Mount Monadnock is the highest peak in southern New Hampshire. It is also the occasion of a poem by the greatest New England intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson. In “Monadnoc,” the genteel Boston Brahmin explains that he expected to find heroic patriots among the mountaineers of the neighborhood. Instead, to his disgust, he encountered “a churl, / with heart of cat, and eyes of bug, / Dull victim of his pipe and mug.” The idealistic Yankee concludes the poem by wishing genocide upon the poor rural whites:

“But if the brave old mould is broke, 

And end in churls the mountain-folk,

In tavern cheer and tavern joke,

Sink, O mountain, in the swamp!

Hide in thy skies, O sovereign lamp!

Perish like leaves, the highland breed!

No sire survive, no son succeed!”

Praying for the defeat and annihilation of their cultural and class enemies is part of the tradition of New England Puritanism, passed on in secular form to the Yankee culture that shapes the politics of New England, the upper Midwest, and the West Coast and dominates American higher education, prestige media, and philanthropy today. For example, after meeting Abraham Lincoln at the White House, Julia Ward Howe, suffragette and convert to Unitarianism, wrote new words to the abolitionist anthem “John Brown’s Body.” She published “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” in The Atlantic Monthly in February of 1862. Instead of being viewed as a vindication of the Enlightenment ideal of universal human rights, the Civil War is defined by the song as a northern Protestant crusade against diabolical Southern infidels: “In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea / With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me. / As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free, while God is marching on.”

The prissy snobbery of Emerson and the creepy fanaticism of Howe echo in the accents of today’s ideologues. The prudes and zealots who want to police speech and ban or rewrite classic works of literature by Mark Twain and Roald Dahl and cancel the careers of comedians are not “on the left” — be it the socialist left or the libertarian left. They are the modern heirs of the New England Puritan tradition.

If we exclude Native Americans and the descendants of slaves, the ancestors of everyone in the United States today (with one exception) emigrated to the US or the British colonies to obtain more freedom — freedom to practice religion as they pleased, freedom from ethnic persecution, freedom to get rich, or freedom to be left the hell alone. The one exception is the Puritans.

Of all America’s white settler groups, the Puritans are the only ones who left the old country because it was too free. Like the New Hampshire rubes who made Emerson shudder, the folks back in Merrie Olde England were having too much fun. They were dancing around maypoles and having sex and drinking and telling dirty jokes in taverns and dressing in fancy clothes and worshiping in churches with stained-glass windows. Unable to take it any longer, radical Protestants fled to the woods of New England and created their own totalitarian colonies, whereupon they immediately began persecuting religious dissenters and hanging neighbors, mostly harmless old women accused of being witches.

Seventeenth-century Puritan theology has thankfully not survived. But the culture of Puritanism — apocalyptic rhetoric, the belief in a righteous community of saints, the idea of a duty to regenerate a fallen world through social reform, and the tendency to view adversaries as servants of Satan — became part of the general culture of Yankeedom, spread by emigrants from New England to the Great Lakes region and West Coast. The conservative Southern historian Clyde Wilson describes the view of Connecticut Puritan preacher Jedidiah Morse in Morse’s 1789 book American Geography: “Most of the book was taken up with describing the virtues of New England. Once you got west of the Hudson River, as Morse saw it and conveyed to the world’s reading public, the US was a benighted land inhabited by lazy, dirty Scotch-Irish and Germans in the Middle States and lazy, morally depraved Southerners, corrupted and enervated by slavery.”

Wherever they moved, the puritanical Yankees who originated in New England persisted in identifying the same groups as enemies of true Yankee Americanism — Jews, Catholics, and, most of all, white Southerners. In 1858, the Chicago Tribune denounced all three groups at once, claiming that the “Catholicized Slaveocratic party” that was “ruled at the ballot box by the Pope’s minions” controlled the “Hebrew Democrat” vote. The two greatest American politicians who organized anti-Mayflower coalitions — Martin Van Buren, the mastermind of the Jacksonian coalition, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who created the New Deal coalition — were Dutch-American New Yorkers. When they ran for president, both faced intense opposition from Yankee Protestant voters in New England states.

The anti-Semitic strain in Yankeedom is minor; Puritans, after all, were Old Testament Protestants who saw themselves as the New Israel. In the late nineteenth century, Jews were seen not as cultural threats but as economic rivals in the areas of the American economy that Yankees had long dominated, like commerce and banking. Northern WASPs responded by keeping Jews out of their clubs and limiting their admission to the Ivy League between the 1920s and the 1950s. 

