QUAKERISM
“The Quakers have long maintained their objection to music.
I have been told of a very old-established Quaker boarding-school in Pennsylvania
that never had a piano until 1907.”17
Pianos during the time noted above were nearly as common then
in American homes as guitar strummers are now in a California charismatic
congregation. One piano late-coming to one Quaker establishment is
not the point, but it is symbolic.
According the Percy Scholes in his book, The Puritans and Music,
the calumny against Puritans was effected by Samuel Peters18 (b. 1735), an ordained Episcopal minister, whose sanity
was questioned and whose convalescence was recommended but who was instead
made a bishop by the Church of England. In fact, the charges that
have been laid against Puritans more properly should be laid to Quakers.
“The views ascribed to the puritans, on dress, amusements, and
music, were apparently actually held by the quakers.
“George Fox (Journal for the year 1649) says, ‘I was moved
to cry out against all sorts of music’, and two centuries later (1846)
the ‘Yearly Meeting Epistle’ of the Friends in Britain has the following:
“‘Our attention has been turned to the increased exposure of our
young friends to the temptations of music, which we believe to be, both
in its acquisition and its practice, unfavourable to the health of the soul.
Serious is the waste of time of those who give themselves up to it; and what
account can they render of those precious hours which might otherwise have
been devoted to the glory of God and the good of their neighbour?
It does not, however, merely involve absorption of time; it not infrequently
leads into unprofitable, and even pernicious associations, and, in some
instances, to a general indulgence in the vain amusements of the world.’”19
Scholes goes on to write of later Quakers objecting to such attitude.
No group large enough can always have members who are always typical.
There was ever the “singing Quaker.” Certainly George Fox, the founder
of Quakerism, sang. Instrumental music, on the other hand, was held
to be “artificial musick.” There are always shades of acceptance
and rejection to be found among members towards official declarations made
by their leaders. In our own mid-century, in a report of the [Quaker]
Lesson Handbook Committee of the Adult School Union [in England], “Mrs P.W.
Bennet,” is quoted thanking “the Committee for including further lessons
on music. For many music is a way of religion [my italics].”20
My point is that the art of music has always been rigidly held
up to inspection to a degree unlike any other human endeavor. Science
or sport or business never get the magnified eye of investigation that
music gets. Which is very telling. It says that music is simply
more important than any of them. In much respect, it has more force
than law. And I personally appreciate the fact that where an instrument
was to be found in a Quaker Meeting House, it was a piano.
Quaker is Philadelphia, and Philadelphia is all about what was
to come in America.
“Hofstadter described the birth of the ideas that came to America
through the port of philadelphia.
‘As the English religious reformers became convinced that the
Reformation had gone far enough to meet the social and spiritual needs of
their followers, successive waves of Millenarians, Anabaptists, Seekers,
Ranters, Quakers assailed the established order and its clergy, preached
a religion of the poor, argued for intuition and inspiration as against learning
and doctrine, elevated lay preachers to leadership, and rejected the professional
clergy as “null and void and without authority.” At the time of the
Puritan revolution, the preachers of the New Model Army were unsparing in
their anti-professional and anti-intellectual broadsides against the clergy,
the university teachers, and the lawyers. . . . the left-wing chaplains,
in the line of the Levellers and Diggers, followed Gerrard Winstanley’s example
in calling the universities “standing ponds of stinking waters,” in pointing
out that a liberal education did nothing to make men less sinful, and in
stirring the egalitarian passions of the poor.'21
“In striking contrast to the almost immediate settlement of isolated
towns straight across Massachusetts [Puritan Community], the frontier in
Pennsylvania [Quaker Individualism] slowly moved West throughout the eighteenth
and into the nineteenth centuries. The myth of the individualistic
frontiersman centered on the character of Daniel Boone, who set out on his
wanderings westward from Pennsylvania, where his Quaker ancestors. . . .
had settled.
“Page Smith, in his interesting modification of the famous
Turner Thesis of the individualistic development of our western frontier,
has shown the great importance of towns in the settlement of America.
He conceptualizes the two major types of town settlement as the ‘colonized’
(orderly and communal, as in Massachusetts. . . ‘with the church as the symbolic
center’) and the ‘cumulative’ (haphazard and individualistic, as in Pennsylvania.
. . ‘with the county courthouse as the symbolic center’).
“Little wonder that Tocqueville eulogized the New England town
as both an ideal school for leadership and authority and an antidote to
the extreme individualism that marked so much else in American society.
Noting that ‘the gradual development of the principle of equality is a providential
fact,’ Tocqueville added that ‘the New England town seems to have come
directly from the hand of God.’”22
“The Puritans moved into the wilds as a community, not as
individuals.”23
Whereas communal identity strives to maintain cultural roots,
the great westward move to California was a trek of individuals, some more
willing than others to rid themselves of the excess baggage that comes with
maintaining cultural roots, in pursuit of personal success.
“Pennsylvania, as every schoolchild knows, was ostensibly a holy
experiment in religious tolerance and egalitarian democracy but was in
fact ‘a seventeenth-century real estate development’. . . [sold in large
lots to rich merchants], and settled largely by individuals rather than
communities.”24
Thereafter, across to the farthest edge of the continent, eked
a national real-estate development ethos (the Way of the West) along with
the anti-hierarchical doctrine of egalitarian-individualism (Doin’ your
thing) that eventually metamorphosed into the ism of the Self-Made-Man (The
Mostest), where the only alternative for man without authoritarian standards
- that last bastion of authority, the Bible - is the antinomian reliance
on the “Inner Light” revealing new truths - i.e., personal success and self-fulfillment.
