Debates over the possibility of social reform have been prominent in twenty-first-century American politics. Leftists have proposed to rectify systemic racism, sexism, and sexual exclusion through the power of legislation and modern technology. The rapid-fire accusations and proposed legislative solutions have left many conservatives and moderate liberals confused and deeply alarmed.
While we can certainly be concerned and promote thoughtful political opposition, we need not lose hope. We are not the first generation to face such challenges. In fact, the roots of leftist progressive thought and policies lie in the social reform movement of the early nineteenth century. In that day, there were many, like the New England author Nathaniel Hawthorne, who were sympathetic toward some of their goals but realized that man’s power and knowledge is limited. We can find counsel and comfort in Hawthorne’s reflections on the ultimate ends of human attempts to produce utopia.
Biography
Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1804 to a family that had lived in the area for five generations. One of his Puritan ancestors had even sat as a judge in the Salem witch trials in the late seventeenth century. His father died at sea when Hawthorne was only four years old, so he spent much of his childhood living with extended family in the wilderness of Maine. Hawthorne was an avid reader and eventually attended Bowdoin College where he met Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and the future president of the United States, Franklin Pierce.
After college, Hawthorne returned to his family home in Maine, working on his writing and publishing short stories under pseudonyms or anonymously. For a while, Hawthorne dabbled with transcendentalism, a philosophical system led by friend and fellow author Ralph Waldo Emerson that rejected the depravity of man, instead seeing the problems of man and society as a failure of political will.[1] Through his associations with Emerson, Hawthorne learned about social reformers and became convinced they were overlooking the most important problem in human relationships—the heart of man.
Social Reformers
Middle class socialites, revivalists, pietists, sceptics, and feminists led the social reform movement in antebellum America. They advocated for using state power and moral suasion to enforce a wide range of social changes in response to the disintegration of “the physical and intellectual props of conservative order” in American society. Expanding democracy and industrialization had hollowed out the moral center of society. Thus, “if civilization was to survive, either these props must be rooted again or some wholly new social architecture devised.”[2] They believed they could construct a new rationalized social order through legislation, social pressure, and the power of technology.
As the wealth of society shifted from local rural landowners to middle class industrialists committed to technological innovation, “the new possessors of wealth and numbers despised tradition, or else were nearly ignorant of it.”[3] The power of man over nature was in the ascendant through technological innovation. The steam engine, railroad, factory, and telegraph gave man the ability to overcome obstacles that had hamstrung human travel, trade, and communication since Adam first walked in the Garden. No wonder many Americans began to imagine using this newfound power to transform society.[4]
Traditional, intergenerational societies were gutted by mass migration to urban centers where the previously poor yeoman farmer found new levels of poverty in the slums packed in against the walls of factories. In their new homes, the poor were “severed from true family-life and reduced to mere household-life, his old landmarks buried, his old faiths dissipated.”[5] In this context, Jacksonian democracy called for extending the franchise to those who did not own property and were spiritually, culturally, and intellectually unprepared to govern with prudence. Thus, demagogues claiming to provide legislative solutions to social problems quickly manipulated this new voting bloc.
Many social reformers committed to their plans with religious fervor and sought to coerce social change through moral arguments and legislation. Evangelical, charismatic, itinerant preachers of the Second Great Awakening like Charles Finney and many Quakers preached post-millennial perfectionism. They maintained that men and women could achieve personal perfection through an act of the will, which would overflow in benevolent action in society.[6] They produced campaigns to eradicate social ills like poverty, drunkenness, prostitution, and slavery.
Many female social reformers were also leaders in the early feminist movement (what is often referred to as First Wave Feminism). These women eschewed marriage and maternity as a form of bondage to avoid at all costs.[7] To garner greater political support for their social reforms, they began advocating for restructuring the political framework of society to include women.[8] In the process, they sought to eradicate gender differences by adopting masculine social roles and activities. In effect, they idolized masculinity.[9]
Dietary reformers like Benjamin Rush and the pietist millenarian Sylvester Graham exhorted the public to abandon flavorful food and that “deranging stimulant” (meat) in favor of vegetarianism and bread-based foods made from unbolted (or Graham) flour (graham crackers, oatmeal, and cereal). They believed that these dietary changes along with the abandonment of alcohol, coffee, tea, and the most tempting stimulant of all, sex, were the only hope for preserving morality and order in early America.[10]
Each reformer argued that social circumstances were the cause of immorality in society. Given the time and opportunity, they all believed that they could restructure society through moral suasion or appropriate legislation to eliminate suffering, inequality, and vice.
“Earth’s Holocaust”
Hawthorne cast a jaundiced eye across these reformist plans, even though he agreed with some of their criticisms. He was galled by their smug self-righteousness and deeply skeptical of the power of the state to transform society. He doubted his contemporaries were much more enlightened than their ancestors. But the tides of the culture were running against Hawthorne’s moderation.
