The Promised Land: Memory and Desire
Williamsburg 55th Antiques Forum February 2-6, 2003
Given by Wendell Garrett
We are pleased to present the first of four parts of a very special article, Wendell Garrett’s lecture, THE PROMISED LAND: MEMORY AND DESIRE, which opened the 55th Williamsburg Antiques Forum, February 2-6, 2003.
"In the beginning, all the World was America." These words of John Locke in 1690, echoing the familiar words from Genesis, intended a metaphor for that idyllic state of nature in which mankind lived before the establishment of civil society. But Locke’s metaphor evokes something more: it implies the way America was seen from Europe as a fresh beginning, a break with the accumulated evils of the past, an earthly paradise to weary Europe, a belief in riches and perfection beyond the sunset. Like the Garden of Eden before the Fall, America seemed to Locke and many others in the World World, to stand at the dawn of a new history, radiant with new opportunities. Travelers to the exotic New Atlantis felt they were leaving the present for the future. And this interest in the New World by the Old, was profound. Those who came were the New Israelites on an errand into the wilderness assisted by Providence to Canaan, the Promised Land of the Jews, a land flowing with milk and honey.
But first the text for our sermon title — "Memory and Desire".
From T. S. Eliot’s "The Waste Land":
April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Memory and desire: the remembered past and the idea of progress. Opposing concepts — a paradox, if you will. The concept of progress as a benevolent evolutionary process has been an animating and controlling idea of Western civilization. In the 18th century, eminent men of letters and Utopian dreamers looked upon the future of mankind with optimism. They had a sanguine faith that now men could indeed become gods. Turgot, the founding philosopher of progress in France, went so far as to declare, in 1778, that America was "the hope of the human race".
But, by the end of the 19th century, doubt had taken over; the bright promise of the future was driven by nostalgia or homesick longings for a pastoral past. Humans were being diminished, degraded by industrialization, dislocated by urbanization, and disillusioned by the erosion of the old democratic tradition in new social conditions. Henry James was "frankly bewildered by the turmoil in American life". T. S. Eliot responded to the disorder of his own time with an almost irrational rage for order and with a strong plea for the necessity of a remembered past — a past represented by ritual, tradition, memory, High Church liturgy, and even myths. Eliot — born in St. Louis — was the product of two cultures, one native and one adopted, both threatened by the dislocation and turmoil of war that drove him to his meditations on the personal historical past. When he was buried in the Somerset, England, village of East Coker, the home of his 17th century ancestor who migrated to the New World, these words were inscribed on his memorial tablet to reflect his own history and strong sense of the past:
"In my beginning is my end" and "In my end, my beginning"
The seamless web of history: Memory and Desire. Throughout the history of the American people, a deep-running tide of nostalgia has always paralleled the idea of progress. Like the god Janus, we face both the future and the past.
Full of rage and faith, American orators on the Fourth of July have invariably joined lament and celebration in reaffirming America’s sacred mission. From John Winthrop’s cosmic vision of the Puritan wilderness outpost as a "City upon a Hill" down to Lincoln’s invocation of his dream of America as the "last, best hope of earth" when he summoned God’s New Israel to the "irrepressible conflict" of the Brothers’ War, there has been something boundless and unprecedented, providential and prophetic in the republic’s destiny.
The New England Zion was never an untroubled Christian utopia. Settlement unsettled traditional restraints in the new, fragile communities of New England. Strangers had to cooperate with each other, and people who lacked social rank and experience were thrust into positions of leadership. Civil government was often improvised in the midst of political crises, economic depressions, and Indian wars. Religious tensions emerged in the holy commonwealth, laying bare the seemingly inexorable decline of fervor among the "visible saints".
The 17th century was an era of trial and error in the settlement of British North America. As Bernard Bailyn has observed, that settlement had its origins in the unsettlement of Europe. The first immigrants brought with them a sense of piety, order, and decency which they felt had been denied them in the competitive, commercialized, and hierarchical society of Renaissance England. But the central irony was that the Puritan experiment itself decayed as surely as all human constructions, and slowly, the corruptions of England visited the wilderness Zion, until it became a mere extension of England. By 1674, Samuel Torrey considered the golden age of New England to be gone forever. "Truly, so it is, the very heart of New England is changed and exceedingly corrupted with the sins of the Times", he railed. "There is a Spirit of Profaneness, a Spirit of Pride, a Spirit of Worldliness, a Spirit of Sensuality, a Spirit of gainsaying and Rebellion, a Spirit of Liberalism, a Spirit of Carnality, Formality, Hipocrisie (sic) and a Spiritual Idolatry in the Worship of God."
But reading these apocalyptic jeremiads calling the faithful to a higher life, we risk losing sight of the shared aspirations of ordinary men and women, raising children, planting crops, living through good times and bad in villages where the meetinghouse was "the center of the whole Circumference" and was surrounded by timber-framed houses "orderly placed to enjoy the comfortable Communion". The utilitarian and decorative household objects that survive from the Pilgrim century reveal, more than the written record, something of the instinctive conservatism of these uncommonly common souls embarked on a pilgrimage to transform "an howling wilderness…into pleasant land, accommodated with the necessaries—yea, and the conveniences of 
human life".