In contrast to anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism has always been central to Yankee Puritan culture, in both its religious and secular forms. For religious New Englanders, the Pope was the Antichrist. For their secular heirs in Social Gospel progressivism and modern “woke” progressivism, the Catholic church is a medieval relic and an obstacle to social progress. Before the Civil War, northern Protestant panic about the possibility that the Pope and his Jesuits would use Irish Catholic immigrants to take over America inspired the nativist American party, the Know-Nothings. “Know-nothing” referred to the need to maintain secrecy in the presence of possible Catholics, not ignorance; most Know-Nothing nativists were genteel Yankees. In 1824, the inventor Samuel F.B. Morse warned that Catholic immigrants would “carry Popery through all our borders.”

In the parts of the country that they controlled, puritanical Yankees waged war against Catholicism through Sabbatarian laws that shut down Catholic business and pleasure on Sundays; prohibition, the “Maine Law,” which triumphed as national Prohibition from 1920 to 1933, aimed at the serving of wine during mass and Irish-American and German-American saloons; and the attempt to “Americanize” Catholics by means of public school systems, reinforced by state constitutional amendments that banned public aid to private religious schools like parochial schools. Thanks to Yankee anti-papism, the US is the only English-speaking country today that does not offer school choice and does not publicly subsidize private religious schools. It is no coincidence that the origin of American public education is often identified with the passage in Massachusetts of the Old Deluder Satan Act of 1647.

Yet of all of the chosen enemies of the Puritans, white Southerners were viewed as the most inherently barbaric, backward, and diabolical, quite apart from the institution of slavery. In fact there were two white cultures: the Anglo-American “Cavaliers” of the coastal plantation belt and the Scots-Irish of Greater Appalachia. The Cavaliers lived far from the Yankees and collided with them mostly in the halls of Congress. But when prudish, puritanical, hyperliterate Yankee settlers collided with the rowdy, libertine, and thinly-lettered Scots-Irish of the upland South, the result was as explosive as the meeting of matter and antimatter.

One zone of particular conflict was the Midwest. There, Yankee settlers migrating from New England via the Erie Canal to the Great Lakes encountered mountaineers moving north from the Appalachians and the Ozarks. In the Midwest, according to the historian Richard L. Power, “It was the Yankees who were described as yearning to constitute a social and cultural elite that would sponsor and support higher education, literary societies, and lecture courses, and follow their inclination to regulate the morals of the whole society… Taxed with being busybodies and meddlers, apologists own that the instinct for meddling, as divine as that of self-preservation, runs in the Yankee blood; that the typical New Englander was entirely unable, when there were wrongs to be corrected, to mind his own business.”

The structure of the towns laid out by Yankees and Southerners illustrated their very different conceptions of society. The archetypical Yankee town, embodying the ideal of a closed, homogeneous, sectarian community, was a village with a church overlooking a commons. Puritan democracy took the form of the town meeting. In the South, towns were traditionally centered on the courthouse; the rural county, in which most folks lived on far-flung family farms, was the locus of identity, not the city (growing up in Texas, I was sometimes asked what county my family was from). Politics was left to local “courthouse gangs,” whose members often used their offices to enrich themselves and their cronies, and who had no interest in improving the moral behavior of their constituents. 

In the old days, the yeomen in the hills and hollers were often unchurched and saw ministers like my great-uncle Jasper, a Methodist circuit rider, only on the rare occasions when they showed up to officiate at funerals for the already-buried and marriages for the already-pregnant. Only in recent generations did the urbanization of the South and the spread of literacy create the present-day Bible Belt. Apart from the ritualistic Episcopalianism of the Southern ruling class, Southern popular religion was based on personal salvation by Jesus Christ and dominated by premillennial Baptists and amillennial Methodists — lacking the zeal for social reform of Puritan postmillennialists.

The cultures of Greater New England and Greater Appalachia collided again on the shores of the Pacific in the twentieth century. After the Mexican-American War, California and the states to the north were settled by New England Yankees and transplanted Yankees from the Midwest. They reacted with horror and overt discriminatory practices toward the Southern “Okies,” like the Joad family in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, who showed up looking for work during the Great Depression. The defense plants of World War II and the oil industry drew another influx of white and black Southerners to the West Coast. Bakersfield, California, produced the “Bakersfield sound,” a blend of country, rock, and honky-tonk associated with Merle Haggard and Buck Owens. Meanwhile, the descendants of Okies voted for Nixon and Reagan, the enemies of goofy California New Age liberalism — a transplanted, watered-down version of New England Transcendentalism. The clash of the cultures of Okies, Southern blacks and whites, and Mexicans with the puritanical vice laws bequeathed by Yankee immigrant gentry provided the subject matter for the genre of LA noir crime fiction.

