The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop

The fact that Edmund Morgan, as a professional academic historian, wrote a biography at all is a product of his time. For the last third of the 20th century and still to an extent today, academic historians have doubted the value of biography (at least of “great men”) to explain what is essential about the past. They have thus often regulated biography to the province of popular history. Morgan, by contrast, wrote during a period when historians valued a deep understanding of the most prominent figures of history, both as a tool to understand past events and as case studies for what works in leadership. The Puritan Dilemma fits squarely into this older tradition.

Morgan belonged to what became known as the “Consensus School” of American history. In contrast to Marxist historians who framed everything in terms of class conflict, the Consensus School argued that cooperation and agreement had more importance. They saw an American tradition in which people of different parties and social classes had similar values. Democratic traditions offered a venue for debating how to apply those values: Each debate shaped and shifted the consensus slightly, but the American people held to a core sense of shared identity, values, and unity. In the two decades after World War II, especially as the Cold War began, this vision of American democracy had a strong public and civic appeal. 

Morgan retained a strong sense of the importance of social history, in contrast to many contemporary historians, even as he rejected class conflict as a simplistic lens for viewing history. He was also a pioneer in taking religious motivation and the religious intellectual tradition seriously, at a time when many historians assumed religious rhetoric either masked secular desire for money and power, or else was the product of irrational fanatics. His lack of attention in The Puritan Dilemma to the major role played by Indigenous Americans is, however, a large oversight in comparison to 21st-century historiography.



In taking the Puritans seriously, Morgan also takes explicit aim at a contemporary stereotype of them as oppressive and irrational authorities obsessed with making sure no one (especially women) took any enjoyment out of life. This stereotype owed its popular diffusion in large part to Arthur Miller’s 1953 play, The Crucible, which dramatized the Salem Witch Trials. Miller’s drama also indirectly challenged the “Red Scare,” during which American leaders such as Senator McCarthy fed fears about Communist infiltrators and engaged in what became termed a “witch hunt.” Morgan’s emphasis on Winthrop’s moderation can be seen as an answer to this association of Puritanism with oppression and intolerance. Winthrop, in Morgan’s view, sought to persuade with rational dialogue and sought unity. 

Winthrop’s model of leadership offers a different view on Puritanism and contrasts with the extremes of McCarthyism. Winthrop’s willingness to engage people of different views, and his discernment of how to treat foreign powers with different values, had relevance to the debates of the 1950s. Americans had divisions; consensus historians like Morgan believed they could be overcome. America had to make hard choices about colonialism, Communist regimes, and dictators. Though he does not and would not argue that any of those situations are exactly the same as those faced by Winthrop, Morgan clearly believed that Winthrop’s successful handling of somewhat similar questions offers lessons for leaders in his own day.