T.J. Jackson Lears > Quotes

“The desire for unmediated grace put mystics like Anne Hutchinson in direct conflict with Puritan authorities in Massachusetts Bay, who sought to contain her challenge to ministerial authority. The molten core of conversion needed to be encased in a solid sheath of prohibitions, rules, agendas for self-control—the precisionist morality that we know as the Protestant ethic. An ethos of disciplined achievement counterbalanced what the sociologist Colin Campbell calls an other Protestant ethic, one that sought ecstasy and celebrated free-flowing sentiment, sending frequent revivals across the early American religious landscape. The two ethics converged in a cultural program that was nothing if not capacious: it encompassed spontaneity and discipline, release and control. Indeed, the rigorous practice of piety was supposed to reveal the indwelling of the spirit, the actuality of true conversion. Yet the balance remained unstable, posing challenges to established authority in Virginia as well as Massachusetts. The tension between core and sheath, between grace abounding and moral bookkeeping, arose from the Protestant conviction that true religion was not merely a matter of adherence to outward forms, but was rooted in spontaneous inner feeling.”
― Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–1920

“The most profound radicalism is often the most profound conservatism.”
― Jackson Lears

“Gradually I began to realize that modern advertising could be seen less as an agent of materialism than as one of the cultural forces working to disconnect human beings from the material world.”
― T. J. Jackson Lears

“Ultimately Rockefeller's confidence games proved wildly successful. At its height, his fortune outstripped those of all the other robber barons-even Carnegie's, by a hair. By 1913, Rockefeller's net worth totaled nearly a billion dollars, or 2 percent of the U.S. gross national product; a comparable share today would give Rockefeller a net worth of $190 billion, or more than triple that of the richest man in the contemporary world, Bill Gates.”
― Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920

“Henry Flagler: “Do unto others as they would do unto you—and do it first.”
― Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–1920

“Douglass went on forcefully for an hour. “We Negroes love our country. We fought for it. We ask only that we be treated as well as those who fought against it.” The crowd roared its approval.”
― Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–1920