The Puritan Yankee

The Puritan Yankee

Thomas Allen

The following description of the Puritan Yankee, which is a redundant tautology and superfluous supererogation, has been extracted from Forgotten Conservatives in American History by Brion McClanahan and Clyde N. Wilson, who extracted their description from several authors, but primarily from James Fenimore Cooper. (Cooper was a New Yorker, who deplored Puritan Yankees because they were ruining New York. They destroyed New York decades before they destroyed the South.) Page numbers enclosed in parentheses are to the book referenced above. In the quoted material, I have changed some verbs from past tense to present tense. My comments are enclosed in brackets.
New Englanders and the regions where their descendants settled [New York and along the Great Lakes and later the West Coast] are more Puritan and less classical than the rest of the country. Additionally, they emphasize “profitable economic activity and community supervision of public morals” (p. 18). [Hence, Hillary Clinton's, who is a Puritan Yankee, “it takes a village to raise a child.” Today, Puritans scrupulously supervise public morals to ensure that people speak and act in a politically correct way. If anyone fails to be politically correct, these modern-day Puritans vehemently attack him, not only verbally, but also physically.]
According to James A. Bayard, the Yankee school system [public school system] was the cause of the political turmoil of the 1860s and 1870s. [Puritan Yankees created the public school system, i.e., government schools, which explains why the public school system is so dysfunctional and why it indoctrinates instead of educates.] Bayard remarks, “‘It [the Yankee school system] may stimulate the brain but it ignores man’s moral nature and produces discontent with their condition among the masses. God help the country in which the masses are merely stimulated and trained to act in combinations which are always, sooner or later, controlled by demagogues’” (p. 48). [This explains why, with rare exception, demagogues, instead of statesmen, have governed the country since 1860.]
For the Yankee, democracy is a matter of power and appetite instead of a matter of liberty under the law. It means “that people have a right to whatever they happened to want, the law and private rights be damned” (p. 53).
Moreover, the Yankee has “a liberal supply of Puritanical notions” (p. 54). He has a native shrewdness with an evasive manner. Also, he gives the impression of “a sneaking propensity that renders him habitually hypocritical” (p. 54).
Furthermore, the Yankee admires plutocrats, especially the nouveau riche, and always defers to money. Money is “the only source of human distinction” (p. 54) that the Yankee can clearly understand. [In this respect, the libertarian is hardly distinguishable from the Yankee.]
Yankees are hardworking and entrepreneurial and often manage to gain “control (often clandestinely) of many of the essential business of the community (p. 54). [Thus, once they reach a critical mass in a community, they proceed to ruin it by remaking it in their own image.]
Also, Yankees are “pushy social climbers, insisting that their betters treat them as equals, but refusing to grant the same to those who are less successful and prosperous” (p. 54). They presume “an intimate friendship with mere acquaintances” (p. 54).
“The Yankees value education so much so that they often presume to more learning than they really have and expose themselves as pretentious pseudo-intellectuals” (p. 54). As a result, the Yankee established the public school system in the United States. Nevertheless, this school system offers an education that is superficial and substitutes learning for common sense. [Many holders of Ph.D. seem void of common sense.] Moreover, it fails to “produce the really educated men needed for leadership” (p. 55).
Additionally, the Yankee values and craves “respectability more than independence” (p. 55). He has the capacity to “organize to get things done and bring about change, whether other people wanted it or not” (p. 55). [The US government, which the Puritan Yankees have controlled since 1861, is notorious for bringing about change, especially if people do not want it, while ignoring what the people really want.]
About the Yankee, Cooper declares, “‘A Yankee is never satisfied unless he is making changes. One half of his time, he is altering the pronunciation of his own names, and the other half he is altering ours’” (p. 57). He adds, “‘I doubt if all this craving for change has not more of selfishness in it than either of expediency or philosophy’” (p. 57).
Yankee newcomers regard themselves more righteous than the natives among whom they settle. Therefore, the Puritan Yankee newcomers believe that they are entitled to change the ways of the natives and to appropriate their property (pp. 57-58) [as happened in the South during Reconstruction].
Inevitably, the Yankee quarrels with all above him. In his self-righteousness, the Yankee “‘throws a beautiful halo of morality and religion, never even prevaricating in the hottest discussion, unless with the unction of a saint’” — as Cooper writes. [Most often, today, that saint is His Divine Highness Saint Martin Luther King, Junior. Next to him is the most Marxist Democrat at the moment. Lincoln is another one of these precious saints, but his halo is beginning to tarnish among the younger Marxists.]
Out of the Puritan Yankee came “Anti-Masonry, Mormonism, prohibition, vegetarianism, Seventh Day Adventism, socialism, and feminism” (p. 58). Also, out of the Puritan Yankee came abolitionism and John Brown terrorism (p. 58). [To this list, neoconservatism needs to be added.]
Above all the Yankee, who is of Puritan stock, is a self-righteous, hypocritical reformer and crusader, who is forever seeking change for change-sake (pp. 144, 179).
Ever since 1860, the Puritan Yankee has controlled the United States. Since then, the United States have always been undergoing “perpetual crusades for the reform and reconstruction of society that diminish American liberty and independence to this day” (p. 55). If anyone objects to the Yankee’s righteous crusade [such as spreading democracy throughout the world], he is a bad person. For the Yankees, it is “a normal means of proceeding in their Puritan heritage . . . to justify themselves by portraying those who opposed them as bad people with evil motives” (p. 58). [Puritan Yankees are like locusts swarming across the land, devouring everything in their path, and leaving nothing behind but utter devastation. Thus, they remake the world in their own image.]
Fortunately, not all Northerners are Yankees. Many are decent, hardworking, honest people (p. 183). [Unfortunately, Yankees have infested the South, for example, the Bushes.]

Copyright © 2019 by Thomas Coley Allen.

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