Charles A. Beard:

THE solemn hour approaches. It will
soon be just three hundred years
since the Pilgrims let go their anchor off
the coast of Cape Cod. A flood of oratory
will surely descend upon us. The New
England societies, the Pilgrim societies,
the Forebears societies, the Colonial
Dames, and the French and Indian War
societies, and all those who need an ex-
cuse for a night out will attend banquets
given under the benign auspices of astute
hotel managers. College presidents, se-
rene, secure, solemn, and starched will
rise and tell again to restless youths the
story of Miles Standish and Cotton
Mather. Evangelical clergymen will set
aside special days for sermons and thanks-
givings. The Archbishop of Canterbury
(shades of Laud!) will send a cablegram
to the Back Bay Brotherhood! We shall
be shown again, as Henry Jones Ford
(Scotch-Irish) once remarked, "how civ-
ilization entered the United States by way
of New England." We shall hear again
how it was the Puritans who created on
these shores representative and demo-
cratic republics, wrested the sword of
power from George III, won the Revolu-
tionary war, and freed the slaves. It has
ever been thus. Egomania must be satis-
fied and after dinner speakers must have
their fees.

The flood of half truth, honest igno-
rance, and splendid conceit will produce
an equal reaction -- a cry of rage and pain
from the improvers of America. Mr. H. L.
Mencken will burst upon our affrighted
gaze in full war paint, knife in teeth, a
tomahawk dripping with ink in one hand,
a stein of Pilsner in the other, and the
scalps of Professors Phelps, Sherman, and
Matthews hanging to his belt. He will
spout a huge geyser of pishposh and set
innumerable smaller geysers in motion
near Greenwich Village.

In view of the clouds on the horizon
and the impending deluge, it would be
well to take our latitude now and find our
course lest we should be blown ashore
and wrecked upon the rocks of Plain Asi-
ninity. Nothing would be more sensible
than to renew our acquaintance with
Green, Gardiner, Prothero, Hallam,
Lingard, Clarendon, Ludlow, Bradford,
Usher, Bancroft, and the other serried
volumes that flank the wall. The record
seems to stand fairly clear: an autocratic
Stuart monarchy and an intolerant ear-
clipping Church, the protests of the puri-
fiers, qui . . . receptam Ecclesiae Angli-
canae disciplinam, liturgiam, episcopo-
ruin vocationem in quaestionem palam
vocarunt, immo damnarunt, the proposi-
tions of Cartwright, the godliness of the
independents, the Mayflower Compact,
Cotton Mather's Magnalia, and all the
rest.

But neither the orators nor the contem-
ners are content with the plaih record.
They must show how the Puritans had all
the virtues or all the vices. Once the term
Puritanism had fairly definite connota-
tions. Now it has lost them all. By the
critics it is used as a term of opprobrium
applicable to anything that interferes
with the new freedom, free verse, psycho-
analysis, or even the double entendre.

Evidently in the midst of much confu-
sion, some definition is necessary, and for
that purpose I have run through a dozen

Reprinted by permission from the New Republic, XXV, No. 13 ( December, 1920), 15-17.

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