It is a pity that critics so keenly aware of the importance of tradition should have turned away from the traditions with which they had most in common. In their search for a "usable past," as Brooks called it, they ignored the past that lay close at hand and rummaged in all sorts of out-of-the-way places. They tried to piece together a cultural tradition from the works of neglected or minor writers or, in Frank's case, from the "buried cultures" of the Southwest, where Mexicans and Indians had once lived "in harmony with Nature." In an early work, The Wine of the Puritans (1909), Brooks had warned himself that it was impossible "deliberately [to] establish an American tradition." By 1918, however, he had decided that since "the past that survives in the common mind of the present is a past without living value," it might be possible, after all, to "discover" or even to "invent" another one.

He was right the first time. He and his friends might have addressed themselves to the important task of rescuing the puritan tradition from its genteel captivity. Because they dismissed it out of hand, the rehabilitation of puritanism had to wait for Perry Miller and other historians of the thirties and forties. By that time, the conditions for such a reappraisal were much less auspicious: the negative stereotype of puritanism had sunk too deeply into the popular mind to be easily dislodged, and Miller's work, academic in conception and execution, made little impression on the general public.

For Brooks and Bourne, Mumford and Frank, "puritanism" meant genteel pretensions, prudery, and censorship. At a time when genteel critics like Barrett Wendell and Stuart Sherman claimed official custodianship of the puritan legacy, the rebellious "young intellectuals," as they called themselves, had good reasons to distrust this particular past. The New England tradition was now identified with the social and political ascendancy of an Anglophile elite led by people like Henry Cabot Lodge and Nicholas Murray Butler. It was identified with movements to restrict immigration, to stifle cultural diversity and political dissent, and to impose "Americanism" as a kind of public religion. The fierce debate about

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