Nothing Good Comes From New England
Puritan killjoys produced an elite culture of prissy snobbery and creepy fanaticism that thrives today in secularized form
John Brown was a lunatic; Harvard is worse
America’s true national culture is the descendant of a Mexican and a Swede wearing a cowboy hat and driving a Ford F-150
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, …