
As the Pequod sinks, the flag waves proudly (if ironically) on a doomed ship. In the same way Trump hugs the American flag, Ahab flies it proudly on the vessel he is taking down. The Pequod, led by a madman, is doomed. It flies the flag of a pre-Civil War America which has just passed a compromised pair of laws that will destroy it the way Ahab killed the Pequod.
Hawthorne and Melville are both writers interested in spirituality and the interior life. Both of them see America’s crisis as a theological one. For Hawthorne, we’re all a bunch of Pharisees who don’t recognize Christ figures when they see them. For Melville, the white whale represents both spotless goodness and the empty void of pure evil. For both writers, America is a Custom House or a whaling ship which gathers a human community in search of the good but often ruled by unconscious deeper passions. For Mark Twain, America’s crisis is rooted in its Romantic mythologies.
I have never taught The Scarlet Letter or Moby Dick, but Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was a staple in the American lit courses I taught at UCLA in the 1980s and 1990s. It’s a fun but challenging book to teach. I still laugh out loud at some of the gags in the novel, but the persistent use of the “N-word” makes it deeply offensive to many students. As a result, the book is dropping out of the standard curriculum, and that is understandable but sad. It has so much to tell us about the state of things in America both then and now.
For me the best place to start is with Mark Twain’s consistent ridiculing of Romantic ideas of chivalry and adventure. If you remember the beginning of the novel, Tom Sawyer constantly insists that they play games according to the rules set out in Alexandre Dumas’s novel The Count of Monte Cristo. And late in the novel (in the puzzling final chapters where they cruelly lock Jim up in a shed) Tom’s adventure book hysteria returns in a particularly ugly way.
To me, though, the most interesting example of misplaced American mythology comes in chapters 12 and 13 when Huck boards a shipwrecked steamboat called the Walter Scott, named after the novelist whose romances, especially Ivanhoe, led southern readers to describe themselves as “cavaliers” living according to codes of honor and chivalry. Soon after the Walter Scott episode, Huck lands himself in the middle of a feud between the Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons with tragic results all around. Mark Twain believed that Walter Scott and the Romantic novels led the American southerners to develop a mythology about themselves that led them into the Civil War. They actually seemed to believe that they were defending a chivalrous way of life rather than refusing to give up slavery.
One of the delights of reading Adventures of Huckleberry Finn consists in watching Mark Twain make fun of American (particularly southern) culture. He describes the middle-class furnishings and lugubrious paintings in the Grangerford house with undisguised contemptuous glee. And over the course of Huck’s and Jim’s adventures he exposes an American prurience for excitement and sensation. In the small Mississippi River towns bored men set dogs on fire to amuse themselves. People crowd into a drugstore to watch a man die from gunshot wounds. Those wonderful frauds, the king and the duke, work their con games in revival meetings and theaters because people will do almost anything to escape the boredom of day-to-day life.
The major issue, of course, in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the moral problem of slavery. Huck is a product of slave state culture, and as he rafts down the river with Jim he begins to feel guilty that he is helping an escaped slave go free. His conscience so bothers him that he plans to turn Jim in. But then Huck comes up against the reality of Jim’s love and care for him, and this throws him into a crisis:
I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn’t do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking—thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me all the time: in the day and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing. But somehow I couldn’t seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I’d see him standing my watch on top of his’n, ’stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey, and pet me and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had small-pox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the only one he’s got now; and then I happened to look around and see that paper.
It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:
“All right, then, I’ll go to hell”—and tore it up. (Chapter 31)
My college teacher Henry Nash Smith wrote an article about this episode: “A Sound Heart and a Deformed Conscience”. Huck feels towards Jim as he would toward a father, yet he has internalized the oppressive logic of slavery. Finally his heart wins out and he does not turn Jim in. But, like Hester and Dimmesdale in Puritan Boston, his loyalty to what his heart tells him puts him at odds with prevailing social codes. Conventional wisdom may be conventional, but it is rarely wise.
If Hawthorne sees America as a place which has its beginnings in a false kind of theological exceptionalism, and if Melville sees America as a nation fundamentally vulnerable to demagogues, Mark Twain knows that America is fatally damaged by the original sin of racism. A culture that thinks one group of people superior to another, a culture that believes that human beings can be bought and sold as property, such a culture is in a sense fatally flawed. I became a Christian in the 1960s, largely because of the Civil Rights movement. For a long time I believed that we had made significant progress in racial justice. Given the overt racism of the Trump Administrations over the past decade, I no longer believe that.
One of the theologians I read extensively in seminary and still think about was Reinhold Niebuhr. In The Irony of American History (1952) he said this:
Our age is involved in irony because so many dreams of our nation have been so cruelly refuted by history. Every nation has its own form of spiritual pride…. Our version is that our nation turned its back upon the vices of Europe and made a new beginning. We are mystified by the endless complexities of human motives and the varied compounds of ethnic loyalties, cultural traditions, social hopes, envies and fears…which lie at the foundation of our political cohesion.
As America celebrates its 250th anniversary, it is tempting to bewail the failure of our national errand. Faced with what Niebuhr calls the irony of our history—the seemingly unbridgeable distance between the loftiness of our aspirations and the seediness of our performance—it is tempting to proclaim the experiment a failure and to throw up our hands in despair.
As Jill Lepore wrote in These Truths in 2018, “The past is an inheritance, a gift and a burden. It can’t be shirked. You carry it everywhere. There’s nothing for it but to get to know it.” As disgusted as we might be by the current state of things in America, we should not delude ourselves by wishfully thinking that Trump represents something new. He is if anything a copycat, distilling all the worst features of longstanding trends in our history into one convenient location. He is one-stop shopping for the dark side of our national nature.
And we Christians should remember that it is always dangerous when followers of Jesus become Romantic about nation states. Followers of Jesus were not at home in Rome, and we are not really at home here, either. Niebuhr reminded us that we hope for a consummation not within but outside of history. The allegories of America instruct us in the folly of hoping that any political organization will satisfy all our needs for identity and meaning. At best, a nation is a way of organizing our civic life and does what it can to promote human dignity. For anything more than that, we find our identity in the cross and not the flag. As the author of Hebrews puts it,
All of these died in faith without having received the promises, but from a distance they saw and greeted them. They confessed that they were strangers and foreigners on the earth, for people who speak in this way make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they had been thinking of the land that they had left behind, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better homeland, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God; indeed, he has prepared a city for them. (Hebrews 11)
Even in its better days, America never quite resembled the city prepared for us. It resembles our better country in its aspirations, but every so often a charlatan comes along promoting triumphal arches, golden ballrooms, and bespoke currency. Our three fictional allegories remind us that, while our dream and promise can be noble, we have always had a hard time living into them. That is why we who follow Jesus do not ultimately despair. We know about irony, the distance between the actual and the ideal. We know that sin is real and so is hope. And it is in hope that we, together, accept the irony and nevertheless persist in seeking to make the city we inhabit look more and more like the one prepared for us.
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