Catholicpunk / A (Semi) Final Draft (#2)

Chapter One / A Crack in Everything

Okay. Here is the second part of Chapter One, entitled “When Harvard Was America.” This is a long section. But it takes us to the meat of the matter. Am including the final paragraphs of the “Meet the Sopranos” section, which I have amended. I hope you enjoy. Tomorrow we’ll move on to the section of the chapter entitled “Germain Grisez and Plan B.”

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At the beginning of 1963, the United States still inhabited that state of mind that we nostalgically remember as “the Fifties.” John XXIII was pope. John F. Kennedy was president. The disturbance in Vietnam remained largely a covert “police action.” College campuses were still mostly passive institutions of instruction. Civil rights activity remained largely peaceful, with a focus on litigation. Bob Dylan was playing acoustic folk music. There was something called “the Pill,” but most people were not really sure what that was. The nation remained overwhelmingly and safely “white,” however one might want to flexibly define and apply this label.

By the end of 1965, Pope John XXIII and President Kennedy were dead. The United States had openly entered the war in Vietnam. College campuses were in turmoil. Drug use was spiking. Sexual mores were collapsing. There was rioting in the cities. Bob Dylan was playing electric rock music. Vatican II had forever shifted the identify and influence of the Catholic Church. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 had opened the United States to non-white (which is to say non-European) immigrants from Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

The Fifties were definitively over. Amidst these torsions, one can only imagine the shocking symbolism for Mr. and Mrs. Soprano of the cabinet of adult desires and temptations their son discovered in my parents’ bedroom.

How are we to consider this rupture between 1963 and 1965? What hints does it provide about the forces that have propelled us toward our post-liberal moment? When things begin to crack apart, they do not leave nothing remaining. Nature abhors a vacuum. Matter never simply disappears. Neither do thoughts and ideas. New things will begin to form in their place.

My father, raised during the Depression years in a tightly knit Brooklyn Jewish community, actively suppressed his religious origins. He and my mother joined the Unitarian Church in Princeton. When he prayed, he looked up, as if to ascertain the weather. I’m not sure I ever heard him refer to God.

I wouldn’t say my father was positive the future belonged to the “indoor men” of the postwar era such as himself. But he was certainly a man of the liberal Enlightenment. Which is to say he was a modern man, a man of words and ideas, not actions and deeds, one who believed the arc of history at least should bend in his direction, even if he was not one to do the bending himself. He would leave that to the Mr. Sopranos of the nation, my father the word and Mr. Soprano the flesh.

My father never had the chutzpah to believe he was of the class of elites who might own the historical narrative. Even lapsed Jews in 1964 did not possess such hubris. And Princeton, despite its Ivy League pedigree and distinguished contributions to the history of the United States, was not itself that sort of town. To find those sorts of people, and that sort of town, one would need to venture further north, to Cambridge Massachusetts and Harvard University.

What we can therefore begin, barely, to discern in the United States between 1963 and 1965, in its blooming chaos, generally, and in the fateful encounter between my father and Mr. Soprano, specifically, is the interplay of three cosmologies—three visions of history, civilization, and society—one decaying, one resurgent, and one emergent.

In this period, these cosmologies found living expression in the work and lives of three men: Harvard literature professor Perry Miller (the chronicler of a fading Protestant order); Catholic theologian Germain Grisez (the architect of a resurgent Catholic intellectualism); and Cal Tech physicist Richard Feynman (the herald of a new, scientific and postmodern worldview).

When Harvard was America

In the middle portion of the 20th century, as a professor at Harvard, Perry Miller wrote seminal works of American intellectual history. Focusing on Colonial America, Miller created a dense, tensile argument about the impact of Puritan ideas on the American imagination. Ironically, given this thesis, Perry Miller marginalized the Puritans by presenting them as the antithesis of what America eventually became—big-shouldered and profane.

