Modern America Before America

The flowering and final culmination of Quaker values planted on this continent in the early 18th century goes a long way to explaining the strange cultural and social situation we find ourselves in today.

But perhaps the Christian concept of sin means, among other things, that all men tend to pervert virtues into vices. If the vice of Massachusetts Bay was indeed fanatical intolerance, the vice of Pennsylvania, like Rhode Island, was excessive tolerance. As we shall see in Chapter 8, Pennsylvania, much like Rhode Island, went through a period of amiable anarchy during the half century following its founding. At the same time, it was from the beginning a huge economic success. Especially after 1740, it was the most rapidly growing and affluent of all the colonies. In striking contrast to the more static and less affluent colony on Massachusetts Bay, the Quaker City inadvertently developed into highly mobile and heterogeneous plutocratic democracy. Though the rich merchants surely reigned, they hardly ruled in the style of the authoritative Puritans, largely as a result of Quaker influence. But moneyed men have always been tolerant of others. Why assert one’s authority when privileges and comfort can be purchased so easily?

Why, then, did Philadelphia go through its Golden Age almost a century before Boston and without any previous glacial age? The answer will have to await a more detailed study of this period in Chapter 10. Here I should like to make two points. In the first place, the flowering of New England was the product of an aristocratic social structure led by men with deep roots in the governing class of the society, going back to the glacial age; Philadelphia’s Golden Age, on the other hand, was the product of a heterogeneous and democratic social structure whose leadership elites came largely from elsewhere and from all classes within the city. In the second place, the form of expression of these two ages was very different: in Boston it was predominant in creative literature and history; in Philadelphia it was in science, especially botany and medicine.

Perhaps added insight may be gained if one sees that eighteenth-century Philadelphia played more or less the same role in colonial America that New York City played in the two decades following World War II. Both were the wealthiest cities of their age; both acted as hosts to talented elites though neither produced a coherent leadership class; both were extremely stimulating cities where men and women, regardless of class, religion, or national origin, came together in a permissive atmosphere in which money rather than authority set the tone; and both were marked by tendencies toward social and political anarchy. If Philadelphia was the city that brought the Enlightenment to America, one wonders whether historians will one day write that New York in the postwar era was the city in American where the ideas of the Enlightenment finally went wild.

Whereas the heart of the Puritan value system, as I have emphasized, was the hierarchical doctrine of election and the closely allied concept of the calling, especially that of magistrate and minister, the bedrock of the Quaker value system was belief in equality. Equality to the Quakers meant equality of all men before God, not equality of economic conditions. Thus, the Friends rejected all earthly authority.

Quaker anti-authoritarianism grew directly out of the doctrines of perfectionism and the Inner Light and long antedated the testimony of pacifism or conscientious objection. Many Quakers, both officers and men, came out of Cromwell’s army, and they withdrew or were dismissed mainly because of their antipathy to authority. As one colonel put it in a letter to General Monk: “My captain lieutenant is much confirmed in his principles of quaking, making all the soldiers his equals, according to the Leveller strain…. when I think of the Levelling design which had like to have torn the army to pieces, it makes me more bold to give my opinion that these things be curbed in time.” From the beginning, then, the Quakers were levelers of authority rather than levelers of wealth.

At this point it is important to emphasize that the anti-authoritarian ethic of the Quakers was loosely allied with their anti-intellectual antipathy to all theology or abstract social theory. Theirs was a direct, empirical, and pragmatic approach to the natural man and his relationship to God. Whereas the Calvinists and the Puritans (like the Catholics before them and the Marxists since) produced a highly complex and intellectual body of dogmatic theology, the Quaker movement produced nothing of the kind. As a consequence, social control and social identity among the Quakers, guided by no intellectually binding dogma, had to rest on a series of petty symbols, or “testimonies,” that were rigidly enforced within the community of Friends. In this connection, it is useful to go back to Tocqueville’s analysis of American democracy. For he was the first to see how equality and individualism are two sides of the same coin; he then showed how both, far from producing a creative individuality, are likely to lead to a stultifying uniformity in manners as well as in ideas. The authority of dogma, in other words, may in the long run prove to be more liberating than the anti-intellectual tyranny of public opinion and peer pressure, which has marked both the Quakers and Philadelphia Gentlemen throughout our history and characterizes American society today.

