Customer Reviews

Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History

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By far the most interesting book I've read in a *long* time, Morone's _Hellfire Nation_ examines the 200+ years of America's history, but takes a wholly different approach from the norm; instead of seeing the early Puritan settlements as an anomaly that would gradually fade as history progressed, he cites the Puritanistic "us versus them" outlook of morality as being an integral part of most of American history.

And yes, this is a very refreshing and fascinating way in which to view history. Morone's basic thesis is that a) "popular" American morality is frequently cited as the only thing that can protect "us" from "them," whether "they" are blacks, the Irish, Jews, et cetera, and b) that this emphasis on those frightening Un-Americans is what fuels "moral fanaticism," like prohibition, Comstockery, the VD/social hygiene movement, c) and from this, laws are put into place which persist long after their spawning social movements have died down, leaving them in the hand of fanatics. The thesis doesn't just hold up; it *thrives*, adequately explaining many facets of much of American moral history, and while Morone's constant repetition of the final point stated above (that fanaticism eventually dies down, leading a select few to continue its legacy to the detriment of a no-longer-incensed society) becomes a bit wearisome, it really does show how *well* so many social events fit into this pattern.

Verdict? Yes, Morone's clearly "biased," if one must use that term, to a classical liberal side of things (i.e. don't expect any sympathy for Jim Crow here), yet he is certainly open-minded, wondering for example how prohibition would have turned out if its emphasis had been on the positive nature of sobriety instead of punishing and routing bootleggers (he has similar semi-misgivings about the social hygiene movement's relentless pursuit of prostitutes). But that doesn't dimish Hellfire Nation's power. If you have a passing interest in the intersection of morality and society, you must give this one a shot!

If, like me, you are a bit of a history buff who regrets having paid scant attention in those American history courses, this is an essential book.

Professor Marone reconsiders our national history, in its more wrenching periods, as the struggle for a shifting moral high ground. The result is literally stunning, uprooting, and wise.

History buffs support an entire industry that is spinning out "how-then, what-now" books about the founders, the civil war and the current hit parade of latter day pols. Professor Marone delivers something very different: a brilliant archeology of the winner-take-all contest for righteousness that has so thoroughly characterized our national life, from John Winthrop to yesterday afternoon.

And he can write: in places a little breezily, in others quite densely, but always clearly and engagingly.

Professor Morone's personal political stance is clear enough, and yes, it's left of Fox News. I can only hope that people who don't share his views on the present will take time to relish this masterful, sweeping interpretation of our past.

i really love this book. it's got a great set of foundational lines of inquiry, a slick usage of data, and a broad enough focus to consider the politics of gender, race, nationality, class, and so on with coherence.

the only significant problem is that part one ends at 1776 and part two begins at 1800; this skips over both the revolutionary war and the constitutional convention. it might be argued that this period merits a book of its own (perhaps several dozen have already been written), but i would've liked morone's investigatory reasoning to extend over it. that caveat aside, an extremely important contribution.

I had a difficult time putting this book down for it is revelant to our current political climate. Two of my close friends have ordered this book after browsing through my copy. It is well researched and written. Bravo Dr. Morone, this book is a masterpiece.

August 9, 2010

SHOULD BE IN EVERY HISTORY CLASSROOM IN AMERICA

A Hellfire Nation Toasts the Immigrants
As we reflect upon the state of the Union in the extreme summer heat of July, 2010, with its endless procession of 90 plus degree days and high humidity, and with the still heated debate over Global Warming producing further carbon dioxide but no legislation, it only seems natural that when it comes to reading lists, we should once again recommend James A. Morone's Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History (2003). The book was also recommending itself because of the summer dynamics of the debate over immigration, a policy issue conservatives never seem to tire of working, even though it has so many twisting strands that it's never entirely clear just how it is going to affect our politics. The hope of the Right is that the Democratic stance will further alienate the "blue collar" constituency, which will be losing their jobs and paying for immigrant "welfare" at the same time. What caught our eye was an article which contained a number of these tricky strands and which appeared in the July 19th edition of the NYTimes: "Obama Wins Unlikely Allies in Immigration," by Laurie Goodstein. The unlikely allies for Obama in this case are some "evangelical Christian leaders," although we have to note that the ones cited tend to come from the conservative portion of the evangelical movement - a movement which has a broader range when it gets mapped upon the political spectrum, although it's probably true that the majority lean right in politics.