Miller's body of work reduces to this thesis: the colonial enterprise propelled itself forward and the Puritans (still quaintly and vaguely European and medieval) retreated to the margins of our identity—not absent but alien—prophetic visionaries whose vocation was to remind us that the center holds in our nation only so long as we acknowledge the presence of sin as the condition of our existence. The vehicle for their exhortations and lamentations was the sermon form known eponymously as the jeremiad.

Miller famously burnished his own quest to illuminate “the meaning of America” with an overheated origin story that placed him in 1926 as a 21-year-old “stevedore” on the other side of the world. In Miller’s telling, his younger self stood “disconsolate” at the edge of a jungle in the Belgian Congo, “unloading drums of case oil flowing out of the inexhaustible wilderness of America.” There, while “in that barbaric tropic,” Miller felt thrust upon him “the mission of expounding what I took to be the innermost propulsion of the United States.” And what might that innermost propulsion have been?

What I believe caught my imagination, among the fuel drums, was a realization of the uniqueness of the American experience; even then I could dimly make out the portent for the future of the world, looking upon these tangible symbols of the republic’s appalling power. I could see no way of coping with the problem except by going to the beginning…. The beginning I sought was inevitably—being located in the seventeenth century—theological…. Since the first articulate body of expression upon which I could get a leverage happened to be a body of Protestant doctrine, I set myself to explore that doctrine in its own terms.

Miller here lays down stakes that to this day bound our national sense that we Americans are somehow “exceptional”; that our experience in the four centuries that have since unfolded has been “unique”; that to fully appreciate what makes us civilizationally peerless we need to go to “the beginning”; that what we find at the beginning is “Protestant doctrine”; and that the finest and purest expression of that doctrine was the Puritan leader John Winthrop’s sermon, A Modell of Christian Charity.

However, the motive—to retrospectively bear witness, to be present at the creation, to discern meaning, to make sense of the past in order to put it to rest, to bury it, to move forward—is implacable. In this sense, to discern the meaning of America is to pierce the veil. It is to disenchant ourselves. It is to become fully human.

But there is something else going on here, not quite subdural, but in the shadows, laden with portent, and worth mention. In this—almost certainly fabulist—account of his origin story, Perry Miller also fired a shot across the bow of the American historical profession. For Miller, America began not with a set of founding acts, but with a set of founding ideas that served as the predicate, the essential condition, for these founding acts.

Unfortunately, in his view, American historians were “apt to slide over these concepts in a shockingly superficial manner simply because they have so little respect for the intellect, in general. I have difficulty imagining that anyone can be a historian without realizing that history itself is part of the life of the mind; hence I have been compelled to insist that the mind of man is the basic factor in human history.”

Here’s a bold proposition that generalizes from these insights. In its heyday, say from 1870 to 1970—I’d argue that one could not teach American history at Harvard without staggering under the weight of its historical burden. In these decades, by any measure—spiritually, politically, financially, culturally, and mythically—Harvard was America. Harvard embodied the meaning of America. And if Harvard ever were to fall, there was clearly a sense that America (Harvard, writ large) would inevitably fall.

In 1964, liberalism was the hegemonic mode of thinking and discourse in America and Harvard was its epicenter. In 2025, Donald Trump delivered a raucous commencement address at the University of Alabama, declaring that “the next chapter of the American story will not be written by the Harvard Crimson. It will be written by you, the Crimson Tide.”^[iv]

Today, Harvard is in the crosshairs of the conservative movement: its leadership besieged, its faculty cowed, its programs, enrollment, funding, and tax status under threat. For Catholic radicals such as JD Vance and Elise Stefanik, Harvard stands as a symbol of all that is decadent, rotten, and corrupt in liberal higher education. They argue that Harvard’s ideas and ideals have failed-that they are empty, lying fallow like husks in a blasted winter cornfield. This assault is rooted not only in politics but in a resurgent vision of American order, one that challenges the very cosmology Perry Miller sought to define.

