"It did not come naturally; in fact, it would be difficult to conceive of any more dogmatic and less tolerant people than the first settlers on New England shores"
About this Quote
American origin stories like to frame the New England settlers as morally serious underdogs, building democracy out of raw timber and prayer. Paul Harris punctures that halo with a lawyerly jab: whatever else they were, they were not champions of pluralism. The line works because it refuses the comforting idea that intolerance is an occasional bug in the national software. Harris suggests it was closer to an early design feature.
His phrasing is strategically cold. "It did not come naturally" reads like a rebuttal in a brief, pushing back against the popular assumption that freedom and tolerance simply sprouted from the colonial soil. Then he tightens the screw with "difficult to conceive", a near-absolute that courts the reader into trying - and failing - to imagine a more dogmatic group. The rhetoric is prosecutorial: no anecdotes, no melodrama, just a devastating comparative claim that leaves the myth looking naive.
The subtext is about power, not piety. These settlers, often celebrated for fleeing persecution, quickly built systems that punished dissent, policed belief, and treated deviation as a civic threat. Harris is pointing to a recurring American pattern: groups that arrive demanding liberty frequently turn, once they have leverage, into administrators of orthodoxy.
Context matters, too. Writing from the late 19th/early 20th century, Harris is speaking in a period when Americans were renegotiating what "tolerance" should mean amid immigration, religious diversity, and modern reforms. His point lands as a warning: if you want a freer society, you cannot outsource that work to the past, especially not to ancestors who were busy enforcing purity.
His phrasing is strategically cold. "It did not come naturally" reads like a rebuttal in a brief, pushing back against the popular assumption that freedom and tolerance simply sprouted from the colonial soil. Then he tightens the screw with "difficult to conceive", a near-absolute that courts the reader into trying - and failing - to imagine a more dogmatic group. The rhetoric is prosecutorial: no anecdotes, no melodrama, just a devastating comparative claim that leaves the myth looking naive.
The subtext is about power, not piety. These settlers, often celebrated for fleeing persecution, quickly built systems that punished dissent, policed belief, and treated deviation as a civic threat. Harris is pointing to a recurring American pattern: groups that arrive demanding liberty frequently turn, once they have leverage, into administrators of orthodoxy.
Context matters, too. Writing from the late 19th/early 20th century, Harris is speaking in a period when Americans were renegotiating what "tolerance" should mean amid immigration, religious diversity, and modern reforms. His point lands as a warning: if you want a freer society, you cannot outsource that work to the past, especially not to ancestors who were busy enforcing purity.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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