Two quotes in particular got us to thinking about the grand issues raised in Hellfire Nation. The first, from the well known Reverend Richard D. Land, who is the president of the public policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, is revealing for the way he views the potential for a new conservative coalition. That would be the one with Hispanics forming a crucial part, hence his support for Obama's policy position on immigration. Land says "Hispanics are religious, family-oriented, pro-life, entrepreneurial...they are hard-wired social conservatives, unless they're driven away."

Yet this moderate approach to the issue doesn't sit well at all with other more traditional religious conservatives, who place the sin-crime dynamic front and center for the 12 million or so Hispanic immigrants in the U.S. Thus Jay Sekulow of the American Center for Law and Justice, says "`I think there's a need to reform the system, but I don't support amnesty.'" Bryan Fisher of the American Family Association, sounds like he could have supplied another Chapter in Hellfire Nation all by himself when he says "`What my evangelical friends are arguing is that illegal aliens should essentially be rewarded for breaking the law. I think it's extremely problematic from a Judeo-Christian standpoint to grant citizenship to people whose first act on American soil was to break an American law.'" Talk about "originalist'" theory in constitutional law; here's a 21st century version of "original sin" against the American way of life which apparently can't be redeemed. It's as "fundamental" as one can get in the "strict father" morality of the Right.

Now the fascinating thing is that in terms of older debates about immigration and immigrants, it's tough to pin the 19th century stigmas of lazy, drunken and shiftless - once attached to the Irish, and later the Italians - for example - on today's Hispanics, who are if anything, so hardworking that Land can elevate them to the nation's highest value pedestal: they are "entrepreneurial." So we have to find something to tar their resumes with, and what better way than to say their American baptism, so to speak, is one of breaking our laws. Of course, the debate is heating up also with the national security/911 strand (not defending our borders) and the extra edge supplied by economic hard times: they're taking our jobs and consuming national services - medical care and education, primarily. So, in effect, these are welfare recipients, and illegal ones - charges that don't always surface yet are never far from the undertones of the public debate.

What's missing however, are insights from history and political economy that would reveal in the 1980's that it was the Reagan Administration's fierce Cold War stance in support of the murderous far Right in Central America which sent millions fleeing to the U.S., the first wave of immigration which really gave the issue its initial impetus. As if the civil wars in Central American were not bad enough, neoliberalism in economics has been an economic disaster for most of Latin American during the 1980's and 1990's, no where more so than in Mexico. But don't look too closely; it hurts to see how Mexico has fared after NAFTA and its correlation to increased migration to the U.S. Here's John Gray again (from False Dawn), who devotes about ten blistering pages of that chapter entitled "Engineering Free Markets" to the fate of Mexico: "Market reform in Mexico from the early 1980's onwards has tended to widen economic inequalities and reverse the growth of the middle class that occurred in the previous forty years. This process accelerated with NAFTA, and moved into a new gear with the austerity programme instituted in the wake of the devaluation crisis of 1994 (Page 49)...In Mexico, perhaps more clearly than anywhere else, free market policies have manifestly failed; but they have left the society which they desolated with few positive options." (Page 53.)

Does that sound anything like what is contained in the New York Times article? Of course not. And many Mexicans followed the one "positive" option open to them: they emigrated and crossed over into the United States. To understand how political debates like this one get transformed in the United States, there is no better guide than James E. Morone's Hellfire Nation.

Who Do We Blame When Things Go Wrong?
Morone's thesis is pretty straightforward. Our nation, which still heavily draws upon the moral influence of our 17th century Puritan founders, for better and for worse, has a strong tendency, when things go wrong, especially with the economy, to blame it on individual shortcomings and sins, rather than societal failures like a structurally unsound economy. Actually, Morone says, the Puritans gave us both strands of the tradition, at least initially. When things went wrong in the 17th and early 18th century, their famous sermons, the Jeremiads, not only listed the individual sins and sometimes the sinners themselves, they also pointed out that New England society was collectively violating the "covenant" oath that they had pledged their community to uphold. And, we had pointed out in Sinners in the Hands of An Angry Market, that Perry Miller, America's preeminent historian of Puritan New England, found the greatest of conservative ironies: the Puritans' Covenant was not being undermined by individuals who had morally plunged after the founding; they were following the injunction to work hard at their very secular callings, which were, subtly, decade by decade, undermining the earlier collective moral purpose.