Perry Miller was an intellectual historian. He concerned himself with the life of the mind in relation to cultural forms that conferred meaning on events and that kept chaos - the wilderness, the Indians, war, disease, sensuality, and materialism - at bay. One might posit that the contradictions of explaining the meaning of America from the center of a historical universe that keeps expanding are too much to bear. If Harvard embodied the life of the mind in America, and if the life of the mind “is the basic factor in human history,” then Harvard becomes the basic factor in the life of America.

Miller embraced the contradictions and drank himself to death in 1963, at the age of 58. In December 1963, several weeks following the Kennedy assassination, Miller died in a Harvard University dormitory room amidst a heap of spent liquor bottles. A remembered, “Perry felt Kennedy’s death as a staggering personal blow […] and reacted in the only way he has been able to react in recent months; he got drunk and stayed that way.”

Having been threatened with the loss of tenure in response to his increasingly inebriated classroom monologues, Miller’s wife had sent him packing, and for weeks he’d been reduced to living in a Harvard dormitory, to which students would shepherd him “after classes filled with his incoherent babbling about Kennedy’s death.” The obituary for Miller in the Harvard Crimson speaks to the overawed sense that Miller embodied meanings far greater than himself, too large for anyone ultimately to contain or bear.

In the forest, when a great tree shatters to the ground, there is silence. Perry Miller, who possessed such energy, such force, such bigness, is dead…. He was a giant, and now that we can take the full measure of his life's work, we suddenly feel small and mortal. The feeling is no discredit to us. Perry Miller was not interested in the approaches and techniques of history: he wanted to see the truth, as deep as you can see it, and get it down straight. Almost in passing, this intense man, this very modern man, created America's consciousness of itself.

And then he fell out of vogue - his death occurred right before the tumult of the 1960s almost instantly rendering his historical methods moot - even as his intellectual brilliance and personal charisma continued to grip the imagination of historians and other students of the American experience.

Perry Miller belonged among a quartet of Harvard historians for whom the contradictions of representing Harvard, and thereby representing America, proved intolerable. The others were Henry Adams (1838-1918), F. O. Matthiessen (1902-1950), and Louis Hartz (1919-1986), each in their own way not merely historians of American ideas, but ultimately historians and caretakers of the idea of America. What we learn in the arc of their lives is that this idea, with all of its internal contradictions, when pursued to its logical conclusions, will break you.

Henry Adams was of course a scion of America’s most prominent political family in the first half of the 19^th century. His great-grandfather was the 2^nd president of the United States, John Adams. His grandfather was John Quincy Adams, the 6^th president of the United States. His father, Charles Francis Adams, Sr. was an editor, author, politician, and diplomat. All three of his forebears attended Harvard, as did Henry and his three brothers.

Henry taught medieval history at Harvard for seven years following the American Civil War and subsequently wrote the acclaimed nine-volume History of the United States of America (1801 to 1817), a study of the administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. In the first decade of the 20^th century, he also published Mont Saint Michel and Chartres and The Education of Henry Adams, two profoundly personal, poetic, and elliptical books.

Mont Saint Michel was a meditation on the cultural unity of the Middle Ages preserved by the Church. The Education was, by contrast, a melancholy jeremiad about the cultural disintegration of the United States in the United States in the decades spanning the Civil War and World War I, resulting from industrialization and urbanization. Mont Saint Michel was about Catholicism, Europe, the Middle Ages, faith, and enchantment. The Education was about Protestantism, America, the Enlightenment, reason, and disenchantment.

We’ll return to Henry Adams later in our story, but can conclude for now by calling attention to the 20-year narrative void in The Education that extends from 1871-1891, the decades that encompass his marriage to Clover Adams, her suicide in 1885, and the grief-stricken years that followed. Clover had been a gifted photographer whose ambitions Henry had squelched. She perished from ingestion of potassium cyanide; a chemical she used to develop her photographs.

