>>MARK HORGER: There were significant regional
differences in attitudes about work and leisure and
recreation in the English colonial system in the 1600's
and 1700's. And So I want to talk in this mini lecture
about another region of the English colonial project that
developed significantly different attitudes about work
and leisure and recreation than the Chesapeake world
we just talked about. I want to talk about Puritan New
England in the 1620's, 30's 40's and 50's. New England
was settled, largely by English Puritans. Puritans were
English devotees of a certain small slice of the English
reformation. To understand the kinds of attitudes of
work and leisure you get in New England, We need to
talk a little bit about Puritan theology and a little bit
about the kind of society they tried to build around
their theology. The First point I want to make about the
English Protestants, and here we have kind of a rough
schematic of what's going on in the spectrum of the
reformation in Europe is that England, by the Mid-
1500's was already nominally protestant. The church of
England had disconnected itself from Rome and made
the king of England the head of the church and England
and was already a protestant nation by the time the
English begin colonizing North America. But, the Church
of England that resulted from that break with Rome was
not all that Protestant. By which I mean they hadn't
changed the actual practice of worshiping in Anglican
church all that much and there were other Englishmen
who wanted the English church to be very very
Protestant, who wanted to significantly alter the
practice of worshiping in England. So, the English
Puritans were among these people who wanted to be
very very Protestant and wanted significant changes in
church practice. In general the way to understand what
the Puritans wanted is to understand that they wanted
to simplify enormously the church. They wanted to
worship as closely as they believed they could to how
they believe the earliest Christians had and they
considered a great deal of medieval catholic practice to
have been essentially smuggled in over hundreds of
years and had turned it into something different from
what they were interested in. This allows you to
understand a fair amount about puritan attitudes
towards religion and towards work. So the Puritans
wanted an intensely simple and direct relationship with God
rather than a relationship mediated through
the sacraments of the church. The English
Puritans were also Calvinists, which means that they
believed in a doctrine called predestination.
Predestination is the doctrine that salvation, that your
spiritual fate is decided not by your own behavior, not
by participation in the sacraments as it would have
been in the Catholic church but was determined by an
all knowing, all powerful god for reasons known only to
an all knowing and all powerful god. That God
controlled your salvation and you did not. This view
was derived from the idea God was an all knowing and
all powerful, and if this is true how can God not already
have determined your spiritual fate. In fact Puritans
believed that not only was their spiritual fate out of
their hands, but that it was also as the name suggests
predestined. They believed that arguing otherwise was
to deny that God was in fact, all knowing and all
powerful. This may seem paradoxical today, but this led
to intense piety. Partly because in addition to believing
that salvation was out of their hands, they also tended
to believe that the saved were few, and that the
regenerate were many. That God was likely to choose a
select few souls to be saved and the vast majority of
humanity was damned. They also believed that there
would be visible signs of salvation in your outward daily
behavior. This kind of inverts a contemporary free-will
kind of view. They didn't believe you could achieve
salvation, but they also didn't think that it was likely
that people chosen to be saved by an all knowing all
powerful god, would spend all their days in
unregenerate fashion. They therefore spent their lives
and the lives of their communities constantly
researching their own lives and the lives of their
neighbors for ongoing evidence that they were right
about their suspicion that they were among the saved.
They sometimes referred to themselves as the "Visible
Saints" and beginning in the 1620's and then
accelerating in the 1630's there was a large wave of
migration of English puritans to what is now
Massachusetts beginning in the 1630's they attempted
in new England to build a society in which it was easy to
search themselves and their lives for ongoing evidence
that they were saved. Their concept of what a
community was , was in fact more or less synonymous
with their church congregation and the churches that
developed in New England were eventually referred to
Congregationalist churches. The theory was that a
congregation was a community of the visible saints.
You didn't just join a Congregationalist church because you
felt like it. You would, in fact have had to demonstrate to
existing church members, who were theoretically
already among the elect that you too were one of them.
This is sort of a high barrier to entry and in Puritan New
England, you get communities designed to make it
possible to live a life along those lines. This had
consequences for their attitudes about work and
leisure. The most important point for our purposes
being that the Puritans were the English people who
were most hostile to the leisure preference that we
discussed in an earlier lecture. For Puritans, hard work
was moral. They sometimes conceptualized this as "the
calling" in the way that we might today say that
someone was called to the ministry. They believed that
that applied to all the visible saints, and your calling
was to do whatever it was your life's work was, as well
as you could do it to serve God. So, in puritan New
England you get very different attitudes about work.
First of all, this wound up being a very healthy
physically, community compared to the Chesapeake.
