ABSTRACT
The name “Puritan” began as an insult, and for many it still is. H. L. Mencken defined Puritanism as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” Arguments about New England Puritanism tend to be more about the later United States, and so it was with Mencken, whose real target was prudery in American culture. On the other side, John Adams’s Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Laws (1765) began the tradition of seeing the American Puritans as antiauthoritarian rebels, seekers after religious freedom. United States popular culture keeps this myth alive and well, alongside the apparently contradictory but equally popular view of the Puritans as, in a word, Puritanical.