Clover’s suicide literally created a negative space in The Education, her presence in the story brought into sharp relief by virtue of her absence. For Adams, the brute facticity of her death leached all meaning from the classical education that had previously framed his threaded understanding of Harvard, his family’s political dynasty, Boston, New England, and the history and significance of the United States itself. Following Clover’s death, America no longer had any meaning for Henry Adams.

Like Perry Miller, F.O. Matthiessen—known to his friends as “Matty”—came of age after World War I. Educated at Yale, a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, a literature professor at Harvard, and the author of the landmark study, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman, Matthiessen remains one of the most influential figures in the history of American Studies, a field that essentially did not exist until he and Perry Miller willed it into being during their early years at Harvard.

American Renaissance portrayed the flowering of American literary achievement between 1850 and 1855 with the publication of Ralph Waldo Emerson's Representative Men (1850); Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850); Herman Melville's Moby Dick (1851); Henry David Thoreau's Walden (1854); and Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass (1855). In this book, Matthiessen demonstrated how these authors influenced and nurtured each other through a dialectical interplay of light and dark, of good and evil, thereby establishing a voluminous, boisterous, and cantankerous literary form and voice for a distinctly American democratic culture.

Published in 1941, American Renaissance definitively positioned American literature within the tradition of great world literatures, affirming the nation’s cultural emergence and helping to shape American intellectual identity at a pivotal and defining moment in its history. The book's ambitious scope and democratic vision instantly established it as a foundational text in American literary criticism. The impact of American Renaissance extended into the post-war period, presenting American literature as the embodiment of democratic values at a time when these were contested globally, positioning American culture as exceptional in its democratic character and potential, and helping to justify American cultural leadership and cultural imperialism during the Cold War.

Perry Miller and F.O. Matthiessen worked together at Harvard through the 1940s to establish American Studies as a discipline. Celebrated biographer Kenneth Lynn, who took courses from both professors, observed how Miller's "tough and profane intelligence" contrasted with "Matthiessen's intensity.” Despite their differences, both men comfortably inhabited the broadly left-wing and progressive spirit of campus life during the New Deal. According to the historian Leo Marx, “My teacher and friend, F. O. Matthiessen, was an active socialist but also a Christian. Perry Miller—my junior- and senior-year tutor and Ph.D. thesis supervisor—was sympathetic with the neo-Calvinist left viewpoint of the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr; he too was a committed New Dealer.”

However, the relationship Miller and Matthiessen became increasingly strained after World War II. While both men had pioneered interdisciplinary approaches to American literature and history in the 1930s, during the early years of the Cold War, they diverged on the field's purpose, a reflection of emerging ideological divisions at Harvard that split former leftist members of the faculty into different camps. The growing pressure to enlist American Studies as a soft power weapon in the Cold War aligned with Miller’s previous work in the Psychological Warfare Division of the OSS during the war, where he wrote brochures and pamphlets to promote American liberal democratic values across the globe. Matthiessen never wavered in his commitment to the goals of a spiritually informed international socialism, leaving him increasingly isolated on campus.

By 1950, Matthiessen was deeply depressed, alienated from his more conservative colleagues (some of whom had reportedly come to “hate” him), bearing the weight of personal grief, and facing—not unlike Alan Turing—the grim prospect of government probes into his alleged subversive, Communist, and homosexual sympathies. On April 1, he leaped to his death from the 12^th floor of the Hotel Manger in Boston. He was 48 years old. In a note found in his hotel room, he wrote, “I am depressed over world conditions. I am a Christian and a Socialist. I am against any order which interferes with that objective.” At the time of his death, the “idea of America” had also ceased to mean anything to Matthiessen.

Five years later, with McCarthyism spent but the Cold War raging, Harvard political theorist Louis Hartz published The Liberal Tradition in America, an idiosyncratic and challenging text that nonetheless has influenced generations of students and scholars (most of whom probably never really read the book). The Liberal Tradition in America explained an outcome—the limits of class conflict in the United States and the absence of socialism—by propagating a myth. Hartz claimed that America’s distance from its European antecedents, both in space and time, allowed the nation to internalize unalloyed Enlightenment precepts without the distorting filters of religious, ethnic, and national conflict that were for centuries the norm in Europe. Hartz’s argument became the centerpiece of the “consensus” school of American history that prospered in the United States after World War II.