By the twenty-first century, the Southern Cavalier culture was extinct. Its heirs were absorbed into the new, generic national white overclass schooled in a Yankee-based culture at prestigious universities, including those in the South, which had lost their regional identity. Increasingly Yankee Puritan culture and Scots-Irish redneck culture were de-ethnicized and de-regionalized as well.

America is really a nation of settlers, not a nation of immigrants. The descendants of immigrants tend to assimilate into a dominant regional or class culture, producing snobbish imitation WASPs or backslapping Texans in cowboy boots. Now that American culture has been nationalized — thanks to corporate capitalism, the civil rights revolution, and the collapse of local media — the North-South distinction is giving way to class polarization between the college-educated managerial-professional overclass and the non-college-educated working class. What were regional cultures are now class cultures.

The culture of the American overclass is secular Puritanism. New England universities like Harvard and Yale have become more important in defining the culture of the national elite than regional rivals. Post-Christian woke Puritanism, with constituents of all races and complexions, now plays the role everywhere that generalized Protestantism did in the North, Midwest, and West Coast.

Today’s multiracial cultural Yankees used the occasion of the “racial reckoning” that was proclaimed following George Floyd’s death to eliminate symbols of their age-old Southern and Catholic opponents. Confederate statues were taken down. Stanford University chose to rename Serra Mall, named for the Spanish Catholic missionary founder of the California mission system, in honor of Jane Stanford, the wife of the founding donor Leland Stanford — a rich Yankee who supported the eugenics movement. 

Meanwhile, within the working class, the European-American “white ethnics” of the old urban diasporas have been absorbed, along with increasing numbers of assimilated Hispanic Americans, into a nationalized and multiracial working-class culture that is a rainbow version of redneckery. While the imagery is country, the reality is the life of the semi-rural exurbs and outer suburbs — which are the only places where old-stock working-class Americans and aspirational working-class immigrants can afford single-family homes. While the secular Yankees of the overclass cities push for cramming ever greater numbers of their menial servants and service workers into downtown neo-tenements in the name of “densification” and “urban renewal,” the same servants and service workers are voting with their feet by fleeing to the boondocks, where they can barbecue in their own backyards and drive giant Ford F-150s on raised wheels with armored grilles that could survive a battle in a Mad Max movie. Despised as “deplorables” by the neo-Yankees in their urban strongholds, the multiracial masses of the peripheries responded with the human middle finger named Donald Trump. 

The ongoing cultural Southernization of working-class white ethnic immigrants began during the nineteenth century in northeastern cities, where Irish-Americans, German-Americans, and other immigrants attended minstrel shows with blackface performers singing in Southern accents. The main audience for cheap cowboy novels, and later for Western movies, were those same ethnic workers in Northeastern cities, many of them immigrants who labored in sweatshops while dreaming of shooting their enemies from horseback under the big Western sky. 

Hollywood’s Old West combined the cactus-and-desert imagery of the Southwest with the anarchic violence of Appalachia and the Ozarks. In reality, the majority of the mountain and Plains West was settled by nonviolent Yankees, Germans, and Scandinavians. The feuds and Saturday night barroom bloodbaths were concentrated in Greater Appalachia, from southwestern Pennsylvania to central Texas. But in Hollywood Westerns the local folk have the Scots-Irish twang and the trigger-happy sense of honor of the Southern hills.

While the South has provided America with most of its music and the popular imagery of frontier freedom and the independent cowboy, the official culture of the United States, manufactured in Boston and environs between the Civil War and the New Deal, instead glorifies Puritans and Yankees. The country was founded by the Pilgrims (never mind that the Virginia colony was the first Anglo-American settlement) and saved during the Civil War by Yankee abolitionists (never mind that anti-slavery Jacksonians in Appalachia played an indispensable role). The American heartland, we are supposed to believe, is the Yankee Midwest of transplanted New England villages and white picket fences. The imagery of Thanksgiving and American Christmas evokes New England, not Florida or Texas or the Great Plains.

The paradox of the present moment is that the heirs to the older generations of northern Protestants who succeeded in building the American nation-state in the image of New England and the Midwest have turned against nationalism — even Yankee Puritan nationalism — as bigoted and backward. They are for global social justice and open borders. Their iconoclasm extends to toppling their own icons.

Meanwhile, the defense of an American national community has fallen, ironically, to the very groups — Southerners both white and black, Catholics, Jews, Mexican-Americans — who have been left out of the consensus story of American history as the triumph of virtuous Yankees over their sinful and backward neighbors. Somewhere that Old Deluder Satan is looking on and smiling.