Faith and Democracy

AMERICAN FAITH--Ernesf Sutherland Bates--Norton ($3.75).

THE COURSE OF AMERICAN DEMOCRATIC THOUGHT--Ralph Henry Gabriel--Ronald Press ($4).

Ernest Sutherland Bates finished his book last December, less than an hour before he died. It is the appropriate testament of a man who made his scholarship useful (as editor of the Dictionary of American Biography, The Bible Designed to be Read as Living Literature). Badly titled, American Faith bears no resemblance whatever to a Fourth of July oration. It is the best layman's history of U. S. Protestantism yet published; it is also an illuminating interpretation of early U. S. democracy. Its thesis: "Democracy did not arise out of 18th Century political and industrial conflicts, as a momentarily popular view misconceives. Its roots are to be found in the attempted revival of primitive Christianity by the radical lower-class sects of the Protestant Reformation. . . ."

With lucidity, proportion and no cheapness, Bates tells the story of those poor medieval sects (Cathars, Lollards, Waldenses, Hussites) which embraced pacifism and communism as the teachings of Christ. He shows that religious and economic motives were inseparable in their beliefs and in those of their persecutors. Middle-class Calvinism later suited the acquisitive needs of the middle class; the wilderness of America offered both freedom and advantage to both classes.

Bates deals brilliantly and justly with Puritanism in New England, gives most of his admiration to the radical minister Roger Williams, who founded religious liberty in Rhode Island, the radical nobleman William Penn, who brought the Quaker Colony to the New World.

"Pennsylvania in its birth was a planned society," Bates observes. To his mind Penn was a great political thinker, the Quaker Colony was democracy's brightest hope. While that prurient sadist and hypochondriac, Cotton Mather, was torturing old women for witchcraft in Massachusetts, Penn dismissed a charge of broomstick riding with the remark that there was no law in Pennsylvania against riding on broomsticks. Penn's incredibly dramatic--and in the end tragic--life has nowhere been better told.

It was a tragic loss to America, Bates believes, when the pacifism of the Quakers robbed them of influence in the Continental Congress. By that time the Nature religion of the French enlightenment was strong in men like Jefferson and Madison, the Baptists and Presbyterians were settling the frontier. Bates gives a clear account of these and other sects, of the political forms that grew from their beliefs and necessities, of the Utopian demo cratic optimism shown in the Shaker communes and Brook Farm experiments of the early 19th Century. His book closes with the Civil War.

In The Course of American Democratic Thought, the Larned Professor of History at Yale agrees with Bates that, as many religious faiths contributed to democracy, democracy itself became a national religion. Professor Gabriel's early chapters supplement Bates's later ones, but Gabriel's book deals mainly with a century--1840 to 1940--in which vitality passed from religious to secular thinkers. Among the first and most powerful, Gabriel places Herman Melville.

Melville, who knew the world, could stomach neither Transcendentalism nor the common democratic optimism of his day. In a whaler's forecastle he learned the worst about human nature, in the vast and empty sea he discerned the unknowable mystery of God, in the earthly paradise of the South Seas cannibalism reminded him of evil. He concluded, says Gabriel, that "he who would be a man must stop running with the Christians to the everlasting arms, must cease deluding himself with Emerson that the constitution of the universe is on his side." Democracy he saw as a moment in history, not as history's goal. He had two absolutes: the eternal duality of good and evil, the eternal mission of the individual, a lonely Ahab, to fight invincible evil wherever he found it.

Such hardihood was not welcome to Melville's time. But Melville had a spiritual successor in William Graham Sumner, a hardheaded thinker who began at Yale in 1872 a study he called the "science of society." Professor Gabriel is as trenchant, critical and readable on Sumner as he is on Adams, James, Royce and 19th-20th Century thinkers generally. And he rescues Sumner's importance from the forgetful obloquy it has suffered (outside New Haven) in recent years.

"Liberty," said Sumner, "is not a boon, it is a conquest, and if we ever get any more, it will be because we make it or win it." He fought the sentimentality and venality of the Gilded Age, wrote his revolutionary Folkways (1906) to show the determining effect of social customs on conduct. "His conviction," says Gabriel, "was that the forlorn and probably futile hope of democracy was that the men who profess it should understand what they are doing."

Thus U. S. democracy, which began with the simple fervor of Roger Williams, entered the 20th Century with more complex and troubled beliefs. Trying to uncover a central, durable and indispensable tenet for modern U. S. democracy, Gabriel finds it, as did the late, great liberal, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, in the one among the 18th-Century "rights of man" which still seems indubitably "natural": individual freedom of thought and speech.

An upstate New Yorker by birth, dry, soft-spoken Professor Gabriel, 50, has done all his teaching at Yale, with time out as an infantry lieutenant during World War I. In the past eight years his course in "American Thought and Civilization" has significantly outstripped in popularity elegant Professor Chauncey Brewster Tinker's "Age of Johnson" and now, with 350 students, has the largest crowd in the university. Textbookish in getup and without resort to charm, his book is strictly and impressively U. S. stuff, the richest work of its kind since Parrington's Main Currents of American Thought.

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