Of course, Hartz was wrong. And he knew it. And with no direct evidence to back me up, I’ll propose that this knowledge ate away at him and ultimately destroyed him. For me, this narrative of one brilliant man’s cataleptic decline captures the tragic contradictions we grapple with today as we witness the historic reality of conflict and conquest in American life shred and destroy the latticework of myth to which we have blindly and desperately attached ourselves.

In the early 1970s, at what really should have been the pinnacle of his career, Hartz almost literally disappeared, leading to much speculation about what happened to him. Here is what former Harvard political science professor Samuel Beer, who wrote the entry on Hartz in American National Biography, had to say.

Hartz's highly successful professional career and quite normal personal and family life was brought to an end by the sudden onset of a severe emotional disturbance. No exact medical diagnosis could be made since one symptom of his illness was a resolute denial that anything was so wrong as to require medical attention. This breakdown led to estrangement from his family, including divorce in 1972, alienation from old friends, and finally a senseless conflict with the students, administration, and faculty. In 1974 he resigned from Harvard. Still mentally keen, however, he continued his scholarly work until his death from an epileptic seizure in Istanbul in 1986.

In 1988, famed historian of psychoanalysis Paul Roazen, a student of Hartz’s as an undergraduate at Harvard, published a moving tribute in Virginia Quarterly Review. In this piece, Roazen recounts how, as an undergraduate at Harvard in the early 1960s, the power and force of Hartz’s ideas simply blew him away. Roazen never again saw the world in the same way.

For Roazen, the most telling and enduring moments of his encounters with Hartz (who ultimately served as his dissertation advisor) were Hartz’s compulsive interest in the ideas of Southern antebellum social theorist George Fitzhugh alongside his later regrets about having not focused more on race in The Liberal Tradition in America. Fitzhugh is also of special interest to us because in his books Sociology for the South (1854) and Cannibals All (1857), he delivered a quite-devastating critique of liberal capitalism as the foundation of his neo-feudal (and some say proto-fascist) defense of chattel slavery as the more humane alternative to the “wage slavery” of the Northern states.

This is the crux of the matter, this insertion of Fitzhugh into The Liberal Tradition in America solely to prove a point—that Fitzhugh was the exception who proves the rule. “Fitzhugh was fascinating precisely because the problem of slavery drove him beyond the insights typical of liberalism, but at the time his iconoclasm appeared irrelevant to the nation’s experience.” In other words, Fitzhugh only mattered because he didn’t.

But of course Fitzhugh did matter, not just to prove a point, but because his connection to the South and to its race-based hierarchies and institutions were real and because they spoke to something primeval and enduring about the American experience. In 1954, Hartz is telling us that Fitzhugh “did not seem able to acknowledge the degree to which the South was part of the tradition of liberalism [via Thomas Jefferson and other Virginia architects of the new nation].” By 1964, Hartz knew this was spurious logic. The South was (to use a term favored by Fitzhugh) the antinomy of the liberal tradition. By 1974, this awareness had itself blown Hartz away.

As a postscript to this account, I want to invoke the French phenomenological philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a student of Edmund Husserl, follower of Martin Heidegger, and close associate of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. A lapsed Catholic, Merleau-Ponty articulated through a Marxist lens a powerful post-war critique of liberalism, which concerned unresolved antinomies in modern politics between humanism and terror, that liberal ideals hide illiberal realities.

In other words, we can only vouchsafe the façade of procedural neutrality, rule of law and notions of freedom, justice and fairness that we ascribe to liberalism—its tools and its goals—by paying attention to what lies beneath this façade.

This is a gothic notion, of course.