The Civil War left some Americans patting themselves on the back, proud
of new freedoms achieved, and others resenting their defeat, resisting
it with legal loopholes like Black Codes or labor contracts that
exploited former slaves. Yet it left Black Americans in the midst of an
ongoing crisis, with little chance to recover not only from the deep
wounds of the war, but the very circumstances leading to its outbreak.
Meanwhile, in the country at large, the puritan ethic prevailed, and
rather than take the time to reckon with the ramifications of slavery,
or the premature end of Reconstruction, American society developed a
renewed focus on temperance and modesty laws. Modern America was in the
midst of developing what Mencken calls a form of new puritanism which
harked back to the “Puritan of the bleak New England,” whom he calls
“less the masochist than the sadist.” Unlike the “milder Puritan of the
period between the Revolution and the Civil War,” Mencken suggests, this
more radical form of puritanism is “not ascetic but militant.” In this
cultural neo-puritanism, the “no pain, no gain” formula adapted as well.
The credo of spiritual action which Franklin turned into a pithy phrase
about material success now became a secular principle — implying that
the pain of/suffering/contributed to gains in/virtue/.
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/a-nation-wrongs-itself-on-american-pain-and-the-puritan-ethic/
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