Fenster writes:

The burned over district:

The term “burned-over district” refers to the western and central regions of New York State in the early 19th century, where religious revivals and the formation of new religious movements of the Second Great Awakening took place, to such a great extent that spiritual fervor seemed to set the area on fire.

I enjoy reading about the burned over period since in some ways it reminds me of our current frantic and polarized era. Writing about it too–see here.

I just finished this book, and can recommend it to anyone looking for more history.

It deals specifically, and in detail, with Rochester, with the clearest focus on the several years before and after the big year of 1830, when Charles Grandison Finney came to town and galvanized Rochester society essentially overnight.  

Before Finney: a complete and total mess, with a fractured elite unable to get its act together and worried that the rabble–itself a new idea in America–was out of control, and that in this east coast version of the Wild West they would go under.  

After Finney: a mess, but an entirely different one, and one heading in a new direction.  Finney’s message connects the elites with one another, and with the rabble, in ways that begin to cause a coherence.  

That’s the tale  Johinson tells anyway. He acknowledges in a later introduction to his original 1978 work that his book had come under some deserved criticism, related to his ambitions to create a bottom up social history using quantitative methods. 

And I myself wondered as a complete amateur if he’d captured the clash of settlement cultures sufficiently.  The path breaking book Albion’s Seed, which describes the four different English cultural patterns that are with us to this day, came out after Johnson’s book.  So you don’t hear much about what it must have been like for settlers from New England, bottled up with their Puritan culture for several hundred years, to have found themselves, with a jolt, not only in a raw wilderness but hanging out for the first time with emigrants from Scots-Irish and Quaker America as well as immigrants from overseas–yet another completely new thing.

Johsnson’s analysis focuses more on class than culture.  And whether or not he could have cast a wider net in terms of method he does seem to nail a lot of what went on.  

The Burned Over thing was not just Rochester but also most of Western New York. And some scholars think that what happened in Western New York was not that different in Great Awakening terms than what happened elsewhere in the country, mostly in the Puritan-inflected New England the settlers had left behind.  But something, and something downright strange, happened in Rochester quite quickly, that’s fer sure.

Finishing the book I am still left with the question of how much change could have happened so quickly.  In one chapter you are in 1829 and it is impossible to imagine how things could get messier.  Then you are in 1830 and everything is up for grabs.  I guess there was a lot of tinder ready to be burned. But it is still hard to grasp, at a remove of almost 200 years, how so many people and factions, dug in and entrenched, should see fit to toss everything in the air, and to do it in ways that kickstarted a process of knitting together, however imperfect.

If you believe Johnson’s class-based analysis you will come round to one of his main theses: that while the Awakening was experienced by its participants in deeply religious ways it was fundamentally about social control.  The elites felt their control slipping away.  This control was deeply ingrained after several hundred years of patriarchy, the primacy of family in community, and a world of farms and artisans.  They found themselves in this new land of strangers with different cultural habits, a new and assertive working class that greatly outnumbered them, and emerging organizational forms like factories that they were inventing but did not know how to run.  

While the enthusiasms permeated a good deal of the working classes in religious terms Johnson is pretty clear that the Awakening was largely an elite concoction.  It may not have been understood by any given member of the elite this way.  Each was under pressure to conform to the new mandates in simple behavioral ways, from the pulpit, from the press, and often from their wives: stop drinking at home, go to church, stop giving out liquor at work, hire only people who go to church and don’t drink. Most of the elites fell in line and many of the workers, too.  The workers who went along got steady work.  The holdouts did not do as well, living on the margins or moving on.

It makes perfect Darwinian sense.  A new way of thinking and behaving worked better, even if the religious and social control aspects are hard to tease apart, and even if any given convert was brought to a new exalted, seemingly religious, place mostly under behavioral pressure from family and peers.

I think I had a more romanticized view of Awakenings generally, and of the Burned Over period specifically.  Like it was all a kind of emergent, bottom up phenomenon.  Johnson takes the grittier view that the closer you look the more you find evidence of familiar patterns of social change–more dramatic perhaps but nothing that violates the usual protocols of change.  And what you also find quite clearly is the hand of elites, being the primary agents of change in the direction they desire.

Relevance to today?

Most people I know are scratching their heads over not only the crazy nature of change but the speed at which it is happening. Much of what is now considered mandatory was, just a few years back, deemed ridiculously out of line. So one lesson to learn is that these periods of swift change do happen. We know Lenin said “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” Now we experience it.

But the other lesson relates to the how. How in the world could that much change be ignited in such a short time? The answer, then as now, is that elites forced rapid change because they saw their hold on things slipping in a new world they were unfamiliar with.

How could change happen that fast? Just consider the changes essentially forced down our throats the past five years. The difference? Maybe that regional and national elites in the past throttled their worst instincts since the nearby commoners had ways of holding their feet to the fire. That seems not to be the case with our current Betters. You only have to read what they say in venues like the World Economic Forum, and to reflect on the incessant beatdown of the deplorable heartland, to recognize the rules of the game, and the stakes, have been altered.

That does not mean the Betters win and the commoners lose in our global era. But it does suggest that the commoners start from a position of less natural traction. The system has slid sideways, and with the rise of global elites with no national moorings there is much less by the way of required feedback to keep things under control.

Maybe the traction will increase if, moving up the class and privilege ladder, greater numbers of the middle class who now revel in deploring the lower sorts recognize that they may be next in line in the cattle chute. It will take a lot to flip a burgher wedded to the notion he is protected, and is habituated to kissing up and kicking down. But if they start flipping things may get seriously sketchy.