The American Jeremiad

xvi, 239 pp. "When Sacvan Bercovitch's The American Jeremiad first appeared in 1978, it was hailed as a landmark study of dissent and cultural formation in America, from the Puritans' writings through the major literary works of the antebellum era." "the Harvard scholar Sacvan Bercovitch put his finger on the distinctive shading our writers have given the ancient form: “American writers have tended to see themselves as outcasts and isolates, prophets crying in the wilderness. So they have been, as a rule: American Jeremiahs, simultaneously lamenting a declension and celebrating a national dream.” We Americans, the jeremiad proclaims, have failed to live up to our founding principles, betrayed our sacred covenant as history's (or God's) chosen nation, and must rededicate ourselves to our ideals, reclaim our founding promise. If the manifesto looks fearlessly to the future, seeking to replace the established order with something alto­gether new, the jeremiad is at once jittery and nostalgic, looking anxiously over its shoulder at a prelapsarian past. The American jeremiad, Bercovitch observed, “made anxiety its end as well as its means. Crisis was the social norm it sought to inculcate.” Whether “denouncing or affirming,” its vision “fed on the distance between promise and fact.” Aware that the present fails to measure up to past ideals, the jeremiad nonetheless can't imagine a future on any other terms. It yearns to repair the breach. Consider Thoreau, one of Bercovitch's 19th-century Jeremiahs. Bercovitch notes that Thoreau was writing “Walden” around the same time “The Communist Manifesto” appeared in print. Whereas Marx and Engels “proposed a new form of government, based on a wholly different social system,” Bercovitch writes, Thoreau was making “a protest from within,” hoping, “like a biblical prophet,” to “wake his countrymen up to the fact that they were desecrating their own beliefs.”"--nytimes