However, in the nation at large, over time, the dual nature of this inheritance was not what was passed on to the broader society. Rather, the sin-sinner-crime of individuals and outsider groups has borne the burden of explaining why things go askance in the US. That's our dominant tradition, with what Morone calls the Social Gospel playing an entirely secondary role, only taking the lead during times of incontrovertible economic disaster, such as in the wake of the Panic of 1893, and after the Great Depression.

Under the Social Gospel, a label which originated in late 19th century Protestantism and worked itself into the broader stream of Progressivism, c. 1896-1916, the terms of the social contract are reversed, the "emphasis shifts from the sinner to the system...rather than redeem the individual , reform the political system" becomes the cry. The Social Gospel, Morone explains, finally became the dominant tradition from 1932-1973, before being supplanted by a new wave of Victorian morals and neo-Victorian economics (neo-liberal) with the revival of the Right.

We have to say that if you're looking for a book that will continue to pay you diverse intellectual rewards through its insights about the American Right, and how our society continually frames up issues, there is none better, and furthermore, it's just plain hard to put down. Proceeding chronologically, with wonderful commentary, it's a book we wish would be required reading in every high school's and college's history curriculum. But especially so in Texas; after all, it was selected as one of Christianity Today's top ten books of 2003.

So let's see how well what Morone calls "The Great American Moral Dialectic" - who to blame - the individual "sinner" or a structurally broken economy - works out in one example he couldn't write about in 2003: the great mortgage fiasco.

Mortgage Fiasco: the Sinners, the System and the Rant of the Year
You've heard it everyday and nearly everywhere: if only individual mortgage holders had exercised personal responsibility, understood what they were signing and didn't reach beyond their economic means, the entire crisis could have been avoided. Furthermore, sins were being committed in many originator offices: applicants lied about their wages, and often failed to supply proper documentation. This was individual moral irresponsibility writ large, which harmed everyone. So the story on the Right still goes. Rick Santelli, the options/futures market reporter on the CNBC network, shouted out the protest at the federal attempts to bail these sinners out: we have no responsibility at all for these "losers" who put an extra bathroom in houses they couldn't afford... from February 19, 2009 at[...], "The Rant of the Year" at [...] (We have to observe that the script couldn't be any clearer had Morone written it himself.)

Entirely missing from Santelli's take, however, is the fact that between 2003 -2009, an entire "assembly line" industry grew up, involving: yes, Fannie and Freddie, mortgage originators, mortgage brokers , mortgage bond insurers, mortgage securitzers, the famous Wall Street Banks and brokers, and the ratings agencies, a system so complex and interlocked, and in reality, so completely oblivious to the morality and/or quality of the actual loans themselves that it simply didn't care whether the mortgage holders produced pay stubs or not. It was a collective, systemic late capitalism failure on a scale the world hadn't seen since the stock speculation and interlocking trust system which collapsed in October of 1929. It's such a mind-boggling systemic tale which is so oblivious to the individual sins of the little mortgage loan applicant that it's amazing that Rick Santelli can, being an observer of sophisticated financial "innovations" himself on a daily basis, summon up that level of anger at the "Forgotten Man" sinner at the bottom of the economic pyramid. And indeed, if you listen and watch the video carefully, you'll hear a little footnote of anger directed at the mortgage derivative inventors higher upon the food chain of the calamity. But it's a wonderful illustration of Morone's book and thesis, how Santelli "balances the moral books" against the individual sinner but not the broader economic system. (And we suppose it's why Michael Lewis gives his new book on the financial crisis, The Big Short, the subtitle: Inside the Doomsday Machine.)

