dollars" provided "some sort of basis for literary criticism." The "use of most of our thinking," James maintained, was "to help us to change the world." The way to do this, however, was to recognize that ideas matter only when they evoke passionate conviction, not when they serve merely to make people reasonable, tolerant, and "genial." James admired the martial virtues and harbored deep misgivings about the "strange moral transformation" that had brought them into discredit. He saw nothing wrong with the love of adventure; the trouble, he thought, was that it often failed to find suitable forms of expression. Neither the obsessive self-mortification of sainthood nor the self-transcendence of warfare provided adequate outlets for "spiritual vitality."

Brooks and Santayana, however, regarded the "militant existence" glorified by James with a mixture of horror and amused condescension. They associated it with intolerance, fanaticism, individualism run riot. The puritan and the pioneer were twins, according to Brooks, in spite of their mutual dislike: prickly, quarrelsome, impatient with opposition. Neither had any talent for ordinary social intercourse. The spiritual life of the pioneer, insofar as he had one, was "spectral and aloof," "impersonal and antisocial." Whether American thought defined itself in "metaphysical" opposition to ordinary life (puritanism) or glorified ordinary life in its crudest form (pragmatism), it suffered from the "want of a social background."

Thanks to Brooks, the alleged affinity between puritanism and pioneering became a staple of cultural criticism. In an essay published in 1917, "The Puritan's Will to Power," Randolph Bourne argued that an obsession with "being good" bore a close resemblance to an obsession with "making good." Seemingly self-abnegating, the puritan found a "positive sense of power" in the "raw material" of "renunciation." "In the compelling of others to abstain, you have the final glut of puritanical power." Waldo Frank elaborated this critique of puritanism and pioneering in Our America (1919), assimilating these categories more closely than ever to the aesthetic categories of "highbrow" and "lowbrow." The "frugal and self‐ denying life" idealized by puritanism, according to Frank, diverted energies that might have gone into art into pioneering. The desire for beauty did not die out altogether, but it fled from "reality" into the thin upper air of transcendentalism. Culture became a "philosophic decoration." Hence the appeal of Emerson, who "supplied the dualism which our material

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