This was not a community that failed to grow enough
food to feed itself. This was a colonial society that
particularly in the peak years of the 1630's and 40's
grew community by community and families, and in
some cases entire church congregations would all
migrate more or less at once. By contemporary
measures of how you would ascertain the relative
physical health of the community. Things like Life
expectancy, literacy rates. Puritan England was also a
place where literacy was also privileged. The belief
being that protestants needed to know the word of the
lord in the vernacular. Female Literacy rates were high
relative to Europe at the time this was a much more
demographically stable and much more outwardly sort
of physically healthy society earlier than the one we
talked about with the Chesapeake region. So these were
people intensely invested in the morality of work and
hostile for a combination of religious and economic
reasons for the leisure preference. Puritans over time
have developed a reputation for being no fun. This is
partly because Puritan has been used as an adjective
that did not always apply to the original Puritans. It
wasn't so much that the Puritans were opposed to fun,
but there were two things that were true about puritan
attitudes about recreation and it relationship to work
that explain how opponents of the puritans that began
to think of them in this way. The First is that much of
existing English recreational culture that we discussed
in the first little mini lecture. A great deal of that was
exactly the kind of culture that the Puritans believed the
church had smuggled in over hundreds of years. The
fact that a great Deal of English recreational culture was
tied to feast days and festival days that some of it took
place on the Sabbath which they were intentionally
opposed to recreation. A lot of English recreational
culture was to the Puritans, the kind of thing they were
trying to extract from their lives because they
associated it with the catholic influence in English
culture. Second thing to understand about the Puritan
attitudes towards recreation is that like virtually
everything in their lives, They tended to need to leave a
trail of breadcrumbs from their behavior to their
concept of the puritan community and to their theology.
So, you find the puritans doing things that were
obviously meant to be fun and then be recreational. But
because puritans were enormously introspective and
because they were also fairly literate for the time you
can also see them for example in diary's, which they left
a fairly large number of. Discussing to a degree, they
could justify their recreation as restorative as
contributing to their ability the next day to do best at
their calling. This is something that will have a long
cultural influence on the United States. We will see
throughout the 19th century, examples of recreational
culture whose advocates believed it was necessary for
that recreation to be like vitamins of one kind or
another. To be not just fun for fun sake but good for the
community, good for the individual or good for the
spirit in one way or another. This was an aspect of
puritan attitudes about recreation.
And another point to make about puritan attitudes
about work and recreation that had a
long influence into the 19th century is that the puritans
were intensely sabbatarion. The puritans believed that
the Sabbath was a day of rest, full stop. One of the ways
that they disagreed profoundly with existing English
recreational culture is that English recreational culture
frequently devoted the second half of Sunday, to the
patterns of recreation that we discussed in the first
lecture and puritans wanted to squeeze that out and the
idea that attitudes about work and play and recreation
needed to be different on the Sabbath than the rest of
the week is an influence on recreational culture that we
will see a long influence into the 19th and even in some
ways, the 20th century. I believe in the state of
Pennsylvania, professional baseball was still technically
illegal on Sundays until sometime after World War One.
As a final point about the puritans this is a picture of
John Winthrop, who was among the most prominent of
the first generation of puritans who moved to
Massachusetts bay in the 1630's and 1640's. He was
frequently elected governor of the colony in a variety of
nonconsecutive terms over the course of this period
here and was among the puritans who most clearly
articulated some of the attitudes that we've been talking
about. This image of Winthrop, gives you some idea of
his sense of himself. Any time in a pre-photographic era,
you have someone sitting for a portrait, they are
spending a lot of money to tell you a lot more about
themselves to you than what their nose looks like. So
Winthrop is trying quite consciously here to
simultaneously look prosperous because those ruffles
are relatively expensive luxury goods. But also
relatively plain and astir which was very much the
aesthetic of puritan public life. Winthrop has spent a
substantial amount of money to project that image of
himself here. Winthrop was also someone who kept
tremendously introspective diary's. Remember,
Puritans simultaneously believe it's quite likely that
they are among a tiny, lucky few of saved for all time.
Yet their theology prevents them from being too sure
about that because being too sure would deny the
power of their god. So they spent much of their lives
continuing to constantly search for ongoing evidence
that their suspicions about themselves spiritually were
in fact correct. And so, John Winthrop is someone who
has left Diary's in which you can find him talking to
himself about the moral legitimacy of the recreation he
just partook of. Justifying, a recreational Saturday as a
means of preparing himself for the Sabbath and for the
week ahead. Understanding Puritan attitudes about
work and recreation involve understanding the
theological reasons why puritans were very hostile
towards the leisure preference and understanding that
much of the English culture of recreation that we
discussed in the first mini lecture was exactly the kind
of thing that puritans were trying to extract from their
lives, not because they were opposed to fun in the
abstract but because they believed it was the kind of
catholic influence that they were trying to squeeze out
of their lives anywhere they could.