While watching There Will Be Blood this week I was reminded of the introduction to Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, which I read in December.
Miller discusses two conflicting impulses in early colonial America, represented by the cities of Jamestown and Salem. He describes this difference in one of his brilliant asides in the play:
They (Salem) believed, in short, that they held in their steady hands the candle that would light the world. We have inherited this belief, and it has helped and hurt us. It helped them with the discipline it gave them. They were a dedicated folk, by and large, and they had to be to survive the life they had chosen or been born into in this country.
The proof of their belief’s calue to them may be taken from the opposite character of the first Jamestown settlement, farther south, in Virginia. The Englishmen who landed there were motivated mainly by a hunt for profit. They had to pick off the wealth of the new country and then return rich to England. They were a band of individualists, and a much more ingratiating group than the Massachusets men.
From Miller’s account of the colonial world we can trace two impulses throughout American history: the capitalistic, individualistic, at times rapacious Jamestown and the disciplined, religious, and stringent Salem.
Much of American history can be seen as the ebb and flow of one of these two impulses. Miller was writing in the time of McCarthyism, but consider Tammany Hall or the Bush Administration as times where the Jamestown ethic surged to the fore.
P.T. Anderson’s There Will Be Blood dramatizes this struggle. His main characters are a preacher and an oil man. In the end the oil man kills the preacher.
With the apparent omnipotence of corporate culture and politics in America, it would seem that the Jamestown mentality has triumphed. But in this economy, where people have to turn to something else than wealth, the face of Salem is always ready to resurface.