Given man’s fallen nature, however, the white heat of Puritanism could not be sustained for long, and in the second and third generations’ declension, degeneration and litigiousness set in. As soon as the Plymouth Colony court records start to appear in 1633, one John Holmes was censured and fined for drunkenness, and two couples were "adjudged to sit in the stocks" for fornication before marriage. An exceptionally contentious fellow was John Godfrey who appears on more than 100 occasions in Massachusetts court records. In New Haven, the rising generation seemed intent on deliberately profaning the town’s most sacred values. John B. Browne frequently laughed during the grim sermons of John Davenport, and when his father, Francis Browne (a saint, of course) was publicly "acknowledging his evil, that he had not watched over him as he should", John Browne scandalized the congregation by "walking out of the Meeting house smiling".
There was also the spectacular career of Captain John Williams, an embittered man whose marriage broke up over his own admission of impotence and his accusations of his wife’s infidelity, which no one else believed. In 1683, he sued Thomas Wade and Timothy White for carting away some of his timber. It took four attempts to get a favorable verdict. After that, the case became a staple item for almost every Plymouth court session as each side won reversals. The seventh trial, in 1686, led to a special verdict so confusing to the court that it postponed judgment. By then, Wade had evidently lost patience. He complicated matters and weakened his defense by using Williams’ horses for target practice. In this protracted quarrel, no one would forgive or forget. Six years later, the court finally threw out the suit, ending an almost decade of nasty litigation—all over a load of wood.
Somehow, those saints and sinners seem not quite the material of which heroes are made.
The concept of the New World as a terrestrial paradise, the peculiar abode of felicity, lingered for centuries in the European imagination and, like the concept of the youth of America, is one of its oldest traditions Virginia, wrote Michael Drayton in his famous poem of 1606, is earth’s "only paradise". No country in the history of the world has had to bear as great a weight of idealism as this, because Europe has always projected upon the New World its faith in the capacity of the human race to create a utopia. In the 18th century, Adam Smith believed that the discovery of America and the opening a sea passage to the East Indies were "the two greatest and most important events recorded in the history of mankind". And Goethe, not long before his death, declared: "America, you are better off than the old continent".
To a surprising extent, during the colonial period, not only prominent but ordinary people felt themselves deeply implicated in the success of the American experiment. They shared the fervently held assumption that America was somehow outside the stream of history and free to work out a peculiarly original destiny. The notion of unprecedentedness, of utterly new beginnings, was an article of faith. Having been released from the thralldom of the past but a wonder-working Providence, Americans felt, as Edward Johnson said, "this is the place where the Lord will create a new Heaven, and a new Earth". America was new and unique because it had not participated in the moral dilemma of Europe ’s past. The past, unquestionably, existed, but its jurisdiction was 
contested. Americans were prepared to salute it, in Walt Whitman’s famous phrase, as a corpse going out the door. With a distaste for the gauntlet of time equal to Whitman’s were the 19th century painters of the Hudson River School, who spurned the novelties of progress for what was the oldest in America—the forest landscape. These artists aimed at resurrecting an America that was as sinless and timeless as Eden. What they were painting, Henry David Thoreau was writing about on the eve of the Civil War when he pleaded, "Let us keep the New world new".
The paradox was that the country was growing old while trying to remain young; the heroic past and moral innocence was being corrupted by luxury and affluence, "the offspring of industry, the rich and fruitful daughter of liberty", as one French visitor in the 1820s noted. The resulting ferment is what makes this period so intriguing. American writers and artists, in the manner of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville in prose, and William Sidney Mount in genre painting, reacted with hostility to the growth of industry and business and to the national pursuit and accumulation of wealth. These American writers and artists were attempting to resolve the contradictions of their age. The questions "What is America?" and "Who is this new American?" had been asked before and have been since, but not with this sense of anxious urgency.
About Wendell Garrett
We are pleased to present a continuing series of articles by Mr. Garrett, a regular contributor on the Sack Heritage Group website, dealing with many aspects of the decorative arts
Mr. Garrett, presently Consultant of Americana at Sotheby’s and Editor-at-Large of The Magazine Antiques, received a B.A. in American History from UCLA and his M.A. from the University of Delaware Winterthur Program in Early American Culture. He subsequently continued his graduate work in American History at Harvard University.
In 1959, Mr. Garrett joined the staff of the Adams Papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society where was the Assistant Editor of the Diary and Autobiography of John Adams (4 vols.) and Associate Editor of the first two volumes of Adams Family Correspondence. In 1965, he discovered the earliest diary of John Adams at the Vermont Historical Society and edited it for publication by Harvard University Press. In 1966, he joined the staff of The Magazine Antiques, where he was ultimately made Editor and Publisher. From 1987 to 1993, Mr. Garrett served as Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation (Monticello) and is currently Secretary of the Royal Oak Foundation. In October, 1994, he was awarded the Henry Francis du Pont Award for distinguished contribution to the American arts.
Wendell Garrett is the author of Apthorp House, 1760-1960 and Thomas Jefferson Redivius. He is co-author of The Arts in Early American History and The Arts in America: The Nineteenth Century, Classic America: The Federal Style & Beyond (1992), Victorian America: Classical Romanticism to Gilded Opulence (1993), and Monticello and the Legacy of Thomas Jefferson (1994) and Classic America (1995). Most recently, Mr. Garret co-authored the book, American Home: From Colonial Simplicity to the Modern Adventure (2001).