Urged on more and more by way of the blue-mesmer in our living rooms, this
is the very stuff that continues to drive the nation.
And also to propagate the religion of science:
“Historians of Quakerism have always stressed the kinship between
the Quaker ethic and the spirit of science. When in his journal George
Fox [founder of Quakerism] described his first revelation of the Inner
Light he ended with the words ‘This I know experimentally.’
The Quaker appeal to direct experience rather than to religious authority
or tradition, or even the words of the Bible, was closely akin to the spirit
of empirical science, or the New Philosophy, which became so popular in
England at the time Fox had his vision on Pendle Hill. The spirit
of science was also in a way much in accord with Quaker anti-intellectualism:
the thing, as Fox and Penn stressed (and Emerson later noted about Quakerism),
is far more important than the word. ‘Languages are not to be despised
or neglected,’ wrote William Penn, ‘but things are still to be preferred.’
Robert K. Merton showed the affinity between Puritanism and the rise of science
in seventeenth-century England by carefully analyzing the religious affiliations
of the early members of the Royal Society. This affinity may have
been even more pronounced in the case of the Quakers: between 1663 and 1915,
for instance, fifty-eight Friends were elected Fellows of the Society, a
far larger number in proportion to the small size of the Society of Friends
than any other religious group contributed. Finally, of course, the
Quaker antipathy to higher education was no handicap in the pioneering days
of science and medicine.”25
America’s history of quack doctoring and patent medicine, for
example, and their metamorphic change into our modern drug and medical industries.26
“No educated class of professional leaders was encouraged or even
allowed in Pennsylvania; only the so-called weighty Friends, often the
most affluent, embodied covert authority in the silent meeting of drably
dressed men, women, and children. What mattered the morals of one’s
neighbors as long as the disciplined life within the meeting went on from
generation to generation?"27
Except for a few pilgrims, Progress has become the Redeemer that
gives to Americans what they want and came to get - things. That
we have already been willing to give up certain primary traditional rights
in order to have things testifies to this fact - the dichotomy of trying
to maintain both credit standing and the right to privacy, for example; the
willingness to put human rights on a back burner in order to counter the
threat of international competition in world trade. Despite political
rhetoric to the contrary, America has always been about economics.
The Freedom Ideal lasts only so long as it takes to run out of free real
estate.
“When time takes on the role of redeemer and fulfiller of life,
we call it Progress. To Progress we are ready to commit our dearest
hopes and most cherished aspirations.”28
Philadelphia Man
If America’s innovative fine artists were to reach back and pick
any figure antithetical to them in our national history, it would have
to be the “Philadelphia Man” as described in Puritan Boston and Quaker
Philadelphia,by E. Digby Baltzell.
“Happiness, deriving from a sense of achievement and of having
done one’s duty in exercising authority in community affairs, characterized
the biographies of many men in. . . Boston. . . In Philadelphia, however,
one has the impression from the DAB biographies [Dictionary of American
Biographies] that the city’s leading men led lonely lives, often neither
supported nor admired by their peers. Owen Wister, one of the more
gifted men in the [Philadelphia] sample, once remarked on this contrast:
“‘When in Boston any fellow-citizen paints a picture or writes
a book, he is approached and fostered for Boston’s sake and in Boston’s
name. We of Philadelphia steer quite wide of this amiable if hasty
encouragement. We seem to distrust our own power to do anything out
of the common; and when a young man tries to, our minds close against him
with a civic instinct of disparagement. A Boston failure in art surprises
Boston; it is success that surprises Philadelphia.’
“Wister was speaking of a deeply rooted tradition in Philadelphia.
. . . This Quaker policy of disownment eventually became a Proper Philadelphia
habit, highly visible in the class habit of disparaging exceptional achievement.”29
Of course, Quakers are not just men:
“Women played a major role in the Quaker movement. In fact,
Clarendon thought the Quakers were a female sect.” A voguish ditty
of that day (mid-1600s) asserted:
We will not be wives
and tie
up our lives
to villainous
slavery.
“Fox’s first convert was Elizabeth Hooten; his most important
early convert, later his wife and mother of the movement, was Margaret Fell,
mistress of Swarthmore Hall, which became the movement’s headquarters; the
first Quaker publishers of truth in London, in the universities, and in Dublin
were women; Mary Fisher, a Yorkshire domestic servant, was the first Quaker
in America; and in England today more women than men are registered as Quaker
ministers.”30
The history of Quaker women is replete with events of their fanaticism
and martyrdom - many times at the hands of Puritans.
“. . . . the Friends were a simple, unworldly people, often ‘she-prophets’
convinced of their direct experience of the Lord’s word and prophetically
sure that the whole world would eventually be won over to their truth.
Their sense of inner oneness with the living Lord and their rejection of
the outward restraints of sacrament or Bible interpreted by an educated priesthood
frightened all authorities, Anglican and Puritan alike. The best
Quaker historian of this period, Hugh Barbour, observed that
‘the Quaker preacher and the Puritan pastor worked in opposite
directions and never understood each other’s purposes. . . . The
Puritan leaders were men who had known life in its complexity. They
knew the ambiguous nature of sin and grace in their own best actions and
in the motives they least admired. . . . Both groups actually stemmed from
the same traditions. . . . but they were entirely different in mood and
method. A great minister like Baxter felt man’s unending need of God’s
love and forgiveness. Those who had really seen God, he said, would
not speak of sinlessness, but would abhor themselves like Job. . . .
While Baxter daily prayed to receive God’s Spirit, Friends insisted that
they had it.’”31
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