In 1846, he published the short story “Earth’s Holocaust” in a collection of allegories entitled Mosses from an Old Manse. The brief tale is a satirical fantasy about the utopian goals and shallow thinking of reformists. It also reveals his pessimism about the extent of the good and harm they would be able to accomplish.
The narrator of the story relates to the reader his experience of viewing an apocalyptic bonfire on the western plains, where people cast upon the fire all the products of human civilization and thought to eradicate evil, pain, injustice, and judgment. The narrator has come to view the spectacle in hopes of garnering some deep moral truth that the flames might reveal.
As the narrator stands with a wise observer at his elbow offering commentary, men and women stream to the fire from all directions to incinerate social distinctions. Family crests and wealth accrued through generations of toil and sacrifice are the first objects to be cast into the conflagration, followed soon thereafter by all the world’s alcohol, coffee, tea, and tobacco. Women burn the symbols of their femininity while the advocates of free love torch their marriage licenses. One old man, seeing the general destruction of order, even tosses “his code of manners” on the fire “which he had formerly written down for the benefit of the next generation.”[11]
The destruction turns frenetic as the crowds pour in with fuel for the flames, leading some conservative bystanders to comment that the reformers will not be satisfied until the whole world has been consumed. Indeed, after all the world’s literature and constitutions, military hardware, and symbols of justice have been reduced to ash, even the narrator grows concerned that the world itself will catch fire if the reform is carried any further. But, having started, the reformers will not pause until the whole structure has been torn down.
At the last, they come for religion. The marks of the clergy and Christian ritual are flung into the flames. At first, the narrator is willing to go along with even this shocking action because these symbols were merely the “externals of religion.” In fact, he concludes, “Our faith can well afford to lose all the drapery that even the holiest men have thrown around it, and be only the more sublime in its simplicity.”[12] Yet, having now “laid [their] hand[s] upon the main pillars which supported the whole edifice of our moral and spiritual state,” the reformers hurled the wellspring of all human civilization and knowledge into the raging fire—the Bible.[13]
Up until this point, the narrator has been willing to consider the argument that reason and enlightenment have rendered useless all these products of civilization and the past. However, as a mournful wind sweeps the plain with the passing of the Holy Book, he grows despondent, fearing that nothing will be left but ashes. As he cries out in despair, his wise friend offers a more moderate response, recognizing that man’s power is limited. He assures the narrator that “not a truth is destroyed nor buried so deep among the ashes but it will be raked up at last.”[14] Lastly, as the narrator listens in on a nearby conversation, a dark figure with glowing eyes notes with satisfaction that as long as the human heart remains, evil and suffering will continue unabated.
Conclusion
Flawed systems and structures are easy targets for reformers of any age. If the problem can be externalized and identified, surely it can be remade through legislation, moralized social pressure, and technological innovation. However, Hawthorne clearly saw the limitations of such visions. He drew from his Puritan ancestors a clear sense of the origins of sin and the failures of society. He eschewed the Reformists’ belief that society could be perfected by human action because “sin, in quality and quantity, is virtually constant.” For that reason, “projects of reform must begin and end with the human heart . . . [and] the real enemy of mankind is not social institution, but the devil within us.”[15]
[1] See s.v. “Transcendentalism,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/transcendentalism/.
[2] Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot, 7th rev. ed. (Washington, D.C.: Gateway Editions, 1985), 226.
[3] Kirk, Conservative Mind, 227.
[4] For more information on the role of technology in social reform see Robert H. Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Michael Adas, Dominance by Design: Technological Imperatives and America’s Civilizing Mission (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2006); Carolyn Thomas De La Peña, The Body Electric: How Strange Machines Built the Modern American (New York: New York University Press, 2003); John Kasson, Civilizing the Machine: Technology and Republican Values in America, 1776–1900, Hill and Wang paperback ed. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1999); and Steven Mintz, Moralists and Modernizers: America’s Pre-Civil War Reformers (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).
[5] Kirk, Conservative Mind, 228.
[6] See Paul E. Johnson, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815–1837, 25th Anniversary ed. (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004).
[7] Sally G. McMillen, Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women’s Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 20.
[8] See Alison M. Parker, “The Case for Reform Antecedents for the Women’s Rights Movement,” in Votes for Women: The Struggle for Suffrage Revisited, ed. Jean H. Baker (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).
[9] See Carrie Gress, The End of Woman: How Smashing the Patriarchy Has Destroyed Us (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2023).
[10] Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling, 165–66.
[11] Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Earth’s Holocaust,” in The Portable Conservative Reader, ed. Russell Kirk (New York: Penguin, 1982), 252.
[12] Hawthorne, “Earth’s Holocaust,” 263.
[13] Hawthorne, “Earth’s Holocaust,” 264.
[14] Hawthorne, “Earth’s Holocaust,” 265.
[15] Kirk, Conservative Mind, 254.
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