According to Miller, the commitment to a higher cause and the dedication to God had made the Puritan community unusually successful, and the success of their venture—the wealth it generated—had eventually undermined the venture itself. When Puritans started making money, their purposes collapsed. “A hundred years after the landings, they were forced to look upon themselves with amazement, hardly capable of understanding how they had come to be what they were,” he wrote. They had lost sight of their cause and plan, their purpose and devotion. For Miller, the point of this failure was clear: The demise of the Puritans did not arise from external opposition; rather, it came about from within. It was caused by the Puritans’ own success.
That was the story Miller saw playing out again in the 1950s: The success of the United States, its sudden wealth and power, would soon prove the nation’s undoing. According to Miller, this paradigm had been repeated in a host of societies scattered through the leaves of history. The downfall of the Roman Empire, which Miller explicitly compared to America, also came about through dissolutions wrought by its own success. For Miller, history was fundamentally ironic. Victory and achievement produce disappointment and disaster; progress results from causes other than one’s own intentions; and no advance is finally secure since all growth contains within it the seeds of a new and possibly more catastrophic decline. As the historian Henry May once summarized, “His works on Puritanism all illustrate the slogan that nothing fails like success.” Wherever Miller turned, he saw the same laws of history replayed, and, in his mind’s eye, the beginning of demise could be read in the modern riches of America’s rise.
The way Miller made such claims set him apart from other scholars. He was “impatient with balderdash and decorum,” one student recalled, “abrupt and snorting—perhaps not unlike one of Melville’s magnificent whales.” When Miller died, his obituary in the Harvard Crimson compared him to Melville’s mad Captain Ahab: “Those brawling sentences, the brooding manner, the great, obscene chuckles whose delight it was impossible not to share, all were touched with something superhuman, something demonic. He lived intensely, self-destructively even.” His “manners were often bad,” another student recalled; “his casual conversation was calculated to shock.”
Opening his courses with an attempt “to scare the overwhelming crowds away,” Miller first recounted his “immense accomplishments” and then laid before students an equally immense, almost impossible reading list. Such shows of force would seem to distance him from students, yet “you could not be in his presence without feeling that he cared about you and your ideas,” one student reminisced. “Miller was not unkind,” another added; “he was simply relentless.” In one graduate seminar, “he forbade us to praise our fellow students’ papers. ‘Let us be brutal,’ he said, ‘for we love one another.’” According to at least one account, these lessons applied equally to himself. A student remembered hearing a violent argument in Miller’s office while he waited outside the door. When the shouting died down, he knocked and entered, only to discover that Miller was alone. The argument had been with himself.