James A. Morone has single-handedly revived what appeared to be a defunct genre in American studies. Books with broad themes covering the entire history of America from the Puritans to the present seemed to have been replaced by efforts more theoretically compressed and edgier, especially in terms of interpretations of the question of American exceptionalism. Compare, for example, Catherine A. Holland's The Body Politic (2001) or Anne Norton's The Republic of Signs (1993) to this book or Morone's earlier Democratic Promise (1998) and one can see immediately that the latter have more in common with Vernon Parrington's Main Currents in American Thought (1927, 1930), Charles Beard's The Rise of American Civilization (1927), V. F. Calverton's The Awakening of America (1939), and Daniel J. Boorstin's The Americans (1958, 1965, 1973). Parrington, Beard, Calverton, and Boorstin—and now Morone—offer the reader accessible, spritely written narratives with a measured pace that permits fascinating stopovers to ruminate on particular personalities and events in American history.

Parrington's sketch of Fisher Ames as a representative of a “testy little world that clung to its small clothes and tie-wig” (1927, 271) and Beard's reinterpretation of the Civil War as a delayed revolution are just two of many examples. This genre has never been, however, an atheoretical one, for each of these writers offers his histories in the context of a broad theme usually presented in a dichotomous format. Parrington portrayed both American history and letters as conflicts between two liberalisms, one derived from the French and the other from the English. Beard saw America as battleground between big and small capital; Calverton between Puritan and Dissenter sensibilities, themselves carryovers from the Normans and the Lollard resistance; Boorstin between community and novelty. Morone's Hellfire Nation exhibits all the virtues of this genre of thematic history and, of course, its limitations.

Reviews rarely note an author's preface, but Morone's neatly conveys his purpose. He begins by describing that “the book came to me while I was in an upscale supermarket picking out salad greens.” A man in the store suffered from a loud spasmatic cough. Although the sufferer was aged, an African American, and clearly a workingman, probably a plasterer, a woman came up to him, waved a finger in his face, and said, “I hope you don't smoke!” The man assured the accuser that he did not, but his reply did not dissuade her from giving him a long lecture on the evils of tobacco. Morone expected that the other shoppers would be as horrified as he was by her rudeness, but one after another came up to her with congratulations. He then “began to wonder about the righteous streak that ran through these polite, well-dressed liberals” (p. ix). Morone decided to present a narrative that places moral fervor at the center of American politics. Although America is certainly a commercial republic in which the pursuit of self-interest is readily acknowledged, it is also the role of “the redeemer nation,” first posited by the Puritans, that “drives American politics” (p. 10). These moral crusades—to abolish slavery, restrict immigration, protect “womanhood,” prohibit liquor—reflect two “vital urges: “redeeming ‘us’ and reforming ‘them’” (p. 3). Morone reviews these movements in America and presents some very fine descriptions of this redeemer politics. Particularly well done are the discussions of the cultural and political antecedents to the Mann Act and the Eighteenth Amendment.

Why are Americans so prone to not only moralize issues but also regard moral disputes as threats to national identity? What are the consequences of these repeated “moral out-bursts”? Morone offers several intriguing, though underdeveloped, answers. Since American identity is not, at least overtly, based upon religion or ethnicity, every demand for inclusion by new groups challenges settled answers to questions such as, Who are we? How did we get here? How did we succeed? and “What will these people do to the virtues that got us here?” (p. 494). Sometimes Morone suggests that it is the fluidity of a market society itself, not only in terms of shifting economic patterns but cultural ones as well, that produces this kind of politics. As a consequence, in a “vibrant, changing nation … entire groups wrench themselves out of one moral frame and into another.” One day they are a dangerous threat and the next they are “good people who got a raw deal, pushed down by bigotry or bad luck or big business” (p. 13). As a result, however, political development in America proceeds as much from economic change as from these efforts to “improve” people. State building in America, for Morone, is formed by the residue of past moral crusades. His analysis of prohibition is a convincing example for this argument. Prohibition “pushed federal power into the nooks and crannies of American crime-fighting,” including “federal plea-bargaining, a boom in prison construction, voluminous legal precedents guiding searches, seizures, wiretaps, judicial process, and more” (p. 343). Moreover, prohibition “may have helped fertilize the political culture for the New Deal.”

Like the thematic historians noted here, Morone presents a dichotomy to anchor his analysis. Moral politics in America consists of two distinct ethical outlooks. One derives from the Puritans and focuses upon individual responsibility, conceiving of policy problems in terms of “protecting us and control-ling them” (p. 17). The other, the “social gospel,” completely reverses the Puritan perspective by reconceiving moral issues as collective problems. While the Puritan ethos tackles substance abuse by demanding personal pledges, sin taxes, ostracism, and even prohibition, the social gospel perspective seeks health insurance and living wages. To Morone, these “two great moral paradigms develop and duel across American history” (p. 497). The Puritan ethos was replaced by five decades of the social gospel, “cresting in the 1960s,” but returned in the 1980s, and now Morone hopes that the stage is set for a “new Social Gospel era committed to social justice” (p. 497).

The problem with this dichotomy is that it is very difficult to distinguish the two moral paradigms in most periods. Morone admits that the abolitionists provided “a picture of slaveholders that still stands as the classic construction of an immoral other” (p. 145). Progressives, who are surprisingly absent from Morone's narrative despite his adoption of the social gospel as the designation of one moral model, gave us business and consumer regulation but also promoted eugenics, food fads, and prohibition. Sixties activists receive a very kind reception from Morone, who sees in their agenda a “dazzling awakening” of the social gospel that “buried deep taboos on… almost everything” (p. 443). But who could be more insufferable in terms of its moral certainty of its own villains than this protest generation? Is it even possible, too, that New Deal ethics, represented by Morone as the acme of the social gospel paradigm, were sui generis in the history of American political reform?

Perhaps this dichotomization is itself one of the reasons for the decline of thematic history in American studies, for all Morone's forerunners were avid modernists who hoped to lay bare the irrationalities in American culture that could be overcome with exposure. He, too, hopes that Americans will shed their dependence upon Puritan mores and finally bury “that cranky, narrow, prohibitionist mindset” (p. 344). Yet that censorious woman with her avid supporters in the shopping center seems to pop up everywhere in behalf of causes we both approve and disdain. Nevertheless, despite the limitations of this genre, Morone's narrative is in the tradition of great American storytelling. Hellfire Nation is an account of American politics conceived as a moral tale, told with energy and excitement, that seeks a happy ending.