I should like to close this analysis by suggesting that one of the important consequences of the different emphases in the Puritan and Quaker value systems has been that, when transplanted to Boston and Philadelphia, they produced among upper classes, and the rest of the citizens, too, an intolerant responsibility in the former city and a tolerant irresponsibility in the latter. Though corruption in municipal government is a universal phenomenon, when Lincoln Steffens found Philadelphia corrupt but content he pinpointed this anomaly. Steffens, as we shall see, also found Boston corrupt, but he found its citizens far less tolerant and far more active in trying to clean up the government. Of course, these differing attitudes have long histories in each city. From the beginning of the colonial period in Boston, immigrants other than English Puritans were not tolerated, but at the same time the upper class was deter- mined to be a responsible ruling class. In Philadelphia, the Quaker leaders tolerated incompetent appointments of the chief executives without open revolt, if not without opposition, and acquiesced in Penn’s importing large numbers of immigrants other than Quakers into the colony. And down through the city’s history, the privileged upper class accepted misrule in city and state rather than take a responsible lead.

Just as corruption seems to be a universal phenomenon, so anthropologists have found ethnocentrism characteristic of all cultures. Now, Bostonians have always had more than their share of boosting ethnocentrism, and perhaps this is normal; what is curiously abnormal is the ethnophobia, or xenophilia, that has been characteristic of Philadelphia from the first. Whereas Bostonians are all too ready to see Boston as best in ways that it clearly is not, Philadelphians are equally ready to brand their city as worst in ways that it clearly is not. Bostonians are braggarts; Philadelphians, as Owen Wister put it, have a deep “instinct for self-disparagement.”

“Anyone who knows anything about history,” Marx once wrote to a friend, “knows that great social changes are impossible without the feminine ferment. This is as true today as it was in the seventeenth century. A voguish ditty of that day asserted:

We will not be wives/And tie up our lives/To villainous slavery

And, indeed, women played a major role in the Quaker movement. In fact, Clarendon thought the Quakers were a female sect, as well he might have: Fox’s first convert was Elizabeth Hooten; his most important early convert, later his wife and mother of the movement, was Margaret Fell, mistress of Swarthmore Hall, which became the movement’s headquarters; the first Quaker publishers of truth in London, in the universities, and in Dublin were women; Mary Fisher, a Yorkshire domestic servant, was the first Quaker in America; and in England today more women than men are registered as Quaker ministers.

Mary Fisher’s missionary career typified the Quaker explosion set off in the 1650s in the north of England: the Friends were a simple, unworldly people, often “she-prophets” possessed of a mystical and powerful martyr complex, utterly and self-righteously convinced of their direct experience of the Lord’s word, and prophetically sure that the whole world would eventually be won over to their truth. Their sense of inner oneness with the living Lord and their rejection of the outward restraints of sacrament or Bible interpreted by an educated priesthood frightened all authorities, Anglican and Puritan alike. 

Though Quakers dominated the city of Philadelphia during the early years, by 1700 roughly 200 Anglicans were communicants at Christ Church; three congregations of English and Welsh Baptists had been organized; and immigrants from Barbados had established the first Presbyterian congregation in the city. The first Catholic church in Philadelphia was built in 1732, and by 1750 Pennsylvania had eleven Catholic congregations, next in number only to Maryland (fifteen). There were few Catholics in Massachusetts; nor, in spite of their Old Testament theology and use of Hebrew as a second language, did the Puritan oligarchy welcome Jews. However, Philadelphia had a Jewish congregation by 1745, and the first synagogue was erected in 1782.

The Germans came to Pennsylvania predominantly in two waves after 1700. Most of them were war refugees. First came the sectarians—Amish, Mennonites, Dunkers, and a few other perfectionist groups such as the Schwenkfelders and the Seventh-Day Baptists, who settled in Ephrata. These pious people have kept their ethnic identity, especially their anti-intellectual and anti-modern values, down to the twentieth century. The so-called church people followed Lutherans, German Reformed, and Moravians. The Pennsylvania Dutch country, the richest farming land in America, is a remarkably homogeneous area even today. Indeed, for a long time the area was bilingual; the so-called Pennsylvania Dutch dialect is a mixture of English and German.

By the close of the colonial period, then, Pennsylvania was, ethnically and religiously, more like modern America than any other colony and diametrically opposite to the homogeneous and hierarchical society of Massachusetts. If the anti-authoritarian, tolerant, and egalitarian emphases of the Quakers brought forth the ethnic diversity in the beginning, this ethnic diversity in turn reinforced these values and generated the amiable anarchy that has always characterized the social and political structures of Philadelphia and Pennsylvania.

Tolles aptly summed up the cosmopolitan values of this pious sect:

The world of the Quaker merchants may have been largely a Quaker world, but it was far from being parochial in the geographical sense. By virtue of their commercial, religious, personal, and family contacts, the Philadelphia Quakers were in close touch with the entire North Atlantic world from Nova Scotia to Curacao and from Hamburg to Lisbon. The intelligence which they received from their correspondents and from itinerant “public Friends” was chiefly concerned with prices current and the prosperity of Truth, but inevitably it broadened their view of the world, tending to overcome the provincialism so likely to be characteristic of a colonial people.