For a good take at how the system evolved over-time, eventually including some affordable housing non-profits, including parts of ACORN, in the Countrywide Credit-GSE (Government Sponsored Enterprises) network written from a left perspective, see Thomas Ferguson's and Robert Johnson's Too Big to Bail: The Paulson `Put,' Presidential Politics and the Global Financial Meltdown, here at [...] ; Part II can be found at
[...] with the GSE-non-profit evolution at pages 8-12 of Part II. It's a good answer to Republican charges of just another "government failure" exemplified by Fannie and Freddie, and makes clear that it was these GSE's imitating the worst of the private sector trends that got them in so much trouble. But we still came away marveling out how many different players, private, governmental and non-profit became enmeshed in the subprime system, and how cynical the covering umbrella/rationale held up over the whole "enterprise" - making home ownership affordable to the working poor - became. As the authors point out, it's a tale from the era of neo-liberalism, and shows how far the dominant philosophy of the age could cast its net.

The industrious, sturdy, well-prepared individual competing for work in the free markets of the nation, has been, James Morone tells us, a powerful, dominant guiding image for our nation. Wherever, and whenever the burden can be kept on the individual, and off the mechanisms and institutions of the markets themselves, then that's been the traditional American response. The role the government might play in making the markets fairer - or indicating when they were not appropriate at all - is usually kept out of sight and off the policy table. But to show our readers just how powerful the ideological image is of the brave individual competing in the open marketplace, consider Morone's description of President Andrew Johnson's prescription of "laissez faire" for the fate of the newly freed slaves in the defeated South:

They had no property, little education, no right to vote, and - in some places - could not even move around freely. Yet Johnson was in no mood to lend a hand: `Their future prosperity and industry must rest mainly on themselves.' If they `fail and perish away,' said Johnson in 1865, `let us be careful that the failure shall not be attributable to any denial of justice.' The market - even American history's most profoundly unjust market - allowed him to pin responsibility for success and failure on black individuals, regardless of their impossible situation. (Page 205.)


And, might we ask, when it comes to unemployment and today's "free markets" in labor, whether that is also the effect of Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke's policies? He has approached the problem from the most inventive monetary policies the history of central banking has ever seen - but he can't seem to find it in his power or his intellectual universe to recommend the direct job creation models of the New Deal era, the era he has combed for monetary missteps, like Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz before him. For someone so immersed in the history of 1929-1936, this is a remarkably blank, and cruel, intellectual page, with untold practical horrors in store for the people of the United States.


William R. Neil
Rockville, MD
August, 2010

I am a 50 year old German, who lived in the Southern United States from 1980 to 1990. Is has always intrigued me, why religion plays such a prominent role is the USA, while it plays essentially no role at all in Germany (and in most of Western Europe ). This book explains why this is so.

On the way, one learns a few interesting facts, e.g. that it was King George, who had to tell the settlers to leave the Quakers alone (before, the Puritans took great pride in persecuting and killing them..so much for the quest of freedom of religion...)

The author never leaves any doubt, as to which side he is on, and this renders the book even more believable.

I highly recommend it!

Morone presents an intriguing view of American politics in "Hellfire Nation" (an appropriate follow up to his previous book, "The Democratic Wish").
The book is a unique look at the history of America, which expounds the moral fervor that has ignited the fiercest social conflicts and engendered major social movments.
"For better and for worse, moral conflicts made America," says Morone.
At the end, Morone presents an insightful and inspiring call to a different type of moral politics (which was unfortunately misunderstood by Garrow in his New York Times review).
This book is recommended to those interested in attaining a better understanding of American politics and our post 9/11 world.

Morone's study is a fascinating attempt to reinterpret American history through the lens of religion and morality. However, this laudable effort is damaged by his insistence upon maintaining the traditional academic liberal lenses of "race, class, gender" in every historical era, as if there were no other ways to understand what happened. He also does not take religion seriously enough to understand why it causes people to act as they do -- I walked away feeling like he was openly contemptuous of religion, despite his apparent interest in it.

Hellfire Nation is the best book I have ever read! And I love how Professor Morone drives the crowd wild with his tight black jeans, black sneakers, crazy ties and red shirts. We love you Professor Morone!