As I remarked in Chapter 6, Lincoln Steffens found Philadelphia to be corrupt but contented. The very roots of this contentment, even in the face of extreme political corruption in both city and state, go back to Pennsylvania’s classic period. The merchant elite cared little about law and order in government as long as they were allowed to seek their fortunes in a laissez-faire and private way. No wonder that a recent book on Philadelphia called it the “private city.” Just as the great merchants were happily piling up wealth in the city and building beautiful country estates, so ordinary Friends in the counties were living orderly and quiet lives centered on the meetinghouse rather than the courthouse or city hall. As Howard Brinton, the leading Quaker thinker and historian of our day, noted, the Quakerism of Bucks and Chester counties was going through its Golden Age. No paragraph could shed more light on the Quaker (and Philadelphia) mind, of both the classic and the modern age, than Brinton’s description of Quakerism in the first decades of the eighteenth century.

But the most important product of the flowering of Quakerism in the New World was the unique Quaker culture. By culture is meant a clearly defined way of life with a spiritual basis. A true culture reflects every aspect of life. In the Quaker communities the meeting was the center, spiritually, intellectually and economically. It included a library and a school. Disputes of whatever nature were settled in the business sessions of the meeting. The poor were looked after, moral delinquents dealt with, marriages approved and performed. There was little need for court or police force or officials of any kind except a few whose function was to transfer property and perform similar legal duties. Each group, centered in the meeting, was a well-ordered, highly integrated community of interdependent members…. This flowering of Quakerism was not characterized by any outburst of literary or artistic production. Its whole emphasis was on life itself in home, meeting and community. This life was an artistic creation as beautiful in its simplicity and proportion as was the architecture of its meeting houses. The “Flowering of New England” has been described in terms of its literature, but the flowering of Quakerism in the middle colonies can be described only in terms of life itself.

In summary, to understand the essence of the differences between the classic ages of Boston and Philadelphia one must go back to the contrasting ideals of the church and the sect. The ideal of the church, and especially of the Calvinist in Geneva and the Puritan in Massachusetts, was one of established authority over the whole community, with an intimate relation (though functional differentiation of roles) between the minister and the magistrate. The life tenure of the educated minister, the election sermon, and the church at the head of the village green symbolized Massachusetts’s communalism. Quite in contrast to the church ideal of the Puritans was the sectarian ideal of the Quakers, tolerant of, but not responsible for, the whole community. Indeed, the inconspicuous Quaker meetinghouse lacked the soaring steeple of the modern New England church, signifying watchfulness over the entire community’s morals. No educated class of professional leaders was encouraged or even allowed in Pennsylvania; only the so-called weighty Friends, often the most affluent, embodied covert authority in the silent meeting of drably dressed men, women, and children. What mattered the morals of one’s neighbors as long as the disciplined life within the meeting went on from generation to generation?

The ruling class of Boston and the privileged class of Philadelphia grew directly out of these opposed ideals. As Lawrence Gipson noted in his classic work on British colonialism: “No commonwealth has ever existed that has not been protected by those willing to preserve it with their lives…. The Quakers wanted to live in an orderly society that would protect them, their wealth, and also their right to refuse to protect themselves as well as others from public enemies.” The Philadelphia Quakers, and the Quaker-Episcopal upper class that eventually emerged in Philadelphia, preferred to live in an orderly and prosperous city and state, but they never thought it their duty to lead others toward the good life that they defined for themselves. Here, then, are the taproots of the intolerant and responsible values of the Beacon Hill Brahmin even today and of the tolerant irresponsibility of the modern Philadelphia Main Liner.

In so many ways, the 1640s and 1650s in England were very much like the 1960s and 1970s in our own land. Alan Simpson, in a brilliant essay on Puritanism in Old and New England, noted that “the origins of English Puritanism are to be found among the Protestant reformers of the mid-sixteenth century; it takes shape in the reign of Elizabeth; produces thrust after thrust of energy in the seventeenth century, until the final thrust throws up the Quakers; and then ebbs away.” Perhaps some future intellectual historian will write of our own age: “The origins of Western liberalism are to be found among the utilitarian reformers of the mid-nineteenth century; it takes shape in the Victorian age; produces thrust after thrust in America during the Progressive, New Freedom, New Deal, and New Frontier years of the twentieth century, until the final thrust throws up the New Left and a host of other antinomian movements; and then, like English Puritanism in another day, ebbs away.”

-excerpted from “Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia” by E. Digby Baltzell (1979)